Customer Experience
7 things your social listening software should do
Social media listening is a comprehensive undertaking for businesses, but it doesn’t need to be intimidating with the right tools. Read on to see how you can make the most of your social listening strategy by using psychology and the right social listening solutions.
Social listening is the process of aggregating social media data and analyzing it for insights. While the concept is easy, building a comprehensive social listening strategy can become difficult when the solutions or software you purchase doesn’t have all the features you need. So what differentiates a good solution from a great solution?
The seven things your social listening software should do are:
- Help you harness the power of psychology
- Uncover first-mover advantages
- provide insights into the voice of the customer
- Expand brand awareness with influencer surfacing
- Monitor reviews to enhance brand reputation and customer satisfaction
- Visualize how you stack up against competitors
- Be easy to use and customizable
Let’s dig into what it means to do each of these seven things.
1. Harness the power of psychology for social listening
Social media is so successful particularly because it uses psychology to attract users. People love to talk about themselves – and social media gives people the perfect place to do just that. A popular Harvard neuroscience study found that talking about oneself elicits a pleasure response in the brain, even to the point that one forgoes compensation to talk about themselves – up to a 17% compensation decrease!
It’s pretty unsurprising then that 30 - 40% of everyday speech and 80% of all social media posts are dedicated to talking about oneself. When combined with the fact that researchers found that people define themselves by what they buy, social media becomes a gold mine of unsolicited, honest feedback about brands and businesses.
It is therefore essential that your social listening solution can gather data from all the most popular review sites, social media platforms, messaging applications, and forums to get a full view of your customers and the networks to which they belong. Because brand relationships and awareness play key roles in social media and psychology, a social listening solution should have that understanding built into the logic of the product itself.
2. Uncover first-mover advantages
According to our research, social media analysis often surfaces trends before the same trends surfaced in call or experience data. Why does social media move faster on trends? Well, the nature of social media is to surface new products and trends!
According to Meta, 80 - 83% of Instagram users use the app to discover new products or services, research them, and decide whether to make a purchase. For businesses that want first-mover advantages on the competition, social listening is a must. And the right solution will ensure you get those insights through granular filtering and tracking of your social data down to the information your business needs.
3. Generate deep insight into the voice of the customer
The right social listening software will track the topics or trends that arise most frequently in social data and categorize them for easy analysis by your teams in customized dashboards. With all your data at your fingertips, your teams can get a clearer view of the voice of the customer and make the changes that will lead to increased brand reputation, loyalty, and awareness.
Often, consumers will go to social media to rave or rant about their recent purchases without being asked to do so by the brand. A savvy business with the right social listening tools will aggregate all those posts across their social channels into one spot for analysis. Businesses can then discover where they excel or need improvement in the customer journey and act on those insights to increase customer satisfaction and loyalty.
4. Expand brand awareness with influencer surfacing
To capture increased sales and expand brand awareness, the right social listening solution should clearly surface influencers for your brands on each different social media platform. With that information, businesses can dig deeper into which platforms are best for their social media strategy, what kinds of people promote their products, and potential influencer marketing opportunities.
A successful social media campaign is one that lets people say something about themselves by sharing their opinions about your brand. When people consistently share and talk about your brand to generate engagement, they become influencers
Influencer marketing is the result of utilizing networks of consumers connected to an individual that they trust so that businesses can expand their brand awareness. In some instances, influencer marketing has led to as much as a 600% increase in sales after a brand’s product was featured in an influencer video.
5. Monitor reviews to enhance brand reputation and customer satisfaction
A social listening platform that lets businesses monitor their reviews using dashboards and analytics – and even respond to reviews – enables teams to positively impact customer satisfaction and loyalty. By analyzing the content of reviews and mitigating any concerns publicly, brands show that they are trustworthy and committed to improving their customers’ experiences, which can lead to revenue increases of up to 35%!
Reviews are vital to social listening because consumers trust influencers and reviews more than official communication through brands. In fact, 49% of surveyed consumers said that they trust online reviews as much as recommendations from friends and family, and 37% said they trusted online reviews as much as influencer reviews.
While trust is difficult to quantify in terms of dollars and cents, businesses with excellent reviews can see as much as a 31% increase in spending by customers. A one-star increase on Yelp can even lead to a 6-9% increase in revenue. To ignore reviews – regardless if they come from influencers, social media posts, or business reviews – is to lose revenue
6. Visualize how you stack up against competitor
The right social listening solution should let you analyze your competitors’ social media presence using the same tools you use to analyze your own. The social media landscape is defined by connection, emotion, and rapid adoption of trends. Knowing how your competitors handle their presence on social media can help your business strategize ways to best use the medium to capture more revenue.
7. Be easy to use and customizable
Lastly, easy-to-use, customizable dashboards should be an absolute prerequisite for any social listening platform. You should not need to call support for small changes to your visualizations or to export your data. Having such flexibility enables your teams to work autonomously to perform the analysis that they want and need on your business and your competitors’ business.
Plus, integrations with additional analytics solutions should be similarly easy to implement and use. No matter which way you cut it, a hard-to-use platform with minimal customization will limit your ability to understand how you stack up against your competitors. A platform that lets you behave autonomously and easily slice and dice your data for deeper insights is a base requirement for any social listening solution.
Bottom Line: Take action
Whether looking for social listening tools to replace your current solutions or looking for improved software, it's vital to understand first what your company needs, what it's lacking and how the above items could transform the results of your business.
Social listening should be a comprehensive undertaking for an organization to get the highest quality insights into their customers and market. But the right solution can make it quicker and easier for the organization to realize value and business impact.
With Qualtrics Connect, businesses get a social listening and digital customer service platform that not only provides the functionalities listed in this blog but so much more.
Monitor reviews, aggregate social media post data, and analyze it in one spot, plus gain the tools needed to not only analyze social data but respond to customer outreach on all digital channels. With one tool, businesses big and small can analyze and act on the digital customer experience.
Listen everywhere with Qualtrics