Social listening is one of the most critical tools in your social media campaign.
It contributes to your success as a brand and gives valuable insights about your audience's demographics and their pain points. The insights can help you in crisis management and the discovery of potential sales leads.
With social listening, you can monitor what your audience is discussing. Social listening also helps you track your competitors and what they are doing to succeed. At the same time, you can identify influencers who can be your brand ambassadors. If you’re not yet on the social listening train, now is the best time to do so.
Understand why social listening is critical for your brand in our complete guide:
If you already are, great! In this guide, we’ve listed several tips to help you improve and supercharge the results of your social listening campaign.
Research is the foundation of your social listening campaign. You can’t get things right if you don’t know who your real audience is. Your ideal audience isn't always the same as those who interact with your brand. You can address this challenge through proper research.
Good research starts with a thorough competitor and audience analysis. Audience analysis identifies the exact demographics, locations, and preferred platforms of your followers. Most social media platforms can provide you the details on audience analysis. However, you can’t compare data on preferred platforms within a particular social media platform's insights section. Thankfully, social listening tools like Lucidya provide these insights for your brand.
Competitor analysis, on the other hand, gives you a glimpse of the competition. It provides in-depth details on the current trends, the leaders in your industry, the winners in social media marketing, and the like. Effective research builds a strong foundation for social listening which brings us to the next point.
Now that you’ve done your research, you know your followers and your competitors. The next task is to monitor. Monitoring includes tracking keywords relevant to your business and industry. These keywords include the ones your competitors use.
Aside from monitoring keywords, you can also discover the latest trends, products, and events in your industry which gives you a huge advantage in terms of knowledge. Your competitors most likely have updates on these business matters and you don’t want to fall behind.
Lucidya’s competitor benchmarking tool
Other details you need to monitor are your competitors’ social media handles, hashtags used, and product names. See how your competitors use appropriate handle and product names to market their brand. Hashtag research is also critical in reaching more potential followers who can relate to your brand. They're useful if you're using Twitter and Instagram to connect with your audience.
The benefits of monitoring your competitor include:
Use monitoring tools to get details on the number of mentions, reach rate, and top hashtags in your industry. We also highly recommend detecting negative remarks, which we’ll explain next.
Recommended reading: The Beginner’s 4-Step Process to Performing Effective Competitive Analysis
Negative feedback is part of social media. No matter how carefully laid out your social media listening is, some people will find your content offensive or not to their liking. Some will deliberately create negative mentions to bring you down. You can’t please everybody which is the unfortunate nature of social media.
This negative feedback can affect your brand and trigger crises in worst-case scenarios. But, negativity doesn’t last long. Sometimes, you can ignore these snide comments and go on with your business. Alternatively, you can use social listening tools to know how negative comments are impacting your brand.
Tracking negative mentions in Lucidya
Analyze your social media insights after a damaging incident. How many of your followers have clicked unfollow? Is there a decrease in sales after all the negativity circulating about your brand? How many people have engaged in spreading the wild fire that can potentially damage your brand for the next months?
Answers to these questions will help you come up with proactive solutions. You know when to stop publishing content that raises the sensitivities of your followers and other people.
Social listening gives you insights that you don’t get from traditional data analytics tools. However, these insights don’t benefit your brand unless you take action on them. Instead of using social listening for the sake of it, use it to improve your performance. For example, you can identify product improvements and opportunities for future content ideas based on what your customers are saying.
You can also connect with your audience. Join the conversation or start one. Ensure the conversation is meaningful and resonates with your audience. Don't go all promotional, or you're going to come off as a spammy, non-genuine brand.
Recommended reading: How to Increase Engagement With Twitter Questions
Pay attention to the issues at hand and the emotions at play when talking to customers. If a customer complains about something, look into how you can address the issue. Focus on building relationships instead of hard-selling. If you do this correctly, sales will flow naturally due to increased customer engagement.
Hashtags and keywords are two of the essential elements of your social media post. They can get you to the top searches, but don't stop here.
Look at how your audience/followers engage with your brand. Do they mention your hashtag? Yes, they do, but not all the time. Most of the time, people comment based on the topic, not on the hashtag or keywords.
Don’t rely on keywords as your single source of information. People comment and engage with your content because they like it. The point is to learn how to converse with your audience because you know the topic. This makes social listening natural which improves your performance and customer satisfaction.
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.
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.
