Social Media Listening: Understanding and Responding to Customer Feedback as a Startup

Social Media Listening: Understanding and Responding to Customer Feedback as a Startup

How does social listening work?

Social media listening, also known as social listening, is the process of finding and evaluating online comments made about a business, person, product, or brand.

Internet conversations generate enormous amounts of unstructured data. This makes it crucial to understand what an organisation hopes to accomplish with a social media listening campaign. The best solution may be a collection of free Google Alerts or a pricey software suite that includes ad hoc analysis and complete interaction with historical customer relationship management (CRM) programmes, depending on the objective.

Both social media and one-on-one conversations are useful for acquiring information, but social listening is rapidly emerging as a key tool for customer intelligence. The following are just a few of the numerous ways to use social media to obtain understanding:

• Monitoring online customer support forums;
• Using software tools to gather comments from social outlets, such as Facebook and Twitter; and
• Encouraging customers to suggest new product features and vote on their favorites.

Social media monitoring software can mine text on social networking sites, blogs, discussion forums, and other social media for particular keywords. Specific words or phrases in unstructured data are converted by monitoring software into numerical values that are linked to structured data in a database. Thus, the data can be examined using conventional data mining methods.

What makes social listening crucial?

Social listening enables businesses to comprehend the discourse surrounding their name, as well as the goods and services they provide. It offers useful consumer information that businesses can utilise to assess customer awareness of their brands and enhance their goods and services.

The following advantages of social listening for businesses:

• Effort analysis offers insight into the social media resonance of a specific marketing effort.
• Based on social media dialogues, competitive analysis offers insights into how rivals are faring.
• A business can use event monitoring to track audience reactions in real time to a particular event, like a virtual conference.
• When a business uses social tools like hashtags to listen for discussions involving its industry, it might identify emerging trends.

Businesses can modify how they handle these problems by using the conversational data they get through social listening. For instance, a business might alter the present campaign to solve the issue if the debate surrounding a certain marketing effort is bad. Additionally, it might utilise the data to create future efforts that would be more effective.

Positive social media commentary about a company's rivals may motivate it to behave similarly. A useful method for determining the sentiment and responses of the real audience is to gather social intelligence from social media conversations.

Social monitoring versus social listening

What people are saying on social media is explained by social monitoring. Social listening reveals the motivations behind what people say. Listening focuses on long-term strategic choices, whereas monitoring is tactical.

Examples are as follows:

Social observation. A restaurant keeps an eye on Twitter to see whether anyone discusses its latest offering, a hamburger with cream cheese on the bread. When a remark is made, the company has the option but not the need to respond. Information gathering is the fundamental goal of monitoring. There may or may not be a strategy involved. The company can monitor the various online conversations that bring up its hamburger.

Social listening. The same restaurant keeps an eye on social media for mentions of its new hamburger and compiles the data to analyse sentiment. The restaurant uses the data gathered to create a bigger marketing plan. With the aid of sentiment analysis, it can establish:

• How long to keep the hamburger on the menu,
• What customers enjoy best about it,
• What they want to eat with it, and
• Potential new products to offer are all questions that need to be answered.

The company in the listening example does not respond to every mention of the product. It makes no attempt to sway opinion or alter how individuals feel about the subject at hand. Instead, it seeks to understand sentiment and collect insights in order to create a plan for enhancing sentiment going forward.

Social monitoring and social listening are not incompatible. A social listening approach goes beyond social network monitoring to better comprehend brand-related interactions there.

How is social listening implemented?

Monitoring pertinent conversations on social media sites, comprehending the underlying mood or sentiment, and then responding with a marketing strategy that positively influences sentiment are the objectives of social media listening. Three main steps make up the social listening process:

Monitoring. This involves keeping an eye on various social media platforms for mentions of brands, subjects, rivals, keywords, and items in online conversations. A company can manually monitor its brand by visiting social media sites once a day or more regularly, or it can automate the process with a tool.

Analysis. This stage is what distinguishes social listening from monitoring. Companies search for patterns and trends in the data collected during monitoring to determine what customers like and dislike about a product or service. There are numerous consumer sentiment analysis solutions that make use of automated technologies to give businesses understanding of the emotions behind the text or speech that customers write or say.

Response. Then, businesses may decide how to react. This could be a minor action, like online customer service, or a major one, like reinventing the entire brand strategy.

Companies can use the data gathered via social listening for a variety of additional things, such as the following:

• To track the quality of the customer experience (CX),
• Find unsatisfied current customers,
• Identify potential new ones, and
• Gather data for monitoring return on investment (ROI) or A/B testing several iterations of a campaign to see which one performs better.

Social listening tips

The following are examples of good social listening techniques:

Understand the audience. Discover which buyer personas a brand's goods and services appeal to. Recognise the best ways to market to the target market on their preferred platform.

Determine what to listen for. There will be a tonne of data from which to make deductions. Knowing exactly what your organisation hopes to learn from the data is crucial. This will make it easier for businesses to disregard data set noise.

Use keywords to find data. Using keywords to limit social media conversations is an excellent idea. They may be related to an organisation, its names, goods, and services, or to a bigger sector of the market.

Use a social listening tool. Unstructured social data collection tools can assist in drawing conclusions from the data they collect.

Develop a strategy. It's crucial to use the results of social data analysis to create a strategy. If a business determines that the social discourse is positive, it should learn what the users appreciate about it. If a company notices that its customers aren't satisfied, it should investigate the issue and look for ways to improve. This could entail altering the features, prices, or descriptions of the products. Or, it can entail using other marketing techniques to clarify their products, such enhancing the production of data-driven content.

Social listening tools

There are the upcoming social media listening tools:

• Clarabridge is a CX management AI platform.
• HubSpot provides marketing, sales, customer service and CRM software.
• Lately is social AI content and social media software.
• Sprout Social is social media management software.
• Hootsuite is a social media management and marketing dashboard.

These items could serve as independent social listening tools. They can occasionally be incorporated into a business CRM system. These tools, which are a component of a CRM platform, allow an organisation to compile CX data from several sources and arrange it in one location for analysis. Among the information-gathering sources used by tools are Facebook, Twitter, TripAdvisor, and Booking.com.

Some social media platforms allow users to build unique listening templates that monitor particular keywords and subjects. Additionally, they might offer business intelligence dashboards. Tracking and identifying influencers in pertinent areas is another prevalent characteristic. Users can monitor key performance indicators and analytics regarding their most important influencers, including the quantity of interactions with their posts and how frequently they post about a given subject.

How to get started with social media listening

Businesses should be aware of their social listening goals before investing in a social listening solution. If a commercial enterprise software package doesn't seem necessary, there are still many free social listening options accessible.

Google Alerts and TweetDeck are two examples of free tools. These tools give users the ability to plan automatic posts and track social interactions for straightforward subjects and keywords, just as the paid options. There are certain drawbacks to these free tools, including the following:

• They record a great deal of noise.
• They lack or have few analysis features.
• Data visualisation is done by them.

In order to aid in social listening initiatives, businesses can also leverage application programming interfaces and sentiment analysis technologies.

Most free applications only function with one social media site, including Tweet Deck and Google Alerts. Paid products with additional data visualisation and analytics features should be taken into consideration by organisations looking for a tool to construct an omnichannel marketing strategy. For certain industries, some suppliers offer social listening services.

A crucial component of developing a customer experience strategy is gathering social data. Discover more about how businesses may develop effective CX strategies.