Social Listening for Small Businesses

Recently, a member of my business school alumni group inquired if any of us had used a particular service and sought feedback on their quality. The only answer to this query came within 5 minutes, talking bitterly of a bad experience and advising strongly against using that service. I was reflecting on how there’s a lot of truth in the saying that happy customers may not talk about you much, but unhappy ones will even go out of their way to spread the word far and wide.

Word-of-mouth advice for or against a business can make or break a small business, unlike established brands that develop a certain amount of resilience against such attacks. According to the U.S SBA, there are about 30.2 million small and medium-sized businesses in the U.S, 90% of which fail. It stands to reason for us to say, that not listening to their customers must be count as a major reason for their failure.

Social listening for small businesses is not only important but also particularly effective. If you are running a small business, you could use it as a one-stop solution to most of your marketing needs, saving precious time and money. The market is filled with options from social listening tools ranging from free to premium paid versions, but you can try most for free before you make a final decision. Small businesses need to undertake social listening actively because unlike bigger businesses, they are closer to their consumers.

Why should Small Businesses invest in Social Listening?

Social listening helps a business to be aware of how what their customers think, of their products and services. Any company needs to know its standing in the market before it can dream of gaining an edge over its competitors. Being ignorant, of market trends, competitors and general public opinion, is never a good idea, even for popular brands. Nokia is perhaps the biggest example of a company that stopped listening and was decimated as a result. If it can affect big brands such as Nokia, small businesses need to be more careful because you do not want to lose your existent customer base, however small it may be. Social listening for small businesses can actually help them draw insights from their current customer base and take corrective action to rectify any defects/faults. Once you cater to the needs of your existing customer base, they are sure to share a good word with other people and it bears repetition to ask, what’s better than word-of-mouth marketing?

How to use Social Listening for Small Businesses?

The worst thing a business could do, in today’s wired world, is not to care when customers are angry. Small businesses risk everything in such a scenario. Customers when angry vent it out on social media platforms, which reach a million users. Not paying attention to negative feedback on social media can create a chain reaction on the Internet. One bad review can attract other negative comments and on many occasions, customers have even stormed ahead to call for a boycott for some brands. Even potential customers will be able to see these toxic messages when they use Google and look for the nearest business for that product or service. To avoid a massive crisis in an age when news travels faster than light, one needs to stay vigilant.

Social listening can help small businesses in a great many ways here. The platform allows you to establish an impeccable online reputation by enabling all of the following actions:

Market Research and Real-Time Feedback

Real-time feedback and the insights derived from them render social listening tools the most effective for small businesses. Normally, one would have to invest time and resources to procure consumer data like paying a hefty fee for a survey and then analyzing the data. Social listening tools extract the most relevant pieces of information for your brand from the largest source of free data – online networking sites, review boards et cetera. The tool even helps you to visualize the data with inbuilt analytical features. Real-time notifications help you to act quickly and respond immediately to your customers and this is key to your brand’s success. No angry customer would like to wait a month for your answer, they would just move on to a rival brand. Social listening is also an excellent platform to monitor industry trends, consumer opinions et cetera and thus proving to be a relatively inexpensive market research tool.

Crisis Management and Advertising

Advertisement tries to inspire the wish for a product in a customer through a creative message. In their attempt to be creative, many brands have faced public wrath. Sometimes, it is difficult to understand what would be perceived as creativity and what would not. Interacting with the online audience and obtaining their opinions before you release any controversial content is a smart solution to avoid a PR crisis. Some brands have faced issues with their ad campaigns like the one by Dove, with their shampoo bottles trying to showcase different body types and Antonio Federici putting up a print ad mixing sexual and religious sentiments. Both these ads created serious adverse reactions from many quarters and had to be taken down.

