7 Wonders of the Social Listening World

Using social listing to respond to your customers before they contact you

Let’s put the wonders away for now. Let’s talk business.

How do you know what people say about your company? How do you detect unhappy customers who don’t tell you in your face that your product sucks, but make sure the universe (or, in most cases, Twitter or Facebook) knows about that? Finally, how do you find people interested in the subject relevant to your business in real time and engage them before someone else does?

Ladies and gentlemen, let me introduce you to social listening.

What is Social Listening?

Social listening allows you to discover what people are saying online about your brand, product, competitors or any specific topic in real-time. You get instant notifications that allow you to act upon your mentions immediately. It’s super easy.

Here’s a great real life example to clarify things for you a little bit:

Notice how Vapiano joined the conversation although they weren’t tagged with their official handle? Means they are most likely monitoring their own brand name (good for them!).

But there’s a lot more you can do. Buckle up and let’s go!

1. Brand Monitoring

Knowing how your company is perceived online is an essential part of running your business. Protecting your brand’s name strengthens its position on the market which translates into profits.

It takes a lot to build a brand with great reputation. But even the most trustworthy, reliable and responsive brand may go to the dogs by one unfortunate tweet or comment. Even a minor failure can be instantly broadcast online and have a snowball effect.

Spotting questions or comments tagged with your official handle is not a problem, but do you know how many conversations you’re missing? People are already engaged in a conversation about you. You just don’t know that yet.

Another essential part of your company’s online presence is crisis management. Therefore, you have to know how to handle it.

Source

Regardless of the good image of your brand, great product and customer service, there are always people posting negative opinions or simply playing dirty pool. Unfortunately, you can’t ban them from using the Internet. In fact, you can turn the tables and use such a situation to your advantage.

You need to act timely and keep it cool. The biggest challenge? Brandjacking.

Brandjacking is stealing brand online identity by hacking or faking social media profiles and posting harmful content. With an immediate reaction it can surely be prevented. Here’s a classic example:

http://twitchy.com/jessem-34/2013/11/27/nokia-new-zealand-apologizes-for-f-you-tweet/

Social listening allows you to keep your ear to the ground in real-time.

2. Lead Generation and Sales

Social listening gives you an opportunity to find leads anywhere on the Web. This way you can reach out to them and address their needs with your offer.

More and more customers seek advice and recommendations on the Internet. That leaves you the door wide open to identifying sales opportunities.

Hmm. Our paddles are starting to look a little worn out. Can anyone recommend us some new ones to try? pic.twitter.com/g1W8wy0h59

— Battle of the Paddle (@botpbristol) June 10, 2016

3. Customer Service

Customer service is now more important than ever as clients can easily express their opinions online. Bad news travel fast, particularly on the Web. Fortunately, so do good news and great feedback.

But there’s more. Online reviews, customer insights and your company mentions reach beyond your social media profiles. Your business is also being talked about on discussion forums, news sites, blogs and other places. Social listening gives you that chance to have it all under control. What’s more important, people don’t always use your official handle or tag you. Here’s a painful example.

This kind of review begs for a reply from Nokia.

4. Campaign Analytics

Running marketing or PR campaigns? Got a cool hashtag on Instagram or Twitter?

Social listening collects not only hashtags, but all sorts of mentions. It allows you to precisely track your campaign mentions on the Internet and measure its success by the number of interactions, sentiment indicator, social reach, source types, influencers and most active sites. With one click you can transform all of them into a simple, yet insightful infographic.

Let’s take Volkswagen and its #Polowers campaign promoting Volkswagen Polo.

https://vimeo.com/64216373

#Polowers connects VW’s Polo and followers. Catchy, isn’t it? The campaign was utterly successful.

I’m sure you can’t wait to use our free trial, to learn more about the success of your campaigns!

5. User Engagement

Interacting with customers has never been easier. Conversations about your brand and product take place in social media, discussion forums, blogs and social listening knows where else.

The new generation of customers expects brands to come up with more human and personalized interactions that build trust. They need to feel there’s a real person standing behind the brand that listens, tries to understand and offer a helping hand.

Take a leaf out of Starbucks social engagement:

Try a pump of vanilla, hazelnut, or caramel syrup, Vanessa!

— Starbucks (@Starbucks) June 9, 2016

Engaging your customers online raises your brand awareness and social media reach.

6. Customer Insights (aka who is using your product and how)

More and more customers use reviews sites, marketplaces and social media to provide insightful feedback and suggest improvements, or simply mention that they are using your products. This allows you to see your product through the eyes of your customers.

Others produce their own content which tells you volumes about how they use them and provides you with the much needed real-life context.

https://www.instagram.com/p/BGZ6jepsd5h/?taken-by=_esoterika

The Internet and social listening give you easy access to your customers and their feedback.

Ready to learn what your customers say about your business and product? It costs nothing to see how it works!

7. Influencer Marketing

One of the ways that help gain traffic and increase social media reach is cooperation with influencers that may spread a word about your brand.

Influencers are people whose online presence, insights and knowledge of a given niche attracts an audience. When it comes to business, they may be unaware of your brand but their audience may be important to your business.

You can reach an influencer who’s somehow connected to your area of business. It’s all about relationships, but you need numbers to select the right people to talk to.

Brand24 lists all people, websites, blog, news and social media talking about your brand. You can filter the results according to popularity of an influencer, a specific period of time or sentiment (positive or negative). The results also include fan communities concentrated around an influencer.

What’s more, another list includes a number of mentions the person wrote.

Conclusion

Keep in mind that social listening may be applied in X ways. It’s entirely up to you how you will use it for the sake of your business.

All in all, it goes without saying that social listening puts you ahead of your competition and improves many areas of your business, such as lead generation, customer service, brand monitoring and many others. No need to tell you into what it translates into, right?

One more thing. You can give a try to all these awesome opportunities with Brand24 free trial! Here’s to you! 

Tomek Zietek works as Content Manager in Brand24. He’s fascinated with design, marketing, and new technologies. In his free time he travels, cooks, cycles, plays guitar and reads a lot. .