June 29, 2021
Half of marketers worldwide have turned to social listening to understand consumers’ changing preferences during the pandemic. 63% of social media marketers believe listening will become even more important over the upcoming year. In this quick blog, I wanted to touch on the increasing importance of Social Listening and discuss the top 5 metrics that will help you get the most from your social listening strategy.
So, what is Social Listening and what makes it so important?
Globally, over 3.6 billion people use social media and the number is projected to increase to 4.41 billion in 2025 (Statista). Social listening allows you to monitor online conversations around specific keywords, phrases topics, brands or industries, and gather insights about your target audience and industry. Understanding what people discuss about your brand can give you a competitive advantage and keep you on top of trends.
What are the main benefits of social listening?
- Discover potential new customers: Social Listening allows you to get a deeper understanding of your target audience and helps tailor your strategy to fit customer needs.
- Identify influencers and create an advocacy plan: Social listening can be used to monitor the industry, identify influencers and connect with impactful authors to improve your influencer marketing strategy.
- Understand your competition: Social Listening allows you to track conversations about your competitors and better understand your competitors’ audiences. This is essential to know where you fit in the marketplace and how to benchmark your brand against competitors.
- Engage with customers: Social Listening allows monitoring all mentions and interactions a company’s audience has on social media and directly respond and engage with them. Customers who feel engaged by companies on social media will spend up to 40% more with them than other customers (Reputation Refinery).
- Manage crises: Social Listening allows you to manage any negative incidents or PR issues and identify what effect it has on the company’s followers or brand perception.
Certain metrics can help you to get the most from your social listening strategy.
- Share of Voice: This metric allows you to benchmark your brand’s share of total mentions against your competitors. Share of voice is an essential metric in understanding how effective brand-awareness campaigns are and whether your content is resonating with customers.
- Sentiment Analysis: Sentiment analysis aids your understanding of the perception of your brand. Monitoring sentiment levels for your brand allows you to meet customer expectations and proactively solve customer issues.
- Mentions Volume: This metric measures the number of mentions your brand or product receives online. When running campaigns, an increasing number of mentions can indicate positive performance.
- Engagement Rate: The engagement rate shows the number of retweets, shares, replies and mentions your brand gets on social media. This metric shows whether the content resonates and what topics are performing better than others. Rapid changes in engagement rate can also help to proactively identify crises.
- Competitor Metrics: By understanding where your competitors overperform, you’ll be able to tailor your content to fit your shared audiences.
Social listening is a fast and efficient way to identify trends and understand audience’s perception of your business. Having that knowledge can make a real difference and Immediate Future can help you put these strategies into place. Contact us today to learn how to cut through social chatter.