Having conversations and forming connections with consumers is one of the best ways to increase customer retention and drive brand loyalty. Businesses send targeted messages, offer personalized recommendations, and post engaging content as a way of keeping the conversation going. However, brands shouldn’t neglect the other side of the conversation. They need to pay attention to not only what their customers are saying to them, but what everyone is saying about them. While almost all brands regularly respond to reviews, complaints, and requests, just 24% of them use social listening to actively research and understand their customers’ interests, needs, perspectives, and beyond. What is social listening, and why is it so important for nurturing customer loyalty?

What is social listening?

Social listening is the process of monitoring online spaces like social media networks, discussion forums, and review websites to capture quantitative and qualitative data about a specific topic or a number of topics. This could be information about your brand, your competitors, your industry, or relevant world events. Once the collected data has been cleaned and organized, it’s analyzed for trends and insights. The results are then used to gauge business performance and make informed decisions in combination with first-party data.

Companies typically use social monitoring and social listening tools to monitor the conversations revolving around their brand. These tools help marketers keep track of what people are saying about their business, their products, and their competitors. They also look at key items like branded hashtags, industry buzzwords, competitor news, and online mentions of relevant company figures, such as their CEO and board members.

Social listening vs. social monitoring

Social listening and social monitoring are often thought of as interchangeable, but they actually cover slightly different aspects of social analytics. Social monitoring is more of the “what”, while social listening is more of the “why”. In social monitoring, companies track and respond to conversations about their brand. For example, they might reply to comments on their Instagram posts or write responses to their product reviews. They also typically focus on specific campaigns or significant keywords that are of immediate importance (the “what”), rather than collecting a wide variety of potentially relevant data for future use.

In social listening, companies look at the broader scope of their brand, their competitors, and their industry. Rather than simply collecting information, they’re capturing valuable data that can be used to inform their strategies. For example, they might look at what people are saying about their newest marketing campaign, their competitor’s recent product release, or their industry’s latest policy updates. They might also look at past advertising trends, competitor successes and failures, or industry-wide issues. This helps marketers not only gain context about the past and present (the “why”), but also guides their decisions for the future.

Benefits of social listening

Monitors brand health and company reputation

Social listening gives companies an idea of how well they’re doing outside of financial KPIs like return on investment and customer lifetime value. It helps them focus on who’s talking about them, how often they’re being talked about, and what’s being said. For example, are there more positive or negative sentiments about your brand? Is there a large number of high-value customers talking about you, or just a select few people? Businesses should be fully aware of both the quantity and quality of the conversations about them and their offerings.

This is especially important for businesses who have undergone widely-known successes or public-facing issues, such as a popular ad campaign or a defective product. They can potentially correlate online feedback with increases and decreases in sales, followers, and other metrics of significance. When marketers monitor the discussions surrounding their brand, they get a better sense of how people see and feel about them, and can adjust their strategies accordingly.

Provides competitive analysis and industry insights

Social listening gives companies insights into their competition and their industry at large. They can see what people are saying about their competitors and their products, especially in comparison to their own. For example, do shoppers think your product is better-priced? Do they think your competitor’s product is of higher quality? This can also apply to brand sentiment and brand engagement. For example, which company do consumers perceive as more trustworthy? Which company do consumers consider more innovative? Which company do consumers think offers better customer service and a stronger omnichannel experience? This information helps businesses understand how well they’re performing compared to others.

Industry insights provide companies with an overview of their market as a whole, from past setbacks to current successes to future trends. This may include failed regulation changes, recent technological innovations, and up-and-coming brands. Businesses need to look at what companies, shoppers, and influencers are talking about in order to learn and grow with their industry.

Identifies prospective opportunities and potential threats

Social listening helps identify opportunities for growth and expansion. Businesses should monitor conversations to find gaps in the market they can fill or content they can make that consumers are looking for. Marketers might discover influencers that can become powerful brand advocates or find niche discussion forums where they can better connect with their customers. Companies can also use social listening to identify and nurture leads by engaging with them and sending them personalized offers, which encourages customer loyalty.

Social listening can also identify potential challenges and issues. For example, are people experiencing communication problems when talking to your customer support? Are shoppers having trouble finding your products in stores? This can also apply to issues outside of your own company. Social listening can help brands learn about new products on the market that may rival their own, or sociopolitical issues that may affect things like their supply chain management or business strategies.

