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Social Listening: Mastering Your Brand’s Success with Lucidya

Social media is a critical medium for businesses to master. Not only is it the biggest digital marketing channel, but it also one of the most lucrative income sources for businesses of all sizes. Here are several statistics that highlight the power of social media:

Half of the world’s population—that is just over 3 billion people—use social media regularly. (Statista)
73% of marketers say social media has been “somewhat effective” to “very effective” in generating new business. (Buffer)
54% of customers use social media to research products and services before they buy. (Global Web Index)
49% of consumers say influencer recommendations help them make purchase decisions. (Four Communications)
71% of customers would recommend brands to their friends and family if they receive positive social media experiences. (Lyfemarketing)

These numbers show that social media is a massive contributor to business success in the 21st century. Businesses can no longer ignore its impact regardless of their industry

However, social media marketing comes with its challenges. These include poor campaign visibility, unclear performance reviews, ineffective strategies, and other obstacles. Your brand needs to address these challenges to generate a good ROI from social media.

This is where social listening matters.

Social listening refers to the act of monitoring customer conversations on social media This includes:

Direct and indirect brand mentions.
Keywords.
Key events and updates.
Primary, secondary, and tertiary competitors.
Influencers.
and many more.

Social listening is not only about collecting raw data. It analyzes the data to give brands valuable insights that allow them to make informed decisions to run their business better.

It tells you what your customers are saying, how they feel, and what you can do to satisfy them. This knowledge is helpful in many ways including planning effective campaigns, improving your marketing message, launching new products and services, and so on. The better you understand your customers, the more likely it is for your brand to succeed.

Without social listening, you won’t know what your customers want. Just like in the real world, a lack of knowledge leads to guesswork and approximations. This disrupts your performance as customers don’t have their needs satisfied. For enterprises with millions, if not billions, of dollars at stake, it’s not worth assuming your customers’ feelings when you can easily address the issue with social listening.

Social listening requires a comprehensive tool. It’s best to work with a complete, powerful tool that covers all the features you need—one of which is Lucidya. You’re going to need a tool that monitors millions of public messages and posts and the tool has to analyze each one to generate valuable insights. Make sure your choice is the right one.

2. Determine Your Goals

Before you get into social listening, it’s important to know what you want to achieve with your new venture. To get a better understanding of your expectations, ask yourself these questions.

Do you know what your customers are saying about your brand?
Do you know what the recent developments in your niche are?
Do you know what your competitors are doing?
Do you know what your customers expect from your competitors?

If you can’t answer these questions, social listening will help you gain a good understanding of them which will help with your goal-planning.

3. Determine Your Plan and Strategy

The two terms are interchangeable. In short, a plan means “here’s a way to do this thing” while a strategy implies “this is the best way to do this thing”. Businesses often make plans that are not strategies. It’s important to have your plans based on facts rather than estimates which is what social listening solves.

A good example of these two would be:

Plan: We want to increase our leads and sales through social media.

Strategy: We will plan our campaigns and measure our performances with social listening.

It’s OK if your plan and strategy are not well-defined from the start. You can refine it along the way as your brand gains more insights from your campaigns.

4. Choose Your Data Sources

One important decision to make when building your social listening strategy is to choose which channels to pull data from. Most people assume they should pull data from every social media platform. While this isn’t a bad strategy, it is counterproductive. You’ll have massive volumes of irrelevant, worthless data.

We recommend starting with one social network first. Twitter is a great place to start as the platform is more public compared to Facebook and Instagram due to the latter two’s privacy options. Twitter has privacy settings but you can still access valuable conversations without issues with social listening.

5. Build Your Topics and Keywords

This is the most critical part of social listening. Your topics and keywords determine the success of your efforts.

It’s a good idea to be as specific as possible. Being specific filters tons of irrelevant data so you only gather valuable and helpful insights. Some good keywords to start your social listening journey include:

Your brand name and other keywords related to your brand.
Influencers and personalities in your industry.
Industry keywords.
Competitor keywords.

Step 2: Understand Your Brand

Once you have the suggestions from Lucidya, it’s time to understand what your brand is and how your customers are perceiving your product. Start listening to what the people are saying. You’ll find both negative and positive aspects of your product and business. This lets you rethink some of the past decisions made by your company and help you make informed decisions in the future

A few questions you should be asking yourself with your social listening insights include:

What are the thoughts of your customers about your business or product?
Are you losing old customers and/or gaining new ones?
Are people loyal to your brand? Will they keep coming back to you?
Does your brand matter enough to make a customer share your brand with their friends and families?

If you have a decent amount of social listening insights but don’t know how to use them, here are some things you can do to leverage them:

Understand Your Brand

Are your customers asking the same questions? If you notice several people asking the same question, maybe it’s time that you added that question to your FAQ or homepage to make everyone’s life easier.
Are your customer’s complaints similar? A lot of people facing the same problem means that there is a flaw in your business that needs to be fixed ASAP.
Are your customers happy with your services? If so, figure out what exactly makes them happy and implement a similar strategy to the rest of your plans.
Are your customer reviews positive or negative? It’s important to know if there is something wrong with your company before you go and try to fix it. An overwhelming number of negative reviews means it’s time to go back to the drawing board for your plans.

