How to Effectively USE Social Listening to Transform your Brand?

Have you ever wondered what your customers are saying about your business online? Huh? You haven't? Well, must be nice for the rest of us. Let's imagine you're at a party surrounded by people having conversations about you, what they like, what they don't like, and most importantly, what they wish you'd do better. The catch? You can't hear any of it. This is what it feels like when you're not leveraging social listening for your business. It can lead to customer churn and missed opportunities to elevate your brand. In this video, I'm going to break down what social listening is, how to best use it, and what mistakes to avoid. But this is just a sneak peek into what you can learn in our full course. If you're looking to take your social media skills to the next level, click the link in the description below for our free Social Media Certification course. It's designed to provide you with comprehensive knowledge, practical skills and an industry recognized certification. All for free. Just giving it away? What's that? You want to take it? Yeah. Well, you had your chance. Right now you just get to sit here and listen to me tell the good people about social Listening. Social listening is a digital strategy that focuses on tracking, analyzing and engaging with conversations about your brand across social media platforms. It's like being a fly on the wall or a cow on the couch where people are talking about your brand. It involves three key areas. Listening is about gaining insights from the broader conversation around brand mentions, customer feedb, and industry trends. So if I'm a snack company called Jamal's Jumpin Jellybeans, I track broad discussions about healthy eating trends and feedbacks on snacks across social media. However, social monitoring allows for a more narrow focus towards campaigns or keywords directly related to your products or customers. So my company would closely monitor specific hashtags or mentions related to the latest marketing campaign for a new snack. Product engagement involves participating in these conversations, responding to comments or questions, and fostering a relationship with your audience. When it comes to your business, social listening can help you with reputation management, audience engagement, customer feedback, keeping track of competitors, and product upgrades. Here are some tips on how to best do it. Number one Leverage Multiple Social Platforms One of the key elements of effective social listening is not limiting yourself to one platform. Different demographics and audiences might favor different social media sites. Leveraging multiple platforms ensures you get a broad perspective of what's being said about your brand. With a tool like HubSpot social media software, it's super easy. Go to Marketing Social Accounts. Click on Connect Account to Add and sync all of your social media accounts. This saves you time by consolidating all of your social media pages into one dashboard, allowing you to keep up with with notifications without the risk of forgetting any of your platforms or constantly having to switch between them. Number two Monitor Conversations Keeping an eye on online conversations about your brand is crucial for managing your reputation, addressing customer concerns, and understanding your audience's needs. Google Alerts can help you keep track of those conversations and customers effortlessly. Essentially, anytime your brand or product is mentioned, you'll get a notification. Just enter the brand or product name you want to monitor in the Create an Alert about box. Use quotation marks around the name if it's more than one word to ensure you'll get alerts when the words appear together in that order. Click on Show Options to customize your alert. Here you can adjust how often you get alerts sources you want to monitor News Blogs, Web Video books Discussions Language and region to filter results by language and region of interest, how many results you want to see only the best results or all results and delivery options you can choose to deliver the alerts to your email or or RSS feed. After setting your preferences, just click Create Alert. Google Alerts will now send notifications to your email whenever your brand or product name is mentioned online based on the preferences you just set. Number three Leverage Social Conversations for Product Development now hold up. Didn't I just tell you how to do this in the last tip with Monitoring Conversations? No, this is a little more targeted than simply monitoring conversations. The aim here is to specifically understand customers, pain points and unmet needs in relation to your product. An easy hack to get a peek at what people think of your product is to use a tool like Review Trackers. Once you have everything set up in your account, Review Trackers will start tracking reviews of your business across the Internet. All these reviews will be displayed on your review tracker's dashboard. By paying attention to negative sentiment, you can gain invaluable insights that you should use for shaping your strategy and product development. With that in mind, let's take a look at a company that put these social listening tips into practice and saw some great results. In 2015, Netflix noticed that many of its viewers were posting about falling asleep while watching something on their platform. They complained about missing pivotal episodes and waking up to spoilers. In response, Netflix developed Netflix Socks, a product that pauses the content when the user starts to doze off. Because we all know what can happen. Episode one turns into Episode three, which turns into Episode eight, which turns into sleeping through episode ten. I think we've all been there. Never miss a moment of your favorite shows by following what their customers were talking about, Netflix was able to literally handcraft their product to what their customers needed. They even saved money by not mass producing the socks themselves, but instead provided the knitting patterns and technical instructions for users to make their own. This clever move not only solved a viral customer pain point, but also boosted Netflix's brand reputation as one that truly listens. Knowing the nature and source of conversations about your brand paves the way for what comes next. Effective Audience Engagement Here are a few ways to enhance your brand Customer Dialogue Once you know who you're talking to, respond promptly. 