The advantages of social media listening for consumer brands

Social listening for consumer brands

In a dynamic marketplace, brands need to be hyper-responsive to consumer demands to stay relevant. They have to respond to fast-changing consumer behaviors and fluctuations in demand, which makes swift access to consumer insights crucial. Such insights can help quickly close customer feedback loops, fine-tune communications to increase consumer relevance and engagement, and make thoughtful improvements in products and services.

Relying on conventional data sources alone can leave out crucial information on the table and extend lead times. Consider including social media as a data source to overcome these challenges. Through social listening, consumer brands can drive better marketing results in the 21st century. Here’s how.

Analyzing brand perception and awareness

Social media listening can offer valuable insight into consumer brand perceptions. User-generated content contains signals such as brand awareness, consumer sentiment, brand associations, and relative perception versus your competition. Social listening helps gather and separate these signals from the noise. This data, when supplemented with primary market research can provide a holistic picture of how customers perceive your brand.

Brand perception signals you can track using social listening:

  • How often do consumers mention my brand/product? 
  • How often do consumers mention my brand/product when talking about a related category?
  • Is the sentiment of those mentions positive or negative?
  • What are the characteristics of the people who mention my brand most frequently?
  • What are the most talked-about features/attributes of my brand/products?
  • Is the sentiment for those features/attributes positive or negative?
  • What other brands get mentioned alongside mine?

Reputation management

Companies are well aware of the need to monitor and maintain a positive brand reputation. Negative PR or content that’s inappropriate needs to be handled carefully before it gets out of hand. With social media now becoming the go-to place for consumers to speak their minds about brands, monitoring your brand mentions on all social media platforms is imperative for effective crisis management. But for firms that have a wide consumer base, doing this manually can get complicated. That’s where social listening tools help.

By employing social listening tools, companies can monitor brand mentions in real-time and take timely action to control the situation. In most cases, knowing how to handle a negative post or comment the right way is what makes reputation management truly effective. Netscribes, therefore, combines the power of social media listening tools and experienced crisis managers to help brands manage their online reputation successfully.              

Gathering feedback for product development

Social media listening provides businesses with direct access to customer opinion and feedback. Procter and Gamble did this though a community-based initiative called Super Savvy Me. The online portal encouraged free product trials and access to quality tips from reputed health and beauty bloggers in return for their valuable reviews and opinions.    

Similarly, Skype reintroduced their ‘away’ feature through a Twitter announcement and got some mixed reactions. Businesses that explore such social listening possibilities are not only better equipped to augment their offerings but will also see long-term value through varied customer perspectives. Monitoring product reviews, comments, both about your brand and your competitors are another way to uncover and address pertinent product gaps.

While surveys are one of the most common ways to test a product in the development stage, social media affords brands a much larger sounding board. The unfiltered nature of these conversations arms you with insights into aspects you may have missed or overlooked but are actually key sales drivers.

Influencer identification and performance measurement

Social media influencer marketing has grown dramatically with the insatiable demand for online content. According to Business Insider, brands are set to spend up to $15 billion on influencer marketing by 2022. But how much of this spend is translating into business results?  Social listening can help answer this question.

To know whether your influencer marketing initiatives are working, you need answers to questions such as:

  • How efficiently is the influencer promoting our brand?
  • How often does the influencer publish content associated with our brand?
  • Is the influencer’s follower base growing or declining?
  • How do we measure engagement garnered by their posts?
  • Does their compensation match the value they deliver?

Answering these questions calls for tracking and evaluation at a micro-level. However, determining the right metrics, and sifting through massive amounts of data on each influencer activity across various social media platforms can be daunting. Social media listening combined with analytics can unlock these insights.

Here’s how an energy drink brand derived greater value from their influencer marketing spend using social listening.

As social media becomes an intrinsic part of our lives, marketers need to utilize this rich source of consumer data to understand their changing needs and behavior. We understand that social listening platforms alone cannot deliver the insights you need. That’s why brands, both B2C and B2B, partner with us to unlock actionable insights from social media data.

Are you looking to augment your consumer insights by including social media data? We can help. Contact us to learn more.

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