How Social Listening Benefits Your Business

When it comes to interacting with customers, social listening has become an integral part of a brand’s engagement strategy.

Social listening is more than setting up a simple Google alert for your brand or keyword. It is about finding where the relevant conversations are happening and why.

Social media has become a great hub for customers to interact freely with different brands and companies. In fact, 59 percent of Americans who use social media say that social customer service has made it easier to work through complaints.

Although reading and understanding customer comments and needs is vital to a company’s success, it is the response that matters most. A company who is able to help resolve problems and be transparent about the process has been shown to have 94 percent customer loyalty. Social media channels, like Twitter in particular, have been one of the best platforms for problem solving between consumers and companies.

Using social learning tools have incredible benefits to the businesses which employ them. Not only do they allow for instant notification of brand and/or keyword mentions, but they can give insights that allow for a leg up on the competition, find new customers, and foster new connections with consumers online.

Once the connections are made, the social aspect lets people see that your company truly cares. The communication has an impact on the consumer your brand communicates with, and everyone else in that particular customer’s sphere of influence..

There are some really great tools available to help companies to keep track of their social presence and be aware of what is being said about their brand. Here are a couple of our favorites:

Mention

This app combines social monitoring, analytics, and competitor espionage all in one easy to use space. It can be tailored directly to any business’s specific needs. Brands can monitor  individual sources, languages, photos, hashtags, and keywords. In this way, you can not only monitor your own mentions, online activity, and appearances, but your competitors’ as well.

Any mention of any kind will appear in the app dashboard. From there it is easy to navigate directly to each comment’s original context from articles to tweets. Within the dashboard, mentions can be organized by authority levels and preferences.  In this way, it becomes easier to find and connect with potential influencers who are loving your brand.

The app also compiles comprehensive stats, offering charts separating negative, positive, and neutral mentions as well as competitors’ analytics in a side by side breakdown. Although Mention is a paid service, the insights gained are worth every penny and provide benefits unlike any other.

Hootsuite

This app is specific to monitoring social media mentions. Any time your brand or a competitor’s is mentioned, you will be alerted and can respond quickly and thoughtfully, two of the most important components of customer care.
Hootsuite can monitor all social media mentions in real time and keeps them all in one place, no matter the platform.

You can set notifications for your own brand, specific names, keywords, and companies in order to get the most comprehensive overview of the industry sentiment toward your brand and competing brands. From there, it becomes easy to delegate responses between team members and ensure that each customer gets the best care in the shortest amount of time.

By using social listening tools, businesses can do a much better job of caring for their customers and gaining insights about the industry and their competition. The ability to do this is real time and have all of the information in one place gives your company a strong lead over others who are not employing these tools and taking advantage of the insights they have on hand.

Amanda Peterson is a software engineer and contributor to Enlightened Digital.