Customer Experience and Engagement

Even the top brands of today would have once been small start-ups. Their ability to provide customers with a unique and satisfactory product or service is the reason why they’re big today. However, this sentence tells us only half the truth. Even a great product coupled with poor back up and customer service can drive customers away. Social listening for small businesses helps you track the needs and problems of your audience and resolve them immediately. Most social listening tools create a trouble “ticket” which will be open until a problem is resolved. Multiple members of a team can access the platform, which enables an escalation matrix so more people can be looped in for effective problem resolution. This makes social listening the best tool for online media management.

Engaging with audiences across various channels from one centralized platform with a multi-user feature saves you a lot of financial resources. Social listening for small businesses is an apt marketing solution and one which is critically important for a brand’s survival too. You can now listen to consumer insights, engage with them, find brand advocates, support your recruitment and indulge in social selling – all of this from one platform! Experience the tool by signing up for a free trial.

A Lesson in Social Listening from Netflix

Netflix is among the top names that come to mind when talking about video-streaming and online media services and rightly so. The company is a powerhouse in all its endeavors – be it in delivering quality content or a strong digital presence. The company has witnessed a phenomenal growth in terms of business. The numbers are intriguing – subscribers of Netflix were a mere 22 million in 2011 but have shot up to nearly 150 million in 2019. An estimated 37% of internet users worldwide are Netflix users. Netflix’s massive success can be attributed majorly to two things – the quality of product offering and its top-notch marketing efforts. This company does not take a backseat on social media when it comes to paying attention to the audience. Here, we discuss how Netflix proves to be a fine example of proper social listening, audience engagement, and expert digital marketing.

Netflix

How has Netflix used Social Listening and Social Media to its Advantage?

Netflix has chosen an unadulterated, strong and bold marketing approach on social media. They know their target audience very well and their Twitter bio attests to it. See how they get their target audience to relate to their brand with the reference to Gerard Way. The brand caters to the millennial mindset engaging with and tracking conversations happening online.

Netflix uses Social Listening to invent in Netflix Socks

If you’ve followed Netflix on their social handles, they have always been an audience-friendly brand trying to post humorous and witty posts et cetera. Their gregarious nature does not stop just there, they have also been social listening into the comments and chatter posted online. Through these measures, Netflix discovered that many users fall asleep while binge-watching shows only to wake up several episodes later. To tackle this issue Netflix devised Netflix Socks, a pair of smart socks that sense it when the user is dozing off and send a signal to the device to pause the show.

No doubt, the project was a massive success and they won the Shorty awards for the creative use of technology. Besides proving to be innovators in the industry they also won the trust of their customers as being attentive to their needs.

Social Media Monitoring and Customer Engagement

Netflix invests a lot in social media and digital marketing. They post highly creative content regularly. Not just that, engaging with their audience is a part of their routine as well and they do it quite vigorously. Encouraging viewers to share their content with friends, tag them, participate in activities and polls posted via stories is all part of these activities. They are also keen listeners and their monitoring of pop culture trends has helped them with their social media campaigns. Netflix does not rely much on the traditional ways of marketing. When targeting millennials they are not afraid to follow the “trending” topics and add their own take to it. They are daring and are willing to get casual with the audience. They have promoted the concept of “meme-marketing” very effectively with their posts. By social listening to millennials, you would know which are the trends they love and like Netflix, you can simply leverage on them.

Netflix’s intriguing ability to think forward and adopt innovative social media gimmicks never fail to impress its audience. Paying close attention using social listening to what is being said online is also a big passion for Netflix’s team, and sure enough, the results show in their massively growing business. Netflix is a great example, but not the only brand to have used social listening so successfully. Keep watching this space to see us discuss others who are also doing great work to reap the benefits of social listening.

Social listening to LinkedIn – How does it help?

