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8 Tips for Effective Social Listening and Understanding Strategies to Harness the Power of Social Media

The world is more interconnected than ever, offering significant opportunities for brands to gain insights into customer experiences with their products and services directly from the customers themselves. This opportunity arises from a practice called Social Listening.

Through social listening, brands can glean insights into customer perceptions of their brand, products, and services, as well as sentiments towards competitors and the industry as a whole. This is particularly relevant considering that 62.3% of the global population engages with social media, with an average daily usage of 2 hours and 23 minutes (as of January 2024).

For those interested in the specifics of active listening, here are eight effective ways a social listening strategy can benefit your business by boosting understanding of collected data usage, improving customer satisfaction, and fostering expansion of reach and growth.

1 . Precision in Goal Setting: Brand Monitoring versus Sentiment and Trend Analysis

Before selecting the appropriate social listening tool, it’s crucial to establish the purpose behind conducting social listening, which may encompass one or all of the following objectives:

Identifying emerging trends in real-time to leverage them for the benefit of the brand.
Assessing brand reputation and promptly addressing any issues that may arise.
Monitoring keywords and phrases associated with a specific brand by customers.
Analyzing competitors to stay ahead and innovate within the industry.
Understanding customer sentiments and gauging their opinions regarding the brand’s products, services, and interactions with customer service teams across various channels.
Revealing insights into the customer experience promptly.

Social listening tools should not be utilized without establishing a set of clear, measurable goals that can be evaluated at the conclusion of the listening process.

Creating a comprehensive list of pertinent keywords, hashtags, and phrases that customers utilize when discussing your brand, products, services, and industry across social media platforms is paramount. This list should encompass specific product or brand names, along with related terms.

Integrating this list of words into your social listening tools enables these systems to proactively monitor these vital topics with increased scrutiny and subsequently analyze the outcomes. It’s imperative to continuously update this list, particularly when new products or services are introduced to the market.

3. Selecting the Appropriate Tools

Social listening on a wide scale requires investment in appropriate technology, including social listening tools that provide real-time alerts, analysis, and insights, saving your team countless hours of manual monitoring across various channels.

Among the suitable tools for this task is Lucidya’s Social Listening tool, which empowers you to listen to the market and your customers across social media, news, and blogs. It also gathers and analyzes data related to your brand, customers, and competitors across multiple social media platforms.

4. Simultaneous Monitoring Across Multiple Platforms

Social listening tools keep multiple platforms together at once. Therefore, you should exploit this feature to monitor several platforms together and not limit yourself to one platform. In return, you should narrow your list to include only channels that are relevant to your target audience and industry, that is, where your customers are most active and can be monitored publicly.

Avoid wasting time, effort, and even money on monitoring platforms that your customers and target audience do not care about.

5. Data Segmentation and Template & Pattern Formation by Priority

Data is a valuable asset for modern brands, yet many companies fail to handle it effectively, missing out on its potential benefits. Leveraging data provided by social listening is crucial for enhancing the customer experience.

The essential question posed is: What does data segmentation entail??

Data segmentation is a professional strategy for dealing with large and massive data, as well as branching data, and dividing it into sub- and partial data that is easy to deal with and classify according to priorities. This would enable companies to gain valuable insights into understanding customer behaviour, preferences and needs and thus meet them to the fullest.

Benefits of data segmentation

It is not enough to collect data from social listening tools without making the most of it, so companies must resort to what is called data segmentation. Below are a number of benefits and returns:

Improved targeting, because data segmentation allows companies to tailor their marketing efforts to the needs and preferences of each customer segment.
Data segmentation provides a deeper understanding of customers and can identify customer patterns and trends in each category within the sector.

Brands can also adjust site or app features, content, and marketing strategies to meet the preferences of each customer segment and thus provide a better user experience.

Data segmentation has a significant impact on ROI by improving marketing efforts, reducing wasteful spending and errors. Through specific and precise targeting, companies can increase the effectiveness of their marketing campaigns, leading to increased conversion rates and sales.

Data segmentation is not limited to customers only, but data related to the service or product can be segmented through customer comments, reviews, and preferences within each category, in order to improve the product and thus improve customer service and enhance customer satisfaction.

6. Sentiment analysis

Customer sentiment is analyzed through professional social listening tools, in order to know the customer’s opinion about the service, product, or even the brand’s website. Based on these feelings, measures can be taken to increase the growth of the brand and correct its mistakes.

The customer’s feelings usually fall into three main feelings:

Positive.
Negative.
Neutral.

