How To Implement a Social Listening Strategy

Do you want to forge a durable, ever-growing following on social media to fuel continued interest in and good reputation for your brand?

Of course you do!

Take your rose-tinted specs off then and roll up your sleeves. Curating a personable brand image that will establish you as the thought leader in your niche isn't the easiest way to go. Last thing you want is to create a name for your brand that prospects will run away from — poor customer service, bad publicity, or other unpleasant affairs that can ignite negative customer sentiment, flawed brand perception, and unflattering social media mentions.

Take control of the situation by constantly keeping an eye on your brand's social networks and looking out for those red flags. That's where social listening steps in to give you a hand.

What is social listening?

Social listening describes the process of observing the social media channels of your brand for customer feedback and explicit references of your brand in keywords, emerging trends, topics, competition, etc.

This is often accompanied by a thorough data analysis to squeeze meaningful insights out of these conversations and seize unique opportunities. These opportunities may come in the shape of improvements in customer service, marketing plans, advertising structures and product updates.

By conducting social listening, you can streamline your operations, some of which may include

• Structuring content around what your followers want to see

• Acting on new industry ideas

• Leveraging pipeline to engage with customers

• Continually adapting your business strategy to fit their need.

Oftentimes, social listening is interchangeably used with social monitoring. But are they really the same, or there are nuances to be addressed?

Types of social listening: social listening vs. social monitoring

Well... funny enough, they do differ! Parallel this with a camera lens. Whereas social listening zooms out and adjusts the angle on a broader view, social monitoring has a narrower focus. What does this mean?

Unlike social monitoring, social listening is a two-fold practice. While the former limits itself to tracking social media conversations, the latter analyses and makes actionable decisions without which your brand cannot survive. In short, social listening digs to the core of social mentions and discussions, and applies sustainable strategies.

As Tony Tran, author at Hootsuite, aptly puts it:

Where social media monitoring [is great for A/B testing campaigns or monitoring ROI and] looks at metrics like engagement rate, [relevant hashtags, relevant hashtags] and number of mentions, social listening looks beyond the numbers to consider the mood [or else, sentiment] behind the data.

Getting to grips with how people feel about your product(s) and/or services is key to determining your next marketing moves.

Want to know more about the importance of social listening? Just keep on reading.

Why is social listening important?

The worst thing you can do to your brand is to blindly launch marketing campaigns without paying attention to what the general public and target market say or need. Take the speculation about what your customers want out of the equation and proactively listen to what the world is talking about.

It's 2021! Internet users are given low-cost communication portals to express their views publicly — be it their political affiliations or sappy comments about a viral dance in TikTok videos — so it's almost second nature for them to perpetuate their social media activity with brands they trust.

1. Customers hate it when brands leave them on read

Did anyone ever liked this? We all pursue value and validity for our (online) presence. Stats got it right — survey performed by State of the Connected Customer showed that 52% of consumers expect offers to be personalised, while they view brands that are interactive and responsive as top-tier.

If you're a brand owner reading this, place yourself in your customer’s shoes. Picture yourself in a social context. How frustrating would be it if you talk to someone in person and they ignore you, or you message them and they leave you on read! For you customers to return, you need to possess the virtue of, what I call, swift responsiveness.

Of course, this extends beyond your ability to be vigilant and react to criticism in a timely manner. It's about tapping into social listening to thoughtfully craft value-driven responses that offer viable solutions to problems. That's the type of attitude which not only will it reinforce brand loyalty, but it'll also uplift sales and customer retention rates.

2. You can observe your brand's activity in real time

It's commonplace for brands to be embroiled in scandals and be “exposed”, which puts their hard-earned “good name” at risk. Life happens and more so than ever, a singular one-off incident can raise a tide of negative vibes to drown your social media presence. It may be healthy for your own sanity to filter out and skip some rude social media rants that can plague your PR efforts, but it's problematic if negativity crushes and far outweighs positivity.

