Love it or hate it, social media has changed both individuals and marketers’ game entirely. Brands now have avenues to communicate with its consumers and at the same time individuals are starting to interact immensely with your products and services. Your audience are now more engaged with you through multiple social networking platforms that are available out there.
If you have a smartphone and access to the internet, you’d probably have some kind of your own personal social networking profiles whether that be a messenger app, a forum account or a Facebook profile. Even if you decided to be low-key and avoid having your own social profiles, you probably have interacted or been exposed with either a brand or a celebrity’s social networking accounts one of these days.
Social media is so widespread that it is crucial that brands tap into social listening in order to gain actionable insights that allows executives to make business decisions.
Though there are endless ways on how companies can benefit from social listening, let’s just start with these three.
Customer Care
Social media has been the preferred method for many to reach out to brands when they want to express some concerns or complaints. Do you recall the a time when you had to wait on the phone for minutes just to speak to a customer service representatives? I think you can safely agree that it is tedious, time consuming and inconvenient. Now with the advancement of smartphones, people are more likely to Tweet, chat or send a private message to businesses. Customers value fast resolution of the problem is vital to good service, making social consumer support invaluable.
Southeast Asia’s leading budget airline AirAsia is quite strong on their social care. Each of their regional branch have their own assigned accounts for marketing materials as well as their customer support accounts. They are proactively searching for mentions of their airline online and collaborate across their cross-functional customer care team to resolve issues solicited by their audiences.
Even when you don’t have a designated social account for customer service, you can use social listening tools to pick up some of the conversations around your products/services. You can be proactive and listen to your audience on what are their thoughts, and then deploy appropriate approaches to address these issues. Customers who are vocal about their experiences with your brands are engaged customers, and might be the voice of many others who are experiencing the same issues. They are a valuable asset to get feedback on your product/service.
This then follows to the next point on why it’s important to listen to your audience.
Crisis Management
The best way to manage any crisis is to prevent them from happening. Of course, some unfortunate events can be beyond your control but there are ways for you to be preemptive to contain any potential crises.
With social listening, you are able to:
- Gauge whether the conversations of your brand is skewed more towards the positive or negative spectrum through sentiment analysis.
- Identify keywords or topics that are often associated with negative sentiments or complaints by your customer.
- Measure the increase or decrease of the number of complaints solicited by your audience, and whether there is a spike in complaints that could potentially lead to impending crisis.
Sentiment analysis is usually available at most social listening platforms. This feature analyses where the conversations around your company are within the positive/negative spectrum. Though not a 100 percent accurate, this allows companies to gauge whether there are more negative mentions pertaining to your brand. The tools are then able to deep dive further to dissect some keywords or topics that are associated with customer complaints, allowing your analysts to find out on what are the possible causes of why people are unhappy with your products and services.
When you identify these anomalies at a relatively early stage, you and your team are able to come up with an array of solutions to prevent the general public from leashing out their discontent, which then could morph into a crisis.
Should unpredictable crisis happened beyond you and your colleagues’ control, social listening still plays a very important part to understand and navigate through numerous complaints addressed by the public. Immediately set up a social listening profile on the keywords to monitor how big is the damage and what are the key underlying issues that is the core of the crisis. With social listening tools you are able to point out outlying topics that could contribute to the crisis, which then can help your team formulate a strategy to curb the crisis from imploding further.
Market Research
Want to understand how your product is being consumed by your audience? Social media is an excellent avenue on finding out the many ways your product is being consumed. Some findings you can take out of listening to your brand includes finding out your target market, identifying the market’s needs, positioning of your brand, singling out your competitors and more.
If you’re a brand thinking to launch a particular product or service into a new region, then you might conduct a research via social listening whether there is a community that needs solution similar to yours. Then through sorting out the findings you can point out existing services that could potentially be your competitor and whether the community is happy with its service. The next steps are picking out some keywords in which there are a few things that the current users are concerned about.
Case Study: Celcom
After obtaining a cellular phone license in a saturated market, Celcom the Malaysian Telecom company used one of the renowned social intelligence suite, Synthesio, to find insights on how they can shape their future digital strategies. Through listening they can identify their potential audience along with its key influencers that they can integrate their marketing campaigns with. Not only that, with their findings they are able to establish a success metric on what their marketing KPIs should be based on. Celcom then established a command centre to continuously listen to what their users’ sentiment towards their brands and maintain a positive brand health. Read more about the case study here.
Social listening insights are nearly insights as it allows brands to continuously listen in on real time insights. Traditional research methods are both exhaustive and time intensive. Brands cannot afford to not be up to date with the current events especially in the age of connectivity. Everything is so dynamic that it’s moving to quick. Relying heavily on research companies might not enable you to keep up to track with anything viral or trending around social. Make sure you have a dedicated team or solution to get you up to speed with recent current events.
Now that you have a slightly better understanding on the necessity of social listening, you’re probably wondering on where you can start.
First of all, you can start to focus your effort on the social networking sites that is worth the most for your type of industry or company. As an example, travel and hospitality industries might skew towards Instagram compared to LinkedIn. Food & Beverage companies might not be big on Twitter but more active on both Facebook and Instagram. Once you identify your primary channels, then you can venture into social listening.
There are plenty of other ways on how to utilize social listening to impact your business activities. Stay tuned for a follow up articles on Bloomr’s page.