As for analyzing customer sentiments and their types, there are four. They are as follows:

Careful analysis: Analyzing reviews, ratings, and comments, and classifying them into positive, negative, and neutral.

Aspect-based analysis: It involves determining opinions about a specific aspect of the product or service. For example, TripAdvisor uses this approach to determine the sentiment behind customer reviews and the service itself.

Intent-based analysis : determines a customer’s intent, whether he wants to buy something or just browse.

Emotional detection analysis: This analysis determines the customer’s emotion behind mentioning the brand. This can include sadness, anger, happiness, contentment, frustration, etc.

Why is it important to conduct sentiment analysis?

Sentiment analysis, or also called opinion mining, is very important for companies, as it allows them to know customers’ feelings about their products and services and thus improve them according to their needs and aspirations. In addition to the following advantages:

Get objective and real insights.
Building better products and services.
Analysis at scale, including: emails, chatbot scripts, surveys, CRM logs, and product feedback.
Get exclusive results in real time.

7. Competitor analysis

One of the major challenges to the growth of any company is its competitors. So that brands are always competing against each other to get the highest market share. It is also constantly trying to improve its strategies. Because competitors have a lot of valuable information, which can be extracted using social listening tools.

Among the advantages and success of competitor analysis, the brand obtains after the analysis:

Measuring their social performance

Social listening tools can be used to directly evaluate a brand’s performance against its competitors. Because social listening allows brands to discover their competitive strengths and weaknesses. This competition analysis helps the brand understand its place in the market and where it wants to be in the future.

It is important to identify competitors, because social listening reveals a lot of what the brand has missed. So many metrics are used for comparison, such as reach, engagement rate, click through rate, social sentiment, etc…

Discover value

Social listening gives a deep understanding of competitors’ marketing activities . There is a lot for a brand to learn from well-performing competitors, such as: how to generate business and new followers, how to keep the audience interested and following… Social listening also allows understanding why competitors are running a particular campaign and who they are targeting with it.

In addition, social listening determines which campaigns to abandon in order to save resources. These resources can be better used in new campaigns based on more up-to-date, more accurate data.

Discover important trends in the sector

In today’s digital world, marketing culture relies heavily on trends. Customers also follow trends closely, so brands need to do the same to stay relevant and competitive. When brands keep up with movements in the industry, they benefit as much as their customers.

Social listening is a solution to quickly identify current trends. By leveraging the tools, brands can better understand why certain topics are trending in their industry and quickly adapt their marketing efforts in that direction.

Social listening also monitors competitor activities and general changes in the sector. By monitoring the entire market, brands can predict upcoming trends and take steps to stay ahead of the competition.

Discover new job opportunities

Through a successful and extensive social listening strategy, brands can capture a vast amount of data that might otherwise go unseen. Data is unstructured, and social listening tools help organize it and extract actionable insights from it. After organizing the data comes the discovery of new job opportunities.

Brands derive new ideas from information received directly from customers, such as product or service feedback, as well as pain points, which greatly contribute to developing and improving the customer experience.

Determine competitor influences

Social listening tools explore many expansive sources of information, such as published articles from market research companies, news websites, industry experts and leaders, etc. By tracking such records, brands can understand how much the market is influenced by their competitors. In this case, a detailed analysis of where and how these effects occur can easily be carried out.

A brand can strategize to compete and gain more engagement if influence is low. If the impact is significant, a brand can take measures to either compete against or protect itself from intense competition.

Competitor analysis

Customer engagement is not enough to understand the true image of the brand in the market. Rather, brands should look at customer perception. How people feel about the brand is the real test. Sentiment analysis is the process of understanding a customer’s tone when they say something about a brand. Any sentiment analysis is also essential in customer relationship management.

8. Repeat the process and develop it continuously

Keep in mind that building a social listening strategy takes time and consistent effort to gain insights and drive performance. Therefore, all of the above must be repeated from time to time, while developing performance processes to produce valuable results. It is also recommended to be careful to use tools that are constantly updated to provide accurate value and results.

It is not possible to rely on the results and data of a single listening process. Rather, the process must be repeated continuously and developed to stay ahead and maintain the brand’s position in a fiercely competitive market.

Now that you have a better understanding of how social media listening impacts your business, you’ll likely want to implement some tactics. But you don’t know how to start? Or need some help along the way?

Lucidya provides you with a highly professional social listening service. All you have to do is request a service Listen Social Now , enjoy the results on your brand.

Conclusion

Brands that lean into social listening gain in many ways by deepening customer understanding, strengthening customer relationships, driving and enhancing customer experience, and improving brand reputation, all of which can fuel efforts around improving customer acquisition, conversion, and retention.