It boosts customer engagement by gaining insights into demographics and pain points that you don’t get with standard social media tools. However, there are things you need to do and mistakes you should avoid.
Here are the best practices and common mistakes to keep in mind of when using social listening.
Social monitoring and social listening are two different processes. These processes require different approaches to work to your advantage.
Social monitoring is gathering data about the past. It focuses on the details. An example is knowing how many consumers tag your brand in their messages.
Monitoring vs. listening
On the other hand, social listening is all about the future and the creation of strategies. It involves the interpretation of insights and emerging trends, so your brand can be part of the current conversation.
In a social media campaign, you need to differentiate these two to avoid redundancy in data and strategies.
Social media data is overwhelming. Every day, thousands of keywords related to your business are available for data extraction. You can use these in promoting your business or in social listening, but using all of them can become counterproductive.
You might not be able to identify immediate problems that need solutions. To avoid this, reduce the social media data you generate. Select the keywords and hashtags that directly relate to the issues you can solve.
Knowing what problems are worth solving can save you time. You know what conversations to look for through your social media page. This leads you to the next do's in social listening.
Recommended reading: How to Supercharge Your Social Listening: 5 Ways to Improve Your Brand's Social Listening Campaigns
Fast response is a crucial aspect of social media listening. Your consumers expect real-time responses. Since you defined the problems to monitor, you can solve them quickly.
The question is: how quick is real-time? There's no standard answer because you have to consider a lot of factors. These factors could include time zone, industry, and the urgency of the issues. The important thing is to answer your consumers immediately when they know you’re online.
What customers want from brands (Image Source)
Your answer to these issues doesn't have to be perfect, but it shouldn't place you in a compromising way. The point is never to make promises you can't deliver when you respond to your consumers.
Know the latest trends and information related to your industry. Why? Because of these three reasons.
When you have an idea of the latest news and trends, you can join conversations important to your consumers. By doing this, your consumers feel you listen to them and the community.
Another critical aspect is to stay connected with influencers in your industry. These influencers are potential partners and can promote your brand. Collaborate with them to increase your reach to consumers.
Recommended reading: Get Relevant Industry News In One Click: Lucidya's Revamped Newsletter Reports
Empathy is about understanding your consumer’s feelings. It's about knowing their exact sentiments about something important.
You know how to dig deeper if the conversation is negative. Identify the pain points that your audience is trying to tell you. This is the hardest part because you don’t want to aggravate a negative situation by saying the wrong things.
You should also empathize even if your audience posts positive conversations about you. Use these conversations for future strategy campaigns.
Recommended reading: 5 Things You Must Know About Your Customers
Conversations outside your circle are equally important. Inside your circle means consumers who mention your brand directly.
Thus, we’re talking about the consumers who don’t mention or misspell your brand. These consumers also include those who use shortened or abbreviated versions of your brand.
Why is it important? Because you can include them in your future campaign. Increase your reach even to those outside your circle.
Survival in the business world is keeping up with the competition. When you don't watch the competition, you’re going to lose your edge. You lose connection with what others are doing in your industry.
Tracking the competition takes a few hours a day. These few hours daily will make a difference in your social media campaign. With the use of social listening tools, you can tweak your strategy. You get insights into what consumers are talking about your competitor.
Lucidya’s competitor benchmarking tool
Learn from the mistakes of your competition. Discover the positive and negative sides of these mistakes.
Recommended reading: The Beginner’s 4-Step Process to Performing Effective Competitive Analysis
Negative reviews are normal for business. But what isn’t normal is when you disregard these negative comments about you and your brand.
Unfortunately, bad news travels faster than positive reviews. If you want to protect your brand, take the time to address these negative conversations.
Consumers can recognize your efforts in dealing with negative comments. This action tells them you care about your users.
Recommended reading: How to Avoid PR Disasters and Mistakes with Social Listening
Filters are integrated into search tools. If you don't use these filters, you'll get irrelevant data.
You can use negative keywords, keywords format, or blacklisting to narrow down your search results. Other ways to filter is to use country-specific keywords, geotagging, dates and even languages used.
Planning might be a tedious stage of your social media listening. But, going through every aspect of your campaign can save time and wasted efforts.
If you don’t have a concrete plan, you don’t know what information is needed for monitoring. You don’t have specific keywords to use. Eventually, these don’t-know-anything circumstances can lead to mistakes and negative feedback.
These mistakes and negative reviews can ruin your brand. It's hard to patch things up on social media. So, stop tinkering about how to go about your social listening and put those thoughts into paper.
Social media analytics are there for your convenience. If you ignore these data, it’s like getting into war blindfolded. So, start tracking your analytics and focus on the most critical metrics for your brand. These metrics include sentiments, reach, mentions, engagements, influence, among others.
If you’ve been ignoring your analytics for months, it’s time to start now. Get familiar with the analytics tools and learn how your consumers react to your brand.
Recommended reading: How to Plan the Perfect Measurement Strategy for Your Social Media Campaigns
Again, speed is critical in social listening and crisis management. If you don’t react fast, the fire will rage. By the time you have time to handle things, your reputation is in ruins.
The solution is to put someone in charge of monitoring the campaign. Delegate the responsibility and can focus on other essentials related to your brand. This brand crisis management should also be part of your social media planning.
The person responsible for responding to your consumers doesn't have to stay in front of his or her desk all day. Use push notifications through email or alerts to identify critical situations.
Social listening is a must-have for brands that want to take their social listening performance to the next level. Many successful agencies have used Lucidya’s social listening tool to empower their business and increase their sales.
Now is the best time for your brand to do the same.
Request for a free demo of Lucidya today to start benefiting from social media listening.
Lucidya is an AI-powered social media listening tool that empowers companies with in-depth, never-before-seen customer insights. Lucidya’s best-in-class text analysis engine also provides powerful sentiment analysis for conversations in English and all Arabic dialects including Najdi, Hijazi, Levantine, and many more.
With Lucidya, businesses can build profitable products, boost customer satisfaction, execute successful campaigns, and close more sales thanks to our extensive list of social media listening features.
