12 Tactics to Maximise Your Brand’s Social Listening

You’ve probably heard a thing or two about the funny brands like Oreo, Wendy’s, and Netflix who inject humor on their tweets or making their tweets timely with relevant global happenings. These are brands that surely know how to keep their content fresh for the audience.

Having a good reputation on social media is essential for any business’s growth and satisfying or even entertaining their customers, just like some brands that we mentioned earlier. Aside from having a good social media presence, there’s social listening.

Compared to social monitoring which only helps you track brand mentions and collect data, social listening is your all-in-one progress tracker.

It lets you track your consumers’ feedback, your brand, your competitors, and related keywords and topics in your industry’s niche before analyzing the information you collected and creating a plan of action to get your brand out there — social listening is a two-way process.

Why should businesses do social media listening? Because it’s a responsibility to care for what customers think about your brand, your competitors or anything timely and relevant that’s happening today.

A “netizen” would appreciate a brand that can reply or comment on their post, which can help improve your brand’s exposure, considering that we are in the digital age now and nothing is a secret with the Internet, even if you delete something you published within seconds.

But after social media listening, what are your next steps going to be? Here’s our 12-step digital informative guide on what you can do to hack your business’ growth opportunity.

Have an outstanding customer service.

Some customers nowadays have become more vocal about raising their concerns or complaints on social media. Through social listening, you will be able to track what customers are saying about you and act on it immediately.

Having a sense of urgency and providing value for your customers’ concern is one of the factors why they’ll appreciate your brand more. 

Newsjack any relevant content.

Riding the hype is “the hype”, as long as you can grasp the right way to do it. Newsjacking is inserting your brand on any news breaking story or timely event. Utilising this technique can help generate social media engagement, which can help your brand promote itself once it goes viral.

Just be sure to know when to draw the line when newsjacking content, as some brands have done so but got backlashed instead. 

Find influential people who can advocate your brand. 

When you’re doing social media listening, it will be more convenient for you to track influential people who are using your product/service or has the same values as your business does.

Collaboration with social media influencers has timelessly proven that it can help a business amplify awareness twice or thrice as much. Influencers have their own following base, and their influence on your target audience makes it easier for them to gain the trust of many. 

If you’re still not using web analytics tools, use one or two now. 

Aside from having a social analytics tool, a web analytics tool is a great investment for any business because you need it to constantly improve your brand and will help you create a plan of action on how to make people convert to your website.

If you’re only using one under a free trial, it’s time to use the paid version today. Here are some of the best web analytics tools you can use: 

• Google Analytics
• Clickmeter
• Domo
• Supermetrics
• KissMetrics
• SEMRush

Interact with your customers all the time. 

Customers appreciate an almost-human interaction between them and the brand, that’s why it wouldn’t really hurt making an extensive effort interacting with the consumers from time to time.

Whether it’s a query, a positive or negative experience with your business, or a brand mention, always be ready to reply to them because customers appreciate it more. Oh, and you’re only given 24 hours to reply or comment.

Don’t stop using that social analytics tool that you’re currently using.

If you find yourself not getting sufficient results from that social listening tool you’re using, you don’t have to worry and you don’t need to stop using that. It’s more important to find out what areas of your social media marketing efforts need some further improvement.

As a matter of fact, we highly suggest that you find an alternative social media analytics tool or any of the following trusted social analytics tools for you to have backup data to look on: 

• Hootsuite
• HubSpot
• Buzzsumo
• Brandwatch Analytics

Create a user-generated content.

User-generated content (UGC), in simpler terms, is a content published or posted by an online user and used by the business with the discretion of the online user.

Usually, user-generated content is more trustworthy than written consumer reviews because it shows more creativity and a sense of authenticity than user feedback which can be potentially biased or faked. 

You can easily get creative with user-generated content because it allows your audience to express themselves genuinely and even gain profit from participating in some brands’ marketing campaign! 

Evaluate your brand’s current state.

Social listening also helps you determine when it’s a good time to re-evaluate how your brand is going.

Whether it’s the brand image, improving the purchasing process to make a seamless transaction with your customers, or strengthening your content marketing strategy, re-evaluating your brand’s current situation will help you realise how you can deliver better to your target audience. 

Create your brand’s hashtag.

For small to medium scale businesses, it’s also important to create an awareness that such product or services as yours exist — hence, creating a brand hashtag is one of the core keys you can leverage on. A brand hashtag can usually be your business’ name, your product’s name, or your brand tagline.

In order to have a detailed plan on how to successfully launch a branded hashtag strategy for your marketing campaign. 

Gather insights from the online community.

Other than social media listening, business is on the advantage when taking additional measures on improving their brand by introducing themselves and asking for useful insights from certain online communities where they share the same interests with.

Another good thing about being active among online communities is that it gives you the chance to improve your product or service’s development process.

Take, for example, GoPro’s Hero 4. Hero4 was a product that was inspired by the customers’ insights that GoPro’s Hero 3 has previously released. GoPro utilised their customers’ feedback that they received in order to improve their customers’ experience when using their future products. 

Involve yourself in causes.

Another way to generate good buzz for your business is to get active in doing voluntary causes, charity events, or any kind of involvement that’s closest to your brand values.

There’s a better tendency for consumers to have more interest in brands that promote advocacies that’s very timely with society and global issues, according to CMO. 

Coopete instead of competing with your rivals.

Believe it or not, coopetition will change the way business owners and marketers thrive in the industry.

Due to the immense pressure of keeping up with consumer demands, businesses are finding more efficient ways to generate revenue while minimising impact due to the tight competition in their industry.

The result? Coopetition. 

Today, coopetition is more prominent in the tech and digital marketing industry. In order to implement coopetition successfully, you must be able to determine first whether your business has the full capacity to provide the exact demand of the consumer in a fixed time and manner.

Once you have evaluated that you need collaboration to make the job easier, it’s time to identify your potential future partners within the same industry who offers extensive supplies and services.