2.
Analyzing social data can give you insights into unmet market needs and consumer perspectives on product strengths and weaknesses. This, in turn, can help you improve your products or services.
For example, if a company that sells ice skates notices that customers are complaining on social channels about laces breaking, they might decide to try new lace suppliers and select stronger laces.
If you monitor conversations about skating and skating gear and find that people with flat and wide feet have a hard time finding high-quality skates that fit properly, you might decide to release a best-selling model in extended sizes and arch profiles to meet this need.
3. Discover industry and market trends
Social listening can help companies stay up to date with industry trends. For example, a company that makes athletic apparel might monitor social media sites for fitness and wellness trends, notice an increase in discussions about circus arts and aerial fitness, and conclude that aerial fitness will become increasingly popular among its target audiences .
To capitalize on this emerging trend, you could design a series of ads featuring models practicing aerial silks and trapeze, add an “aerial arts” category to the activities section of your online store, or even launch a new line of products designed for aerial fitness.
4. Optimize marketing campaigns
Businesses can use social listening to gain insights canadian consumer email lists into audience demographics, pain points, decision drivers, and media consumption habits, and use this information to support their marketing strategies.
For example, a healthy meal kit company monitoring customer conversations might observe that many customers identify their products as suitable for kids and picky eaters.
This effectively provides the brand with a new market-proven product advantage and a target audience.
To capitalize on this perception, the company could launch a social media campaign highlighting that its meals are kid-friendly, expand its content strategy to include information on how to get young children to eat a healthy diet, and reach out to social media influencers in the parenting and wellness spaces about paid brand partnerships.
4 Tips for Successful Social Listening
Define your goals
Choose relevant keywords
Follow your audience
Use social listening tools
Social listening is a powerful marketing tool. Follow these 4 tips to make the most of your social listening efforts.
1. Define your goals
Social listening can provide huge amounts of data, but if you don’t set parameters, it’s easy to get lost. While it may be interesting that 25% of your customers own tabby cats, for example, it’s not necessarily useful information for most types of non-pet-related businesses.
Start by reviewing your business goals and determining what type of information will help you achieve them. For example, if one of your goals is to increase sales of a new product, your social listening goals might involve collecting the following information:
How often is your product mentioned?
What other products occupy this same market niche?
How often are competing products mentioned?
Why people buy products like yours
The characteristics of people who buy this type of product
If users approve or disapprove of your product
Why users approve or disapprove of your product
The perceived strengths and weaknesses of your product
You can then adjust your product, product positioning, or marketing strategy based on what you find.
2. Choose relevant keywords
Relevant keywords are tailored to your company, industry, and the types of information you hope to find. Here are five common types of keywords and some ways a business might use them.
Your company name. This includes your company name, nicknames, and any common misspellings. For example, Apple might select “Apple,” “Macintosh,” and “Mac.”
Branded product names. This category of keywords includes specific product names, such as “MacBook Pro” or “iPhone.”
Product Types. Keywords in this category include the names of general product types, such as “laptop” or “smartphone.”
Competing brand names and products. Competing companies and products, such as “Chromebook” and “Dell,” fall into this category.
Industry keywords. To get a sense of the conversation around trending topics, track keywords related to industry trends that are relevant to your business niche. In Apple’s case, these could be terms like “5G,” “generative AI,” and “mobile payments.”
3. Follow your audience
Businesses use their target audience demographics to select social media platforms for their social listening strategies. Platforms publish information about user demographics, which you can cross-reference with your target audience information to identify platforms where your target audiences are active and engaged.
Monitoring target audience conversations that aren’t directly related to your brand or industry can also provide audience insights. You can follow brands that are popular with your target audience that aren’t your direct competition; this allows you to stay on top of general trends that impact the people most likely to buy your products.
4. Use social listening tools
Social media listening software helps businesses track keywords, analyze social media data, and generate reports. Some can also help you identify trends or conversations you should track based on information about your company and industry.
The right social listening tools depend on your social listening goals. For example, if you plan to track brand sentiment, you'll need a tool like Brandwatch that uses text analytics to determine sentiment.
Reputology is specifically designed to monitor customer feedback on review sites like Google and Yelp. Hootsuite is an industry standard that works with almost all social media platforms.
If you're just starting out, you may be able to use your social media management software's built-in alert system (if applicable) or a free tool like Google Alerts or TweetDeck.