One of the greatest powers of Social Media Marketing is its ability to track widespread social conversations in a matter of seconds. Social conversation provides a Marketer with direct insight into what their current or potential customers are thinking and saying about them online.
Today we will be covering 4 different use cases for social listening:
- If used correctly and strategically, Marketers can use Social Listening Tools to shed light on comment sentiments, allowing them to determine where their current or potential customers fall within the sales funnel, providing them with insights to build out their next Social Media Marketing strategy.
Below are examples of the types of comments that you would see under the 3 stages of the sales funnel
Awareness: “Green Valley Creamery has some amazing looking yogurt 🙌”
Interest/Consideration: “I love Green Valley Creamery! I’ll have to try the strawberry yogurt next time I’m at Whole Foods 😁”
Brand Loyalists: “That strawberry yogurt is incredible. I’ve been feeding it to my children for years and they love it 🥰”
The information above is great, but it is what a Marketer does with this information that will determine whether they are utilizing the Social Listening Tool to its fullest extent.
Awareness: If a majority of comments fall under the awareness stage, this suggests that the Marketer’s current strategy up until this point is doing a great job of spreading the word about the company. With that information, the Marketers next goal should be to move followers to the next stage of the funnel: Interest/Consideration. Strategies to achieve the Interest/Consideration stage can include posts that encourage people to check out the website, posts about upcoming sales or product releases, etc.
Interest/Consideration: If a high percentage of commenters fall under the Interest/Consideration phase, that means that commenters are strongly thinking of making a purchase. With that insight, the Marketer must now encourage commenters to purchase the products and become Brand Loyalists. Social Media Strategies to move commenters down along the funnel could include providing an exclusive discount code to shop the product, content with a call to action to shop, etc.
Brand Loyalists: When a majority of comments are from people who are already loyal customers, this suggests that it’s time to reach out to a new audience in order to grow the brand and increase conversions. Thus, a brand should consider boosting posts or using paid ads to reach new customers and convert these new audiences into Brand Loyalists as well.
- Social listening can also be utilized to identify brand loyalists that you may not be aware of.
Social listening also allows you to track posts where your brand is mentioned. By tracking a variety of hashtags related to your brand, you can find existing users who are already posting about your product to leverage. By reaching out to a brand loyalist and offering them an affiliate relationship, free product, or simply thanking them for supporting your brand, you can help deepen their loyalty, and gain more organic promotion.
- Social listening is also a powerful tool for crisis management.
It’s inevitable that things will go wrong at times! Social listening can help you take control of the narrative, and gain insights into how to best navigate the situation based on consumer sentiment.
Monitoring social media after a brand crisis gives you first hand insight into how your consumers feel about the situation. Oftentimes, upset consumers are very vocal about what they think should be done to remedy the situation - listening in and actioning this feedback can help you make your consumers feel heard and reduce further friction.
- Social listening can be used to gain insight into opportunities and threats posed by your competitors.
Having insight into the conversations around your own brand is key, and so is listening in to the conversations about your competitors. There are 2 main benefits to listening in on your competitors:
- You can identify areas to improve your product/offering via feedback from competitors' customers. Are all their customers asking for a new feature? Get ahead of the game by developing it yourself! By understanding your competitors' gaps, you can uncover opportunities to give yourself a competitive advantage.
- You can better understand where your competitors are out performing you. By listening in to the things their customers love about their product, you can uncover areas where your competitors may be out performing you. Understanding these threats allows you make a plan to address them before you start receiving negative feedback from your community.