Dec 26, 2022

5 Reasons Why Social Listening Should Be a Priority for Your Brand

To succeed, working on your brand, product, or content is an ongoing requirement. You can start doing this by looking into social listening.

What is social listening?

So what exactly is social listening? Social listening is when you pay attention to your audiences. After all, communication is a two way street! Are they talking about your content, product, industry, competitors or brand? In a positive or negative light? Having these insights from your audiences can be an eye opening experience.

After you have gathered a good amount of data, start the process of analyzing data. Social Listening is when you find an opportunity to improve your brand or understand your customers needs through the data you’ve gotten.

Social listening can only happen if there is social monitoring. Monitoring happens on every social media platform out there. Social Monitoring is simply observing online conversations. Social listening occurs after data collection, when we turn data into action. "Action" can range from: developing a new marketing campaign, to rebranding. It's all in the realm of audience research. Examples of social listening include: Hashtag tracking or monitoring sentiment during a crisis.

What are social listening tools ?

Social listening tools are software applications that collect social media data. Examples include: social mentions, hashtags, keywords, urls. We do this to keep track of what people are talking about. It will be about your relevant industry, brand, or even your competitors. Social listening tools allow you to keep track of what’s happening around you.

Why is social listening important for me?

We all know that knowing your audience is a crucial step in all ventures. Not only knowing your audience, but also keeping up with them. Without social listening, your brand and image can suffer. Being in the loop and in trend lets your brand respond in the best way possible.

Take a look at these examples:

Slack - Slack does a great job of connecting with their customers. Whether that would be the witty and friendly copy on their software, or their relatable tweets! Slack has nailed their marketing, and social listening. The up and coming messaging platform frequently interacts with their customers. Unsurprisingly, this fun and witty software is the fastest growing SaaS startup in history, and became a $16 billion business.

Pepsi (Kendall) - Remember when Pepsi came up with this campaign? Social listening is using the data you have to make better business or marketing decisions. The pepsi campaign came out amidst the Black Lives Matter protest. In an attempt to create a campaign from the movement, they ended up leaving a negative impression on the majority of audiences.The backlash resulted in over 53.5% negative social media sentiment on the day of release, and the PepsiCo brand’s value on the market dropped by 4%. Brands can avoid media scandals like this one. Avoid an expensive mistake by monitoring, and understanding your audience through social listening tools.

KFC - The famous chicken-chain restaurant had to close down several locations in 2018. They then gave a public apology featuring the image below:

The image is the recognisable KFC bucket, with the letters rearranged to “FCK” - on two national newspapers. KFC got over a billion reach through social media and other editorial coverage. A simple, honest, and effective way to give your customers bad news. I mean, who can be mad at that, right?

Five Social Listening Benefits

Stay on top of customer feedback

“There’s no such thing as bad publicity” right? That depends. How fast can you act? Like it or not, nowadays your brand’s reputation can be on the line in a matter of seconds. By using social listening tools, you can monitor your brand closely. By tracking what people are saying about your brand on social media, you can get real-time insights into how your products or services are being received. This can help you identify areas for improvement and address any issues that may be causing frustration for your customers.

Understand your audience

Social listening can provide valuable insights into the demographics, interests, and needs of your audience. By analyzing the language and topics that people are using when discussing your brand, you can get a better understanding of what they care about and how you can better serve them.

Know your competitors

Your competitors have the same target audience that you do. Tracking their brand and how people are responding to them allows you to learn from them. Both successes and failures, social listening lets you track and learn from your competitors. You can also monitor their unsatisfied customers and offer them a solution.

Identify new opportunities

By tracking relevant keywords and hashtags, you can discover new trends and opportunities for your brand to get involved in. For example, if there is a popular Twitter hashtag related to your industry, you can use social listening to see how people are using it and how you can join the conversation.

Improve online customer experience

People love to share their experiences. Whether that would be on review sites or social media sites, respond to your customers. Both satisfied and especially unsatisfied customers. If they’re unsatisfied, you’ll want to get to them as fast as possible. Social listening allows you to approach any unhappy customers and resolve the issue right away.