What Is Social Listening, and Why Does It Matter?
Have you ever wished that you had a tool that helped you figure out what people are saying about different brands, products, or people? Congratulations! You just described the basics of social listening.
Let’s jump more in-depth. Social listening is defined as the process of using digital tools to monitor mentions of brands online. These tools allow marketers to gather key information about online conversations around competitors, their brand, as well as engage in that conversation if they so choose. With more conversational insight, marketers can make strategic decisions that are more customer-centric, as well as better determine product and brand positioning.
Not all social listening tools have the same capabilities. Some, like Sprinklr, Sprout Social, and others are more advanced with capabilities and insights that prove more useful for large companies with noticeable brand presences. Other tools, like Hootsuite, have simple dashboards you can set up with key phrases that help you monitor Twitter and public Facebook posts.
Social listening has many benefits, but there are a few that stand out.
Identifying Key Trends
Do you wonder what people are talking about the most in your industry at any given moment? If you own a bakery, maybe it’s rainbow-colored bagels. If you own a landscaping business, maybe it’s drought-resistant shrubs and grasses. Social listening tools can identify industry trends, provide mention volume, and identify popular social channels in terms of conversation around a selected topic.
Arby’s and Wendy’s Meta Rebrand Response
In 2021, when Facebook changed their name to Meta, Wendy’s was quick to make a comment on the update. Shortly after, Arby’s jumped in with their own response. Social listening tools can help uncover conversations that your industry competitors may already be a part of, often in real time.
Knowing Your Audience
Social listening tools are important in defining key audience traits. Machinima, an advertising company for digital video game marketing, is a great example of how a company successfully identified its audiences and how they talk on social media. Machinima examines six types of gamers in the gaming community and segments them into audiences based on behavioral traits and interests. They wanted to better understand these audiences and how they could market to them more effectively.
Using Crimson Hexagon, Machinima was able to define each audience by building monitors based on keywords that were identified in the conversations of each audience segment surrounding their favorite games. This helped Machinima better understand topics of conversation that were most popular with each audience segment and provided insights and strategy that helped fuel strategic campaigns, create partnerships and influencer programs, and better target key audiences.
Identifying Influencers, Advocates, and Detractors
Are many people saying negative things about your brand, or is it just a small, loud group? One of the challenges many brands face is how to respond to negative feedback on social media and determine the source. If you have a social listening tool that identifies sentiment, you could also identify if negative mentions of your brand are coming from a small group of people, or from a larger group. This can help you build your brand’s response strategy.
Want to identify a potential influencer who loves using your product? Social listening tools can do that too by measuring a user’s influence level.
Prevention & Crisis Management
One of the challenges many brands face is identifying negative content about their brand or product before it has the potential to go viral. This aspect of social listening has many benefits: you can address the poster privately or publicly and resolve their need or concern, or you can craft a crisis management response and have the upper hand before the story circulates elsewhere.
The decision of taking action on a negative post can also be influenced by social listening. Once the post is identified, marketers have the potential to keep monitoring the post itself and responses for potential virality. This can help a brand to decide if action is needed.
In 2016, when Chick-fil-A replaced their BBQ sauce with a new Smokehouse variety, fans expressed their outrage over the change on social media with #BringBacktheBBQ. Given the negative launch, Chick-fil-A decided to return to the original product for the first product relaunch in company history. Using Sprinklr, they created dashboards monitoring sentiment and customer engagement so that Chick-fil-A’s social media team could engage in real time and monitor the sentiment surrounding the campaign. With Sprinkr’s social media capabilities, they identified the most vocal fans and detractors and sent them custom surprise and delight kits.
Chick-fil-A launched #BroughtBackTheBBQ and saw a 188X increase in Chick-fil-A and BBQ sauce mentions on the day the sauce was returned to restaurants and over 1,000 mentions of both hashtags over three months. They responded to or reviewed more than 5,000 messages in the first three days after the announcement, and saw sentiment change from 73% negative to 92% positive.
#BringBackTheBBQ
The #BroughtBackTheBBQ campaign enabled Chick-fil-A to better connect and build a better relationship with their loyal customers.
Build a Better Customer Service Experience
Let’s say you only look in your brand’s Twitter mentions for what people are saying about you. If you do, you’re missing out on key information and a great deal of interaction potential. Many social users talk about brands and products without even tagging them. Think about the potential and opportunity to connect with consumers to create an even better experience, as well as use that real-time feedback to improve your products or services.
When Barclays launched its mobile banking app PingIt, which allows users to send money to each other using only a phone number, they used the Sentiment social listening tool to track buzz and real-time feedback about the app and use these insights to make improvements. Customers who had feedback were able to be heard and have their concerns utilized, making them feel valued.
Barclays is just one of many brands that have used social listening tools to provide a better experience for its customers. Starwood Hotels and Resorts has an extensive global social media presence comprised of multiple brands. To successfully manage the hundreds of thousands of incoming messages per month, Starwood turned to Sprinklr for coordinating social media efforts in order to improve message responsiveness. By monitoring social messages across brands, regions, and teams, Starwood was able to enhance its customers' experience.
Inform Advertising Efforts
While social listening benefits above mention organic social media, social listening tools are an excellent way to inform advertising efforts through feedback on products and customer experience. This can help inform your strategy around messaging and advertising copy.
Many global brands use social listening tools as a way to monitor real time comments on ads, particularly on paid social platforms such as Meta.
The Social Factor
In today’s digital landscape, there are millions of conversations about brands and products happening on social media, not to mention across the web. As you’ve read this article, thousands of those conversations have been started on forums, websites, social channels, and other sources. What marketer wouldn’t want a pulse on what's happening?