Improves campaign performance and customer engagement

Social listening gives brands an idea of how well their marketing campaigns are doing and what can be improved. If you don’t see a notable increase in sales and brand engagement, your marketing efforts may not be reaching the right audience and will need further adjustments. If your competitors are gaining more traffic from shoppers, you might want to look at what they did well so you can incorporate it into your next campaign.

While quantitative metrics like clickthrough rates and conversions are a strong indicator of customer satisfaction, qualitative knowledge helps companies improve their customer retention and customer loyalty. For example, if consumers are talking about their favorite ad campaigns or products, brands can post about their own to keep the conversation going. If users are posting product photos and videos, brands can leave comments and reshare them on their own feed. Marketers should remember that customer service isn’t social listening - responding to complaints on Twitter or answering basic questions on your website is customer support, not customer engagement.

Challenges of social listening

Lack of meaningful objectives and actionable insights

Some marketers struggle to find significant ways to use social listening as a way of collecting and leveraging valuable data. Unlike financial metrics or marketing KPIs, it can be difficult to determine your social listening goals. For example, how do you qualify the value of the conversations you’re listening to? How do you take discussions about your latest product release or newest brand partnership and turn them into a business strategy? Most importantly, how do you determine where, when, and how you’re listening?

Before you jump online to see if people are talking about your company, set some actionable goals. Maybe you want to see how many people mention your brand on Twitter over the course of a week, or monitor the amount of user-generated content that people post with your branded hashtag in a month. From there, the information you’ve gathered can help you better engage with your customers and understand their needs.

Potential for bias, noise, and misinformation

When listening to conversations on social media, discussion forums, and other online spaces, marketers need to be careful about fake or incorrect information. Spam, internet “trolls”, and malicious bots often fill social networks and comment sections with noise, making it hard to find what people are actually talking about. They may also spread false information about your brand and products specifically.

To counteract this, marketers should invest time and resources into cleaning and organizing their social listening data to ensure they’re only gaining insights from relevant and accurate information. They should also take the time to disprove harmful rumors and moderate the conversations surrounding their brand without being overly critical or controlling. If they’re too heavy-handed, people may feel discouraged from talking about their brand in the first place.

Social listening best practices

Track your keywords, topics, and conversations

It’s not enough for companies to set up news alerts and track a few hashtags. They should expand their reach to just about everything that might affect them and their performance. What are people’s opinions on your business decisions and ad campaigns? How are your competitors performing from a financial, marketing, and customer perspective? What are the biggest topics, innovations, and challenges in your industry as a whole? Marketers should collect a wide range of information while understanding that their areas of focus will change and evolve over time.

Connect with brand advocates and influencers

As mentioned previously, social listening is a great way to find prospective opportunities for reach and growth. Monitoring online spaces helps businesses find and connect with influencers and potential brand advocates. If you find someone with an online presence that consistently talks about your brand, you could send them exclusive deals, free merchandise, or even offer to form a business relationship with them. Their followers may become customers, potentially forming a brand community built on shared interests and customer loyalty.

Incorporate competitor performance and customer feedback

Not only should businesses learn from their own successes and failures, but they should also look to those of their competitors as well. For example, what makes their ads so popular with shoppers? Why was their recent product release criticized by consumers? Companies need to analyze their competitors’ failures to avoid making the same mistakes. They also need to regularly leverage both positive and negative customer feedback. For example, if there are comments about your products being popular with a certain age group or about your packaging being difficult to open, that information can be brought to your next strategy meeting.

Leverage relevant metrics and first-party data

Social listening and first-party data can give each other additional context. For example, if you see significant increases in website visitors, you might find out that an influencer recently talked about your brand. If you see consumers praising a new competing product, you may be able to anticipate an upcoming decline in revenue. The combination of social listening and first-party data can also be used to guide strategic business decisions, such as forming a partnership with the influencer to further increase brand awareness or finding ways to make your product better before your new competition negatively affects your sales.

Using first-party data in your social listening strategies

Social listening is a crucial part of understanding your customers and gaining insights into your competitors and industry. When used in tandem with first-party data, the information you collect can help develop well-rounded and well-informed strategies for your business and marketing efforts. Whether it’s about your latest ad campaign, your newest product release, or your recent business partnership, social listening and first-party data can give you a complete picture of your customers and industry from all angles.

3 tier logic’s PLATFORM³ helps brands create programs like gift with purchase promotions, sweepstakes, loyalty programs, and more in order to drive customer loyalty and capture valuable first-party data. Modules like Dynamic Messaging and Data Capture & Analytics provide marketers with the tools they need to strengthen their connection with their customers and make informed business decisions. To learn more, book a demo with our team today.

Complete Guide to Social Listening