Social media gives brands a fantastic opportunity to create a sound reputation; it is always buzzing with ideas, thoughts and opinions from people across the globe. The flipside of social media is that sometimes it can create buzz for the wrong reasons and put the brand reputation at risk. When such situations arise, brands need to respond and salvage the situation. Social listening is vital to detect such cases early on in the conversation and take corrective action.
Social listening is about tracking mentions of specific words, phrases queries across social media platforms; social listening also comes in handy to follow comments relating to competitors, industry, and campaign hashtags. Social listening is an integral part of the brand’s online reputation management digital marketing companies like Adaptify specialize in online reputation management.
1. Create A Plan for Social Listening Before Putting It into Action
Have a plan for social listening. Try to find answers to questions like why you want to monitor and what you want to watch. Define social media listening goals and what the brand intends on achieving. Develop robust use cases for social media listening plan. It is also wise to finalize the Standard Operating Procedures (SOPs)for various touchpoints and stakeholders.
2.Invest in A Social Listening Tool to Suit Your Requirements
While social listening is essential, it is impossible to keep track of social mentions across various news and blogs. Thankfully, there are advanced social monitoring tools that will track your brand mentions and even analyze data that could reveal your brand’s wealth of information. Choose a social listening tool to suit your requirement and budget. For this purpose if you buy Instagram followers will be helpful.
3. Carefully Select Your Keywords
Customers will often not be straightforward in mentioning the brand name while making a negative comment, selecting all relevant keywords and not just the brand name. It is useful to track competitor mentions and industry updates to generalize the consumers’ sentiment prevailing. Careful choice of keywords will go a long way in capturing all relevant information.
4. Actively Listen to Your Audience
Gain insights about where the audience is talking about the brand and what they are talking about. More comprehensive the range, the better it is. Different channels will speak differently about the brand this knowledge will help define how the brand will communicate on various media. It will also help device a robust response strategy.
5. Promptly Reply to All Positive as Well as Negative Comments
Social media is buzzing with activity at all times; it pays to have an “always-on-strategy” to respond to the customers. When it is not feasible to respond, it is better to frame an auto-response. A smartly worded auto-response to acknowledge the customer and convey when you can attend to the query is essential. All messages, positive and negative, need to be responded to for the neutral comments, you may choose not to respond.
6. Collaborate with All the Stakeholders of The Customers
Social listening generates useful insights it is essential to communicate learnings to various departments. Data, coupled with action, will help deliver a better customer service experience it helps develop proactive strategies to engage with the customers, thereby enhancing brand image and brand loyalty. Social listening aids a customer-centric approach and, if taken well, will give the brand an edge over the competitors.
Conclusion
Social listening is an extensive analysis of the audience and how they feel about your brand, competition, and the entire industry. Social listening will generate useful data about the audience, but the purpose of social listening is not to create data. The audience feedback could be the basis of better product innovation, content creation and PR activities. The data should be understood and used to drive positive changes to give a better customer experience.
Barry Lachey is a Professional Editor at Zobuz. Previously He has also worked for Moxly Sports and Network Resources “Joe Joe.” He is a graduate of the Kings College at the University of Thames Valley London. You can reach Barry via email or by phone.
