What is Social Listening and Its Impact on Ecommerce?
Published by Incomedia in Guides and Tips · Friday 02 Feb 2024
Social listening consists of paying attention to, and analyzing, what people are saying online about your brand. This allows you to learn more about how your brand is viewed on the market, and improve the insights you get. This means you gather more useful and actionable insights that allow you to improve your marketing campaign.
This article will explain what social listening looks like, what the benefits are, as well as offer some examples and easy ways to carry it out. We will also show you how you can create a social listening strategy of your own.
What is social listening?
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Social listening is the same thing as social media listening. It’s the process of analysing online conversations about your brand, and even the industry you work in more generally. The point is to find out as much as possible about your audience. You could, for example, keep an eye on your social media platforms in order to see when your audience mentions your brand or gives some feedback on your new hosted phone system features.
Social listening is a more proactive approach to hearing what your customers are saying, and at a larger scale than a survey. You can also conduct sentiment analysis to find out how people feel about your brand and make adjustments to your marketing campaign on the basis of that knowledge.
Some questions you might want to use for your social listening campaign could include the following:
- How do your customers feel about your brand?
- How do they feel about your website content?
- How does your audience feel about your competitors?
- How do they feel about your products and/or services?
- What are their main desires and needs?
- What topics are your followers discussing online?
- What challenges do follower groups share?
- What are their FAQs?
- What do they engage with most on social media?
Is social listening different to social monitoring?
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While social listening and social monitoring share some similarities - namely, that they both consist of noticing what customers have to say on social media platforms, there are also some key differences.
Social listening consists of a broader focus on what people are saying about the brand, and even the industry and product type as a whole. It takes a generally broader perspective into account, analysing conversations held over social media continuously, in order to adapt marketing campaigns over time.
Social monitoring, on the other hand, has a narrower focus on one company in particular, or one product, brand, or marketing campaign. Its focus is on specific brand mentions on social media.
Why engage in social listening?
Social listening has become a valuable tool in the toolkit of marketers everywhere. As well as helping you to understand your customers and target audience on a more profound level, and giving you the insights to make more appropriate marketing choices.
Additionally, it allows you to engage in social media benchmarking, comparing your performance and customer sentiment against industry standards and competitors. This helps you can keep your finger on the pulse re information about your competitors and the general state of your industry.
It also gives you a deeper understanding of the customer experience that your products engender. This information can help you to mitigate any issues that could arise in the form of negative reviews, and nip the problem in the bud by addressing customer concerns early on.
You can also use social listening to find out which other brands are on the same wavelength as you, and find potential collaboration opportunities. Overall, this is a great way to manage vendor risk.
Examples of social listening
So, now that you have an idea of what social listening is and the benefits, let’s dive into a few examples of how you can put it to use:
- Whenever someone posts a negative review or comment about one of your services (such as your ecommerce shipment rates), products, or even your brand, you can improve all of these on the basis of that feedback. If your product is glitchy, fix the glitch. Service too expensive? Offer cost-effective deals. Brand too boring? Spruce up your image with some engaging social media posts.
Free to use image sourced from Unsplash - If you discover that a large portion of your audience is inexplicably into cheese curds, you can sure as heck find some way to combine your brand or product with those delicious nuggets. You could consider a collaboration with your local cheese curd supplier, or have a cheese curd giveaway.
- If you “overhear” someone saying something nice about you, then don’t humbly keep that information to yourself! Shout it from the metaphorical rooftops. Repost and reshare to your social media platforms, amplify those approving voices!
Social listening involves placing your audience’s honest and unfiltered feelings about your call tracking for business products, as well as their ideas, interests and opinions, into decision-making regarding your call tracking products.
A strong social listening strategy can help you to not only improve the marketing side of your business, but also to design and redesign your products in such a way as to truly meet your audience’s desires, goals, and needs.
Building a social listening strategy
Decide what your goals and KPIs are
The first step of building a successful social listening campaign is to decide what you want to achieve, and how you want to measure your success - in other words, what your Key Performance Indicators are.
Your goals could include any of the following examples:
- Developing new content on the basis of what your customers and audience value.
- Learning more about the competitors, and your field in general, in order to help your brand stand out and give your products a competitive advantage.
- Mitigating negative reputations and improving your image.
- Finding more potential customers outside of your usual audience who might want what you’re selling.
Some key performance indicators you could use include the following:
- How do people feel about your brand? Positively, negatively, or neutral?
- How engaged is your audience with the content you’re putting out? Which posts get the most likes, comments and shares?
- How much do people talk about you? How often are specific, relevant keywords, your brand, and your products mentioned on social media?
- Who is talking about your brand? Are there any influencers in the mix, and if so, who follows them?
Pick a social listening software
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You can choose from a vast array of social listening tools. In deciding which one to go for, take into consideration your goals for your social listening campaign. Think about your budget, the features you need, and also consider ease of use.
You don’t want to have to spend weeks wrestling with a complex and overpriced software that doesn’t even have the features you need! So choose wisely. It’s always a great idea to make use of free trials to find just the right tool for you.
Take a closer look at your audience
You can find out a lot about your audience by looking at how they interact online and what they say about your product and field. You can see what questions people are asking, what they rave about when it comes to your brand.
Do they like infographics or prefer videos? Are they more concerned with being eco-friendly or thrifty? This information can help you to tailor your products and tweak your brand’s image to meet certain expectations from your customers, including the potential ones.
Take stock of what to look out for
It is vital that you compile a list of specific keywords and phrases relevant to your company using robust data collection methods. This will help you to obtain useful and relevant data from this process rather than just noise. You can make a list surrounding the likes of your brand name, words and hashtags relevant to your brand, and your product category.
Consider including customer-centric terms and phrases that reflect the needs and preferences of your audience. These keywords will provide valuable insights into what your customers truly value and care about.
You can also include things like your social media handles, specific industry buzzwords and topics of interest to your audience, and slogans you may have used in the past. There are a lot of things you can use to find out what people are saying about you!
Identify useful social media channels
While people can be discussing the remote support software by RealVNC that you use, your brand, and services you provide, anywhere online, you should keep an eye on as many channels as possible, starting with your main channels to begin with. You can add more channels to your campaign as you go, adapting and changing your methodology over time.
Filter your data
You can use your social listening software to amass your data and filter it on the basis of various commonalities. These could include things like your keyword list, types of interactions (e.g. comment or share), whether the opinion is positive or negative, and more.
Analyze the results
Free to use image sourced from Unsplash
Finally, you need to look at and analyze the results from all of your hard work. It’s time to check out those KPIs and see how your Vonage outbound call center solutions are fairing on social media. Once you have the results handy, it’s time to decide what you want to do with them.
You could decide to make some changes, carry out some ecommerce retargeting strategies, keep chugging along, or add something to your repertoire.
Final thoughts
Social listening can have a very positive impact on Ecommerce, helping you to stand out from the competition by keeping an ear to the ground to hear what people are saying. We hope this article has given you a thorough idea about how to do that!