Using social listening to manage your brand reputation

“When people talk, listen completely. Most people never listen.” ― Ernest Hemingway

Listening is a skill of critical significance by which we have a sense of understanding, assessing and responding to what we hear. It is an active process and crucial at every stage of our lives. For children, listening is instrumental in the development of language and speaking skills. Likewise, social listening is an opportunity for brands to improve customer support and drive innovation.

With over 3.5 billion Google searches happening every day, the volume of information out there is immense. Deciphering this information is essential for delivering a satisfying customer experience.

Social listening is the tracking and monitoring of specific keywords, phrases and words to leverage that information for identifying customer pain points & deliver relevant content.

Listening vs Monitoring

So, what’s the difference between Social Listening and monitoring? Well, the line between the two may seem a little blurry.

While monitoring is similar to reading a particular chapter, listening is reading the entire book.

Monitoring is a step to ensure you capture every brand mention. It is about tracking the mentions, to help you know what’s happening in the social media world.

On the other hand, the key to listening is identifying and analyzing the relevant part of a social conversation. Understanding people’s reaction, sentiment analysis, and behavior pattern makes listening an art.

Monitoring makes up a vital part of listening, as all the metrics need to be recorded for proper analysis and interpretation. These terms are often used synonymously with each other.   

Tracking conversations

With an array of social channels today, customers can share their feedback, experiences, and complaints regarding a brand directly or anonymously.

What happens when someone complaints about your product’s usability? Do you just sit back and wait for things to get well all by itself?

Well you need to strike while the iron is hot. With listening framework in place you can resolve queries, spark new conversations, identify influencers and build trust around your brand. If you wish to excel at striking a cord with your audience, the first thing you need to excel is at social listening.  

Tools like Hootsuite, Buzzsumo, Epicbeat, Mention and Sprout Social can help you get started.

Building a Strategy

Every strategy is aimed at achieving a goal or aim. Before you start out to monitor keywords, figuring out goals is essential.

Are you looking to:

• Improve Customer Service
• Identify Influencers in your niche
• Keep a check on a specific keyword or phrase
• Monitor an industry specific event

take a closer look at each of these.

1. Improve Customer Service

‘It takes many good deeds to build a good reputation, and only one bad one to lose it.’ – Benjamin Franklin

Complaints can be tough to handle.  Working on a listening strategy keeping customers in mind is an opportunity to be more customer centric. The approach will help you solve problems of existing customers while gaining new ones.

2. Identify Influencers in your niche

Influencers have the ability to impact the tastes & opinions of your target audience. Thanks to their social media following, you get access to a larger audience.  As these individuals hold authority, identifying these individuals is important, approach them to find out how they can help address your specific audience.  

3. Keep a check on specific keyword or phrase

People may have a lot to say about your brand, don’t let those go mentions be unheard. You can monitor specific keywords and phrases to know when you are mentioned.

For example, if you track the phrase ‘Machine XYZ working system’, you can address any customer query related to it. Setting up keyword tracking, will help you solve queries and build brand loyalty.  

4. Monitor an industry specific event

With a major event coming up, it can be a real chance to focus the marketing initiatives to achieve your goals. These events may trigger a way to connect with your audience.  Monitoring events to create content for delighting and engaging your audience is the way to go.  

An event like the recently held US Presidential Elections, has been leveraged by a number of brands like Buzzfeed to incite reactions from its audience.

Solve problems

• Identify Problems

As you monitor keywords which address customer problems, you can reach out to them and resolve their queries, which will in turn help you will help benefit.

• Know about the community

It is also essential to know where you potential customers interact. Join right in and track the conversations to know more about where the community hangs out.

• Product feedback

Get early feedback and initiate changes accordingly for the perfect product.  

• Nurture Transparency

Respond directly to your customer’s queries, look for opportunities to turn them into evangelists and yeah, show them you too are a human!

Listen, Analyze, Implement, and Repeat. Perfect yourself with social listening, to know about your brand’s perception to benefit your brand as a whole.