79% of customers expect a response to their social media posts within 24 hours. Quick responses to customer questions or complaints can prevent issues from escalating and demonstrate your commitment to customer service. It shows your customers that you value their time and feedback. A simple rule of thumb is to carve out a specific time each day to respond to comments and messages. This can help ensure that no customer feedback gets overlooked. What about a chatbot? Hey, raise your hand next time, buddy. Nice. So great suggestion. And while adding a chatbot to your site definitely helps in responding to common questions, it lacks the needed personalization for genuine engagement. This leads us to the next tip. Don't do canned responses. Avoid using generic responses. Instead, tailor your replies to the specific feedback or question at hand, showing that you've read and understood the customer's concern. For example, let's say someone isn't happy with your product and leaves a comment, I'm really frustrated my new shoes broke after just one week. We're sorry to hear that you're not happy. We strive to provide high quality products to all our customers. Thanks for your feedback. If we take a look at our review response template, which you can find in the description, it clearly lays out the rules to engagement here. Begin with an apology, acknowledge the results, and include next steps, as well as thank the viewer. So let's begin with hi George. Really sorry to hear about your experiences with our shoes. This is certainly not the level of quality we aim to deliver. We'd like to make it right. Can you please DM us with more details so we can assist you with a replacement or a refund? A personalized response makes your customers feel valued and heard. For inspiration or ready to customize replies, our review response template gives you the perfect balance between efficiency and personalization. Now that you understand what people are saying about your brand, consider this what if you can find out what the customer dislikes about other brands and leverage that knowledge to offer your own solutions. This tactic of gaining a competitive edge is an important focus in our course. For now, let's delve into the basics. Evaluate their engagement look at how your competitors are interacting with their audience. Are they actively responding to comments and questions? This can give you an idea of their customer service practices and areas you can improve on. Set aside time to check in on your competitors social media pages and look at their comments. Note their response time and the tone of their interactions. Analyze their content what kind of content are they posting? How often? Which posts get the most engagement? Understanding this can help you tailor your own content strategy. BuzzSumo is perfect for this job. It can deeply analyze your competitors content performance. With it, you can look at their most popular posts to try to understand why those posts are resonating with their audience. Once you're logged in, go to Content Analyzer. Put your competitor's website domain into the search bar. BuzzSumo will then provide a list of the most shared content from that domain across social platforms. Again, this allows you to see which articles or posts have had the most engagement. Dive in deep and figure out why. Next up, identify their weaknesses. Look for areas where your competitors are falling short. Whether it's in customer service, product quality or elsewhere, these could present opportunities for your brand to stand out. A great hack is to actively seek out customer reviews of your competitors on platforms like Google Reviews and Yelp. Look for common complaints or criticisms that you can address in your own business to provide a better experience. So if I'm an electronics company and see that my direct competitor gets a poor review, I can use that to inform my strategy. I could build a product that doesn't overheat, prioritizes long battery life, and provide excellent customer service to outperform that. The power of social listening isn't just about being a fly on the wall, but rather being part of the conversation and steering your brand in the direction that your customers desire. From reputation management to product innovation, audience engagement to outsmarting competitors, the advantages are almost endless. If you found this information useful and want to take your social media marketing skills to the next level, sign up for a free social media marketing certification course. Not only will it give you even more strategies for social listening, but it also goes into building a content strategy, how to extend your reach, and much more. As always, be sure to like and subscribe to stay up to date with all the latest marketing tricks. Now if you'll excuse me, me and my friend here have some social listening to do. We're gonna survey the field, let you know how it goes. Now, until then, I'll see you next time. I can't find this client info. Have you heard of HubSpot? HubSpot is a CRM platform, so it shares its data across every application. Every team can stay aligned. No out of sync spreadsheets or dueling databases. HubSpot grow better.