Here's where social listening comes to rescue. By evaluating the incident, you can figure out if the surge in negative reactions had a tangible impact on your status (e.g. loss of followers, decrease in sales or whatever applies to the metrics you measure). This way, you'll determine your next steps in response to these comments, or whether your brand is going through a phase with no lasting effects.

3. You can boost customer acquisition

Social media has so much potential in extending your visibility and outreach to prospective clients. Remember that for your followers, a.k.a buying customers, you're not an impersonal supplier who provides quality products and services; they're primarily humans who look for other humans that share useful content to facilitate their lives. These are the type of users you should be targeting.

Inbound marketing underlines the necessity to distribute engaging content throughout a buyer's journey — from awareness to consideration and decision. This budget-friendly solution draws them to your brand and saves you from the imperative to pester them with annoying ads. In fact, 42.7% of internet users on a global scale has activated ad blockers.

Bear in mind that it's ten times easier to convert your existing readership and social media followers into leads and, subsequently, customers, than it is to shoot messages to strangers and inform them about your products or services in hopes to land a deal.

Through social listening, you can uncover the sort of content your followers prefer to see by peeking in their profiles, and particularly, in their own uploads, shares, and hashtags. With this tactful approach, you can produce relevant content that meets their motivations or tastes and will, ultimately, persuade them that you're the right brand for them. By sifting through their accounts and mentions that don't directly relate to your offer, you can unlock new opportunities to interact with potential buyers.

When should you use social listening?

1. To spot customer struggles

When you first get started with social listening, make sure you fully understand the challenges your costumers are facing, including the shortcomings of your product and services.

How else could you detect the anomalies in online activities as well as the weaknesses and spaces for improvement in what you or your competitors offer, unless you take a step back and listen to those you have used it?

2. Apply strategic topic and keyword listening

Let's say that you're a new YouTuber who uploads a wide range of videos three times a week — from vlogs and food challenges to story times and reaction videos. It's pretty obvious that your niche is not clearly-defined, given that you share different kind of material without knowing what your audience prefers to watch quite yet.

What do you think it's the right way to go about with content when your idea tap runs dry? Choose your answer:

1. You carry on filming whatever you like, irrespective of what your subscribers are interested in and enjoy viewing the most?

2. You break down your YouTube analytics and benchmark comments/reactions to gauge the type of content that performs better.

3. You give up.

An easy way to decide on an answer and kick off your social listening is to monitor strategic topics and keywords. Inevitably and with the breakneck pace that the digital world takes progressive leaps, these will evolve with the passage of time, but you can utilise social listening tools (examples below) to unpack which topics are discussed and which hashtags are applied across the mediascape.

3. Ease the customer feedback experience

Responding to negative or positive reactions about your brand should sit at the heart of your online presence. This is because it allows you to get a sense of what people like, and estimate the longevity of your content and products.

Social listening will give you an opportunity to improve your customer feedback process. Think about how you deal with feedback and complaints on social media, and then simply iterate on the process.

Feel free to steal the way some brands have handled customer requests and complaints like a boss:

Sainsbury's

Nando's

O2

Gregg's

I'm tipping the hat to these examples of social listening! Having the willpower not to indulge in a public meltdown of back-and-forth spiteful replies is key. Create the kind of goodwill with your followers your rivals would envy and help catapult your engagement into greater heights.

If these sound too conceptual to you, let me walk you through the process of social listening step by step.

How to implement a social listening strategy

Whatever social listening model you choose to adopt, never lose sight of your overarching business objectives.

1) Know your buyer personas inside out. Who are you targeting? What social media platforms are they active? What makes your audience tick and what content resonates profoundly with them?

2) Define the reason behind the search.

• Are you considering a new product rollout and want to find out if there's market demand?

• Are you searching for resources to optimise your offerings?

• Are you pinged about what your current clientele is saying to identify new user experience opportunities?

• Want to head off crises and bounce back if these occur?

