5 Social Listening Strategies for Effective Branding

Social listening is an essential tool in maintaining the effective brand awareness and reputation of any business. Businesses can opt on two approaches to handling social listening. Either, by relying on a social media management outsourcing team, or being hands-on. Whichever way you choose it is still important to know the strategies towards successful branding.

Social listening will help in media monitoring customer pain points and provide direct customer responses to questions, complaints, and comments, whilst providing a holistic view of your business overall from the perspective of your customer, which could in the end affect your business success. Customer support is one way of addressing customer complaints. Social listening can track competitor analysis and benchmark metrics to use alongside your marketing goals.

Once you have those in place, here are 5 strategies to apply:

1. Actively join social media discussions

   Today, customers use various social media sites to express their concerns or questions towards the brand. Quick customer support responses is essential to turning a detractor into an evangelist. Actively participating in conversations relating to your brand will open your customers to more information about you and your products, and will give you the opportunity to avoid or address a crisis with efficiency. A customer with complaints expects a response within 60 minutes, so questions about your brand should be answered and not be left hanging. Fast customer support service will benefit the business success, and give your brand better reputation with its current and potential clients. Often engagements in various social forums will enable you to connect with more people than any focus group. Using social analytics will give insights into what content receives the most engagement, outlining the interests of your customers. This will help you make adjustments on future posts and alter how you engage in different social media campaigns.

2. Understand social trends and news

   Trends are constantly changing. Using popular trends on campaigns gives your brand leverage to more exposure. As well as using relevant keywords and hashtags; a brand also has to stay in the know on the latest news. There is always a chance to use recent events as leverage to your brand. How fast can you publish a blog post or a tweet reacting to the latest news development? However, when relating to a real-time event, make sure the proper research has been done to avoid false information. Constant media monitoring will help you keep track and up to date with the latest trends on the internet. Besides knowing trends and latest news, another advantage could be using keywords to build customer relationships and branding. By keeping track on keywords, you can reach out. Using your keywords properly will give a chance to impress new customers, and engage with your current fans. Having a team of social media management outsourcing with your partnered outsourcer helps lessen time in media monitoring since you can rely on your outsourced team to accomplish the task for you, allowing you to be able to focus on other tasks and speeding up your process.

   Types of keywords your business should be aware of:

   • Brand Keywords: Words that are associated with your brand, company name and common variations and misspellings.
   • Industry Keywords: Words that describe your product or services.
   • Location Specific Keywords: If your company has a physical store, has a specific target location it is best to track keywords that is within your demographic target area.
   • Negative Keywords: Filtering out non-relevant words, and topics. If you’re a social media management outsourcing company, you should filter out “lifestyle”, “cosmetics” etc. to prevent being caught up in irrelevant conversations.
3. Identify your influencers

   Another strategy is to identify your key influencers. What best way to spread the brand’s name but by word of mouth from a trusted third party. Identify and reach out to known industry voices of authority, which can boost your brand through their following. More people will trust recommendations from known individuals far more than your own marketing collateral. Nurture and develop these relationships with honest communication and feedback. Along with their audience, they will be able to provide invaluable insights as well as promotion. When reposting an influencer’s content, make sure your brand name is tagged alongside the influencers for future consumer reference.

4. Recognize the need for product development

   What better way to get unfiltered, honest feedback but through social media. Don’t take negative feedback personally, they are not directed at you, take negative comments as an opportunity for development. Show the customers that you are listening. Acknowledge the customer’s needs and expectations. As you make changes to your brand, use social listening to confirm your successful adjustments. If you have just launched a new product, you can discover any shortcomings early by media monitoring social conversations. Try to understand the challenges they run into, being able to act will show your customers that their opinion matters, and can help prevent your brand from losing status. Remember, you produce evangelists from the feedback of satisfied customers. Customer support should not only cater to inquiries and customer problems but should also answer to negative feedback. Responses with both negative and positive feedback can assure your customers that your brand is listening to their opinions towards your service or product.

5. Know your competitors

   The internet has made it easier for competitors to spy on each other. Your brand can take advantage of this by using social listening to know how you and your competitors fair in the industry. Using social listening will give you insights based on what the customers say between you and your competitors. You learn about a campaign they’re about to launch through Twitter, and you can create a better campaign to compete. Conclusion When it comes to effective branding, social listening clearly plays a significant role. Social listening gives us a better insight on your brand reputation, customers, and competitors. Having this strategy in the marketing and branding initiatives that could also give helpful insights on what your brands strength and weaknesses physically and through social media which is a great asset for the growth of the business success.