As a business owner, there’s a good chance you might know exactly what’s wrong with your business. This is where social listening much excels compared to some of the more traditional forms of customer management. It gives you a clear picture of what your business is lacking or doing well.

Maybe there’s nothing wrong with your product, maybe the documentation you provide along with it isn’t unclear. Your pricing may be unreasonable. Your customer service may not be up to par. There are a lot of things that you can do better to improve your business.

Through social listening, you can discover many hidden flaws in your business and fix them before they turn into PR disasters for your brand.

Step 3: Understand Your Industry

Social listening helps you become proactive regarding industry matters. By analyzing key discussions and events related to your industry, you can act early to gain an advantage over your competitors.

With social listening, you can:

Monitor key events in your industry to stay up to date.
Keep an eye on competitors to see what they’re doing to aid your competitive analysis.
Locate gaps in your industry and invest in lucrative opportunities.

Once you have a better understanding of your industry, you can act early and execute campaigns before your competitors have a chance to catch up. For example, you can use Lucidya to explore influencer marketing when growing your brand reputation.

Influencer marketing is becoming one of the most cost-effective marketing channels. Growing your brand through reputable names in your industry lets you tap into a gold-mine of customers you were missing previously.

Say, you’re running an airline. You get in touch with a travel blogger and ask him or her to fly with you. The blogger has a good experience and shouts you out on their social media channels. People—in other words, potential customers—see this and they will remember your brand the next time they’re booking a flight.

That’s how knowing your industry allows you to gain an advantage in the market.Lucidya’s

Step 4: Understand Your Competitors

Your competitors are always looking to one-up your brand. There are two ways to deal with a situation like this. You can give up and remain inferior. Or, you can learn from them and find ways to improve. The latter is always the best choice if business growth is your end goal.

With social listening, you can:

Get a better understanding of how your competitors are interacting with their target audiences.
Figure out what makes their product better than yours.
Analyze your methodologies and compare it with competitors via benchmarks.
Find flaws in competitors and your brand to identify opportunities.
Respond to their up and coming developments with some of your own.

You need to understand that whatever it is your company does, there’s always another company keeping up behind. Do you make TVs? Sony and Samsung are producing TVs every minute. Are you running a marketing agency? Great, there’s only a million more of those out there. Do you clean homes? There are at least a dozen cleaning companies in your neighborhood.

However, just because you have competitors doesn’t mean your brand cannot succeed. Competition is good for business growth. The key is to stay relevant and capitalize on your competitors’ failures.

Social listening is a great tool to help you unearth gaps in the market. You can use a tool like Lucidya to analyze what people are posting about your competitors. There’s a huge chance that you might find something to turn into an opportunity.

For example, people may complain about your competitor’s slow and expensive services. You can take this info and craft a campaign to promote your brand’s top-notch customer experience. Give people something your competitors cannot, and you’ll easily gain new customers in no time.

Step 5: Understand Your Campaigns

Companies marketing campaigns regularly. You can check the performances of your campaigns through tools like Google Analytics. But, you don’t see the full story by only relying on charts and statistics.

This is where social listening gives an extra edge. It helps you measure campaigns based on actual customer experiences. You’re not just calculating CPCs or conversion rates. You’re understanding how your customers feel, what they like (or hate) about your campaigns, what they wish you did, and many more.

For instance, you can use Lucidya to monitor the number of posts people are making on your business. If many people are giving positive mentions, your campaign worked. If the reaction is negative, you probably did something wrong. This is much more insightful than looking at numbers to gauge your efforts. Of course, it’s best to combine analytics and social listening so you get a complete overview of your campaign performances.

Social listening also helps you run better business strategies in the future. Before you run your next campaign, analyze the previous one with a tool like Lucidya. More specifically, you want to answer the following questions:

Did your previous campaign engage your audience?
What was your customers’ response to your campaign?
Did any influencers pick up your campaign and respond to it?
Which demographics were engaged the most?
Were there any negative aspects of your campaign? If so, which ones and why?
Did you generate an acceptable ROI from the campaign?

These insights ensure you don’t repeat the same mistakes in future campaigns, which improves your results significantly.

Social listening is a must-have for brands looking to thrive in the modern business landscape. Not only will it help you understand your customers, but you can also generate new business to bolster your bottom line. Many successful companies have used social listening to great effect. Now is the best time for your brand to do the same.

About Lucidya

Lucidya is an AI-powered social media listening tool that empowers companies with in-depth, never-before-seen customer insights. Lucidya’s best-in-class text analysis engine also provides powerful sentiment analysis for conversations in English and all Arabic dialects including Najdi, Hijazi, Levantine, and many more.

With Lucidya, businesses can build profitable products, boost customer satisfaction, execute successful campaigns, and close more sales thanks to our extensive list of social media listening features.