• Want to ensure you’re ahead of the game with your competitors?

• Is the public talking about you enough? Do you need to firm up brand awareness efforts?

3. Compile the keywords you use across your social networks and other channels, including those that authority figures in your industry utilise.

4. It's always a good idea to dig into historical data from different angles and across social media, news, review sites, blogs, and forums dating as back as, say, 2013.

5. Add your findings in a spreadsheet. Is there anything you can improve?

6. Categorise your findings on the basis of the following questions:

• How do you respond to positive commentary/reviews?

• How do you demonstrate your appreciation to positive commentary/reviews? Do you reward your customers?

• What's your reaction when others speak about your rivals on a favourable note?

• In turn, what's your reaction when people say bad things about your competitors?

• When, where and how do you use your branded hashtag(s)?

7. Become crisis ready and form templated replies on how to approach negative or positive feedback.

• Timely responses are a must, but this shouldn't be limited only to the negative wave of comments. When a customer praises you, they merely say, "Your brand rocks!".

• Validate their concerns by recognising there's a problem, hear them, and show willingness to solve it.

• Encourage them to drag the conversation off social and get in touch with them via email, DM, phone, etc.

8. Detect the chunks of content and keywords that receive the highest engagement.

• What do people are responding to?

• Have you noticed spikes in number of followers after introducing certain keywords in your posts?

• Are there particular topics and themes that your audience interacts with most?

• When you repurpose part of your content, do you see equal measures of engagement?

If you don't have the answers yet, there's a host of tools available online to guide your social listening endeavours.

Social listening tools

With such a comprehensive suite of software at your disposal, social listening is never a failed mission. Here are my three top picks:

• Sprout Social

• Hootsuite

• HubSpot

Sprout Social

Sprout Social prides itself on being one of the best and priceless social media management tools to enhance your social media connections with existing and potential customers. The platform powers your decision-making, as your enter a world of detailed data that promises to scale your engagement attempts, share content, but, most crucially, throw light on insights to enable strategic tweaks.

Not to mention the Twitter Listener reporting dashboards that Sprout Social contains, which explores the voices of a million people and boosts your online identity. What's more, the tool operates on a real-time brand monitoring system that collects brand-based keywords and DMs. Its social listening rests only on an advanced level to make sure that trends never fall off your radar.

Hootsuite

Hootsuite is a similar social listening and monitoring tool that allows you to track social media sentiment without the weariness of having to scrutinise large datasets manually. With this social media and management gem in your hands, you can trace meaning in the billions of conversations taking place online and turn data silos into action. By using Hootsuite, you gain access to comments, messages, and brand mentions across various social media channels in a unified dashboard from which you can respond to them all.

Influencer and lead tracking is another feature of Hootsuite. These lists can be imported and circulated across your registered teammates. You can also tap into the built-in analytics page of Hootsuite where you can take note of what's being talked about your brand, competitors, and your industry so you can design your campaign strategies accordingly. The company doesn't restrict itself on a single solution but provides three different bespoke plans, so you can find what suits your business's model and needs best.

HubSpot

If you want to take your inbound marketing and social media engagement to the next level, HubSpot is the only place to go. Being the great social matchmaker it is, HubSpot can filter out and prioritise social conversations that hold much potential to turning into loyal customers. With this all-inclusive software, you can map out roadmaps for your campaigns, improve your content marketing by publishing blog posts and landing pages, schedule posts for several social networks, and figure out the best times to upload your material.

In addition to the above, the platform reveals key consumer insights in your database while letting you customise keyword lists and activate email alerts, so you're always aware of when your prospects mention you. You can even benchmark performance across your social media and measure the volume of visits and leads.

Conclusion

Social media attests to an ever-evolving stream of consumer trends. If you don't take notice and lean heavily on luck, your brand will eventually lag among your competing companies. Your customers would like to collaborate with a brand that's fresh, human and responsive, offering the products, content, and support that are helpful and value-driven.

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