Social media has always been used as a means for brands to communicate and engage with their fans and followers. On the consumer’s side, social media is often used as a means to reach out to brands, give feedback on products, and share concerns or praises. It is easier than ever before for brands to respond, engage, and build customer loyalty across social media channels.
As advertisers, we should be using Social Listening tools to monitor these conversations to help us develop new advertising strategies, prevent possible campaign issues, and optimize current campaigns.
Here are the top 4 ways that you can use social listening to boost your campaigns:
1. Identify your competitors
Before launching a campaign, it is important to take a look at what similar companies are doing and understand what is working (or not working) for them. By doing this, you can better position your brand, product, social strategy, and your campaign as a whole.
When conducting a competitive analysis, it’s also important to understand the way that your competitors respond and react to their customers on social media. Are they funny? Cutthroat? Helpful? How is their tone affecting their customers’ responses?
TIP: If you don’t know who your competitors might be, try searching online for keywords or terms that define your brand to get a better understanding of what conversations people are having about similar products, brands, or campaigns.
2. Determining your share of voice within the industry
Now that you’ve figured out who your competitors are, it’s time to figure out how much of the social conversation is about your brand versus the others. You can think of “share of voice” as a means of gauging your brand’s visibility on social media. Knowing your share of voice allows you to identify new opportunities to increase your brand’s online influence and measure your campaign’s impact on the social community.
TIP: If you’re looking to quickly increase conversations around your brand, try asking your audience for opinions on new products or campaigns and be quick to respond to their feedback. Customers that feel like they had part in creating something awesome typically drive more positive social feedback.
3. Monitoring brand sentiment
At Civilian, one of our favorite social listening widgets is the Sentiment Analysis tool. This tool allows advertisers to gain a better understanding of the emotions, attitudes, and opinions that people are expressing about our campaigns on social media.
Especially with brand awareness campaigns, it’s important to not only focus on the praises people are singing about your brand, but to dive deep into the negative comments as well. While it’s great to see how well your campaign is doing, is there a problem that has gone unnoticed? Being able to quickly review and respond to those negative mentions can not only help build brand loyalty, but also help drive your strategy moving forward.
TIP: If you start to notice that most of your positive feedback is stemming from one person with a large following, reach out to them! They could be a potential influencer for your brand.
4. Optimizing your campaigns
Once you start to gain insights into how your audience is reacting to your campaign, you can start adjusting and improving your strategy.
If you are seeing that most of the conversation around your brand is positive, ask yourself the following questions:
- Are most of these conversations about a product or campaign that is currently being advertised? If not, is it worth bringing it back into the market? If so, is there an opportunity to expand your targeting into new audience segments?
- Is there enough conversation around a particular subject that’s worth highlighting on your organic social media pages?
On the other hand, if you’re noticing some negative conversations happening around your brand, consider the following:
- Use these comments as an opportunity to speak directly with your audience. Nothing builds brand loyalty more than letting your audience know their opinions are being heard and addressed.
- Work together with your internal advertising team to find a solution. Was there an update that came out of the blue? Try being more vocal about big updates and what people can expect ahead of time.
TIP: No matter how well you think your campaign is doing, there is ALWAYS room to optimize!
Wondering which tool to use?
There are a ton of social listening tools out there you can try that offer some great insights. Look for things such as:
- Real-time data pulled from social, news, blogs, and forums
- Owned and earned media performance
- Influencer identification
- Custom reporting
- Sentiment analysis
- Word clouds
- So much more!
Here at Civilian, our go-to social listening tool is Meltwater (formally Sysomos) but you have a bunch of good ones to choose from. They range in cost from free to several thousand dollars monthly. Start your Social Listening tool search and find the one that best fits your marketing needs!
