How To Monitor Your Brand Reputation Online (With Social Listening)
Creating an impactful presence online is the most important ROI on all the time, money and effort that you put into your social media strategy. But it is very important that you get the true picture and gain in-depth insight into what people think about your brand and products.
Social media marketing does not happen in a vacuum. Platforms are ripe with competition and users are constantly interacting. There are so many conversations happening on these platforms around your brand and other subjects relevant to your brand.
Cutting through all the noise on social media to capture the audience’s opinion is not easy. Social media offers a platform for users to discover, discuss and know more about different brands. Mining through all the conversations manually is an almost impossible, inconvenient task.
In fact, not all conversations and mentions about your brand may be tagged. But, every conversation and mention has something to learn from. How many people are talking about your brand? What are people saying about your brand? Are there any complaints or poor feedback? How can you improve the experience for your audience? Notice any red flags?
Monitoring your brand reputation on social media, where discussions and conversations are constantly happening is, crucial for your business. This is why you need a social listening tool. Social listening allows you to monitor all the conversations around your brand or specific hashtags or keywords relevant to your brand.
Let’s see how social listening can dig deeper into important conversations & mentions, and in the process, help you establish an affirmative brand reputation online.
Social Listening
Social listening is all about capturing the overall picture of your brand, industry, competitors, and subjects associated with your brand. Social listening goes beyond just monitoring conversations. It helps you gain an insight into what actions you can take in response to the data gathered.
You often focus on metrics such as engagement, reach, follower growth and CPCs when it comes to building a social media strategy. Data and numbers rule your business strategy, almost entirely. You often overlook the qualitative aspects of all the conversations happening around your brand.
This is where social listening comes into play. Social listening helps you capture the total number of mentions as well as the audience sentiment for your brand on social media.
So, now let’s dig into how you can monitor your brand reputation with social listening.
Monitoring Brand Reputation With Social Listening
All conversations around your brand collectively make for an important linchpin impacting your brand reputation online. As such, you need a reliable social listening tool to listen to all audience conversations and thereby capture overall audience sentiment.
Unbox Social offers social listening as a part of its suite of features. Let’s see how you can leverage your social listening data to capture your brand reputation with Unbox Social.
If you want to listen to audience conversations, you first need to set up a query. You can monitor your brand name or a relevant keyword or hashtag and track all conversations and mentions around it.
Once you have entered your query keyword, the tool will direct you to an overview of all the conversations. Here’s a snapshot.
Here, you will see the summary of all the data on conversations around your keyword.
An important aspect of capturing your brand reputation online is to measure the volume of conversations happening around your brand. The tool tracks the total number of conversations around your brand as well as the reach and interactions around those conversations. After all, it is important to know how many conversations are happening around your brand as well as the reach and engagement on those conversations.
When capturing your brand reputation, one of the first things to do is, tracking these numbers. Before you dig deeper into the qualitative data for your brand, you need to look at the quantitative data. To put it simply, it helps put all the qualitative data into perspective.
The diversity of content around the given keyword depicts the types of conversations. How varied are the different mentions around your brand? Are there more photos or videos? Which is the most prominent conversation type amongst all the conversations?
These insights could help inform your content marketing strategy.
The mention status graph places your overall keyword mentions along the graph of hot and cold indicating how trending the keyword is. This is an integral part of measuring your brand reputation.
If your keyword is trending, it means many people are talking about your brand. But unless you know the content of all the conversations, it is difficult to monitor brand reputation. Social listening makes the job easier for you. With social listening, you can get a better understanding of your brand reputation.
Social listening by Unbox Social helps conduct the sentiment analysis for your keyword. So, a large volume of conversations alone does not reflect your brand reputation. Studying the volume of conversations along with an overall audience sentiment analysis provides you with a bigger picture.
Audience sentiment is reflected as positive, negative or neutral. Depending upon the nature of the conversation, the AI-powered tool identifies the sentiment behind it.
Perhaps, the most important indicator of your online brand reputation is the audience sentiment. A positive audience sentiment is great for your brand. The negative sentiment, on the other hand, maybe a sign of a red flag. If a majority of your conversations depict a neutral sentiment, you may want to come up with a strategy to steer them towards a more affirmative sentiment.
To take it a step further, you can also look into the top content creators talking about your brand The power of peer reviews cannot be underestimated, and the content that Influencers put out around your brand is crucial to your brand image. The social listening tool by Unbox Social provides you with a snapshot of your most engaging post.
The tool gives your brand/keyword mentions an overall score on a scale of 1–10. The mention score is an overall score indicative of the brand sentiment, engagement, reach and status of all the conversations surrounding your keyword.
Further, look into individual conversations along with insights on every conversation.This will help you understand what kind of conversations are happening around your keyword and also provide you with a better context on each mention.
Gain an insight into every conversation and look at the engagement metrics as well as qualitative metrics including the mention score and sentiment analysis. With access to all these insights around the conversations, you are better equipped at understanding audience opinion. Thereby, you can form a clearer idea about your brand reputation on social media.
Now, let’s see how you can use social listening data to capture and enhance brand reputation.
Putting Social Listening Data Into Perspective
Social listening data, as you know by now, provides vital insights for your brand, to help you enhance your brand reputation.
But, how do you use this data to derive a smart, actionable strategy for your brand?
Here’s how you can put all your social listening data into perspective and use it to build an effective strategy for your brand:
Frame A Well-Informed Social Media Content Strategy
Social listening insights can be valuable for your social media content strategy. Unbox Social with its social listening feature helps provide you context on your content.
A snapshot of a few conversations helps you understand what people are talking about. You can draw out new content ideas from these conversations.
Take cues from audience conversations to create content for your brand. When you know what your audience is talking about, you can frame a well-informed strategy for creation of content.
You can look at the total interactions generated around your keyword, as well.
Spot The Red Flags
Use social listening data to spot any potential threats to your brand reputation on social media. Even a single negative feedback can leave a bad impression on your audience. Pointing out possible red flags can help you steer clear from PR crises.
Look at the overall audience sentiment to understand whether your brand is attracting a positive, negative or neutral sentiment.
To get a clearer picture, you can gather data on the day-wise sentiment for your brand.
Find Brand Advocates
We can’t help but emphasize the importance of peer reviews. These peer reviews have the power to influence audience and help establish trust in your brand.
With the social listening feature, you can easily find the top content creators for your brand. Using this intelligence, you can find Influencers to collaborate with, and run fruitful Influencer marketing campaigns.
At the same time, you can find your most engaging posts along with details of the creator (s). You can identify brand advocates and run an effective brand advocacy program, that helps you enhance your brand reputation.
SUMMING IT UP
Social listening is the need of the hour, especially given that the audience is actively interacting on social media. Taking cues from audience interactions can help you frame fool-proof strategies for your brand and help establish an affirmative brand image.
Social listening can help you in monitoring and optimizing your brand reputation by capturing-
- Audience response to your content
- Spotting any possible negative sentiments
- Identifying brand advocates and running effective brand advocacy programs
Originally published at https://www.unboxsocial.com on September 10, 2019.
