Solution Guru@ Simplify360 – 7 mins read
There are several social media aspects that you could measure with social listening, so it’s possible to get perplexed. The first step to optimizing a social listening tool is to know precisely what you want to achieve. From understanding and tracking customer sentiment to setting up crisis management, you should know what you need.
We’ve always been told to listen before we speak.The same tip pertains to customer communication, brand mentions, category analysis and basically just about any topic under the sun- which can all be done through social listening.
What is social listening?
Social Listening is analysing who your customers are, what their sentiment is, understanding what they need and how to connect with them. It refers to examining conversations, trends and buzz happening around your industry and putting into practice the insights you gain.
As social media is becoming a popular customer service channel, it allows companies to gain a deeper understanding of their customers. Although it’s essential to have a board view, setting specific things you should measure can help you accomplish your goals faster.
Here are 6 aspects of Customer Experience you should measure with Social Listening:
Brand health and reputation
The term ‘brand health’ sounds like another buzzword, but it refers to a collection of metrics that help you understand how your brand is doing. It’s important to note that it’s not how the company is doing but rather your brand.
Managing your online brand reputation is a crucial step to take, if you want to grow your business. Especially due to social media, customers no longer hesitate to call out a brand for any issues on public forums.
A strong and long-lasting brand is vital for your company’s success; it boosts sales, attracts new talent, and free publicity. So, where does your brand stand? Are people aware of it? How do they perceive your brand? What is your brand associated with? How does it perform in comparison to its competitors?
With social listening, you can monitor all the key metrics that will help you gain an in-depth understanding of your brand health and benchmark it against your competitors, it is a reliable resource to help you strategize. Customer satisfaction (CSAT), Customer sentiment and brand awareness are key metrics you should continuously monitor.
Trend and demographic insights
Know your target audience, you may think your product or service is appealing to a particular demographic but know this is only the first step. With the help of Social Listening you can get a bird’s-eye view of your key demographic, this includes gender, age and location.
We all know that the way a brand gains millennials’ attention is vastly different from how they attract older generations, but how did they know to do this?
Social Listening
Through social listening you can observe trends around your industry and brand even before they become a trend. You can examine trends around specific locations and use the data to create content and promotions related to that location.
Customer service
The best way to learn how your customers feel about your brand is by asking your customer service team. They face the brunt of it.
Social Listening will help your business turn from reactive to proactive, which will reap huge rewards for your customer service. A simple example of being proactive is IKEA, you buy their products and have no reason to call their customer service for assistance because they ensure a customer is equipped with exactly what they need.
Think about the most common issue or confusion your customers might have.
How do you know this? By Listening. You can implement all that you learn from Social Listening metrics into your practice. It makes a tremendous impact on customer experience.
Campaign performance tracking
Campaign performance can be tracked before, after and during the campaign period., each serves a different purpose. Analyse brand trends, and customer sentiment across all channels with an Omnichannel tool like our platform, to understand how and where to promote your campaign while maintaining consistency.
Track metrics and sentiment during your campaign to ensure your strategy is effective and if any changes need to be made.
Campaigns can be dissected into several significant evaluations:
- Which demographic of people are talking about your campaign?
- Which platform are your customers talking about your campaign?
- How did the target audience/customers respond to your campaign?
- Perhaps more fundamentally, how persuasive was your campaign in encouraging customers to buy the product or service?
Crisis management
Social Listening is a preventative measure you can take to ensure an emerging issue does not turn into a crisis. Tracking brand mentions and taggings will give you a warning that can help you stay ahead. But to truly be miles ahead of a social media crisis, you should track social sentiment from the get go.
Customer sentiment is a metric that analyses how people feel about your brand. If you notice any sudden change in sentiment, that’s an immediate sign to start looking into your listening streams deeper to understand what people are saying about your brand. An unexpected surge in brand mentions is always worth investigating.
Content Creation
Creating content that is relevant to your industry, while being trendy but also technical can be challenging. With social listening you can learn the ins and outs of creating captivating content by relying on data. Content engagement is a key metric to track for successful customer engagement.
Benchmark your posts against your competitors and see how you can stand out while still being relevant.
Sometimes the most useful products or most needed products do not succeed because they may not have been marketed in the right way. Having a great product or service is only the beginning; managing to deliver it to your customers at all touchpoints in an engaging way is the challenge.
You need to know where, when and how to provide content and by investing in a social listening tool you can achieve that.
Simplify360 is an Omnichannel platform that allows businesses to manage and respond to all their Social Media, Messaging Channels, Review sites and more. With our AI insights, monitor and manage your brand performance. We also provide automated response management for reviews that integrates our AI assistant, ReviewAssistTM.
We are also a Google Partner for Google Business messages.