In my view, ALL brands need social listening as part of a comprehensive social
media strategy but here’s the major drawback: it’s expensive. You must be
willing to invest in what your customers are saying about your product and then
implement those insights into solutions that will benefit your customers. The
consistent process of listening and acting on solutions derived from listening
will result in higher brand equity and of course, ROI.
You might ask: “why
should I care about what my customers are saying about me?”
Simple answer: negative sentiment impacts sales. With social media increasing its reach as a sea of
opinions, perspectives and a means of self-expression, you better be concerned
if your product has a negative sentiment among your customers. Once negative sentiment about your brand has spread like wildfire, don’t be
surprised if sales start to dwindle. Also, you may be missing out on
constructive feedback about your product and (equally as important) monitoring your
competitors on social media.
So what are the benefits of a social listening tool?
1. Share of voice — The number
of social mentions your brand receives vs. competitors. This helps determine
your level of brand awareness and the level of engagement you are receiving in
comparison to your competitors.
2. Sentiment — Once you have
your mentions, analyse these mentions. Are these good comments or complaints?
Look out for trends, themes and patterns in these social conversations. Are
people giving you the feedback you need in order to improve your brand? Are
people happy with your latest app update?
3. Media breakdown — Here’s
where you can see where your audience is most active. Perhaps you’ve been
investing in Facebook all this while but to your surprise, most of your brand
mentions are coming from Twitter. Perhaps this could be an opportunity to tap
into a wider audience?
4. Word cloud — What are the
main topics of conversation surrounding your brand and your competitors? e.g.
if you are a bank, are people comparing your mobile app features and asking for
better updates? This is something your product team should be looking at. Or
say you’ve just launched a new product — how’s the response like? what are
people saying about your product which you could look into?
5. Trends and visibility —
This is especially useful if you are monitoring competitors closely. Tracking
your competitors’ visibility and trends on social media helps you plan out your
game plan and serves as a check-and-balance to see if you could be doing more
on your end in order to be more visible.
6. Influencer identification —
Are there potential micro-influencers or brand loyalists that you could tap
into? Or perhaps content publishers or e-commerce brands that have been
mentioning your product which could inspire a new partnership?
These six points are just
the main insights that you can derive from a social listening tool. Of course,
different tools have different offerings which is why you need to know your
objective for having a social listening tool.
I hope this gives you a
little bit on insight into social listening. Feel free to reach out if you have
more questions.