Social Listening: Turn Social Data into Actionable Insights

Social listening is a powerful tool that can help organisations gain valuable insights into their target audience's preferences, behaviours, and opinions.

Organisations can identify trends, monitor brand sentiment, and analyse the competition to inform their marketing strategies by tracking online conversations across social media platforms and other online channels.

What are the benefits of Social Listening?

• Improve customer service and satisfaction
• Monitor and measure the success of marketing campaigns
• Deliver customer engagement strategies
• Improve online brand reputation
• Discover new customer segments
• Follow competitors
• Keep on top of crisis management
• Track brand and product success
• Monitor brand influencers
• Reach new customers through look-a-like profiling
• Identify opportunities
• Understand customer sentiment
• Product and service development
• Discover user-generated content

How to use social media to gain insight into your customers' preferences

Gain insights into customer sentiment and preferences: Social listening enables businesses to monitor what customers say about their products and services online. By analysing the language and tone used by customers, companies can gain insights into customer sentiment and preferences, enabling them to refine their marketing strategy and create targeted campaigns that resonate with their target audience.

How to identify customer trends on social media

Identify emerging trends: Social listening also enables businesses to identify emerging trends in their industry. By monitoring online conversations, companies can identify new products, services, or features that customers are interested in, enabling them to stay ahead of the competition and capitalise on new opportunities.

Using social media conversations to improve products

Inform product development: Social listening can inform product development by providing businesses with valuable customer feedback. By analysing online conversations, companies can identify areas where their products or services could be improved, enabling them to make changes that better meet the needs of their customers.

Improve customer service: Social listening can also help businesses improve customer service by identifying areas where customers are experiencing issues or dissatisfaction. By monitoring online conversations and responding to customer feedback, companies can improve customer service and build stronger relationships.

Using social targeting to enhance marketing efforts

Enhance targeted marketing efforts: Social listening can help businesses enhance their marketing efforts. By analysing online conversations and leveraging data from other sources, companies can create custom audiences in social channels that target the individuals they want to reach. This enables them to deliver the right message to the right people at the right time, maximising the effectiveness of their marketing campaigns.

How can Charities use social listening?

Social listening can be an incredibly beneficial tool for charities and non-profits. It allows organisations to look at what affinities and engagement people might have with a charity, to indicate how perceptive they would be to targeted marketing. This can be done by looking at existing customers and understanding what they look like across social channels. Who do they follow? What do they post? What hashtags and engagement content are they creating?

From this you can use probabilistic matching and begin to look at new customers from a look-a-like point of view. You can also look at specific subjects to target. Do they support a similar charity? Do they have high interest in animal welfare of sustainability? Look at their online sentiment for triggers, interests, and keywords.

How can Retailers use social listening?

A retail case study: By tracking social media content via API and identifying content, hashtags and other follower activity that match the retailers target audience, this Highstreet brand was able to re-target their customer segment with highly personalised and relevant marketing based on their social activity.

This campaign generated a regular income stream for the brand and raised the profile of the brand as a go to for occasional wear (the focus of the social listening campaign). Read the full case study.

How can Financial Services use social listening?

The benefits of social listening for finance brands: Social listening is an effective tool for financial brands, particularly for brands looking to improve their customer satisfaction and product marketing. Social listening offers insights into customer sentiment, both positive and negative content towards brands, allowing them to identify opportunities and carry out crisis management in real time.

It also allows brands to understand customers on a deeper level, better understanding their needs and preferences when it comes to financial products and services. This can be used to develop target audience profiles and buyer personas to create more targeted marketing efforts across channels.

What demographics best fit social listening?

Social listening demographics: Social listening is focused on demographics that engage with socials. It’s excellent for reaching younger audiences that are generally most active on social media. It is also a great tool for targeting early adopters and trend setters.

What social channels do we listen to?

Instagram, LinkedIn, Twitter, YouTube, Foursquare, Google, Pinterest, Gravatar, Forums and many more...

Is all social data available via social listening?

Each platform has unique privacy policies. If an individual is allowing their profile, post or content to be public, then the tracking of their content is accessible through social listening.

What software do we use for social listening?

We offer bespoke inhouse software – connecting to various streams of data across many social platforms. Find out more.

How to get started with social listening?

This is an empowering way to use data! For any organisation looking to enhance their marketing strategy, social listening is a flexible and insightful approach to data use. From selecting your bespoke target audience, developing social customer profiles and offering targeted marketing insights, we can find you the best people via the best channels for your campaigns and marketing efforts.

Next steps

Find useful resources on Social Listening and a download of our latest Social Listening Webinar. You can also get in touch to set up a Social Listening consultation to get you started.

LEARN MORE ABOUT SOCIAL LISTENING