LinkedIn was built to act as a professional platform that connects businesses, employers, and employees and every other person who can be called a professional. Along with Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram, LinkedIn is also one of the top-performing social media networks today, especially for B2B businesses. LinkedIn has been called the goldmine of B2B, it is where the leaders from the Fortune 500 companies spend their spare time at. The sheer number of LinkedIn users puts this article’s topic into perspective – LinkedIn officially has over 500 million users (according to Business Insider Intelligence). Unlike Facebook and other social media sites, we don’t have members sharing wedding photos and vacation plans. It’s a serious platform for discussions related to business. Your audience here is are business-minded decision-makers who are also well informed about people management, developments in science and technology or global issues of his/her interest. Social listening to LinkedIn cuts straight to the chase and helps you identify the key interests of your B2B customer.

Social listening to LinkedIn – Why?

As mentioned earlier, LinkedIn provides a space for business-oriented discussions. If you are an entrepreneur or even an executive with a profile on LinkedIn, your feed is the first impression people get about you. The same applies to your business page. Your profile is the first place to start influencing people and growing your business. LinkedIn provides an excellent platform for influencer marketing where professionals have successfully promoted themselves as thought leaders and innovators. Many executives promote their influencer status online while subtly promoting their brands as well and this certainly gets their brand increased visibility.

While this attempt to increase awareness is an important marketing tactic for businesses, where and how does social listening to LinkedIn come into the picture? With LinkedIn, one can monitor metrics like increase in follows, connections for a business page or personal account respectively, audience engagement, likes and shares et cetera. Social Listening to LinkedIn is also of great help when it comes to analytics. Say your team posts content on a daily basis. Social listening and LinkedIn’s page analytics can tell you which of your posts are doing great, which topics are being liked by your connections. Monitoring these details helps you learn more about your audience, in turn helping you to figure out what content to share next. Monitoring and researching the interest areas of your audience members provide you with strategic inputs on which your content marketing and influencer marketing campaigns ad strategy can be based in the future. When you know your audience, you put out more relatable content and gain more followers building greater visibility for your brand.

Understand your Employees Better

Apart from the fact that social listening to LinkedIn helps a great deal with market research, influencer marketing, and overall marketing decisions, it can also be helpful for a company’s HR team. Social listening has long been used for recruitment. LinkedIn is a professional platform that can connect you to the star candidate your company has been looking for. Social Listening tools help you set up specific searches for your preferred candidates, track members of high influence or merit in the industry et cetera. This can help your HR team source and recruit candidates with the best skills for the company. Tracking what your current employees think can be helpful as well. Great employer branding can be achieved when your employees are happy and they vouch for your company’s culture and work. Listening helps you discover the pain points your employees might be facing that they might not tell you about at work but may share on social media. Achieving great standards of employer branding does not harm, as it will attract talented candidates to choose to work for you.

Social listening to LinkedIn can be a one-shop stop practical solution to many of your needs as it offers influencer marketing, social selling, online reputation management, and even employer branding.

What Features should Agencies look for in a Social Listening Tool?

Social listening for agencies is a tough nut to crack. For an agency, a lot is at stake – the client’s reputation, their own reputation, and their need to attract more business through showcasing their performance. This is why they need a powerful tool with the capacity to provide the most accurate and in-depth consumer insights from the industry. Agencies need to cater to specific customer needs by personalizing dashboard results and reports to suit them. Imagine the ability to achieve all this, and also being backed by a 24×7 support team to assist with the social listening process. That would make any social listening tool a perfect accessory for an agency.

Social Listening for Agencies

Save Time while drawing Insights

Seeking growth for their own business and their clients, agencies are highly focused on improving the marketing strategy as a whole. This would include monitoring many things like social mentions, brand image, online reputation, sentiment analysis, crisis management, customer acquisition, identifying influencers et cetera. Performing all these activities across multiple accounts is not an easy task without a suitable tool. The process is time taking and time is a scarce resource for agencies, which is why a tool can help them save their time while improving their efficiency.

Real-time Notifications

Practically, real-time notifications are probably the best and most important feature for an agency, offered by a social listening tool. Working at an agency would require regular travel, attending meetings, events and so on. This makes it easy to miss out on important messages online. But, it isn’t an option when the agency has customers who trust them with their online reputation. Social listening tools have learned to adapt to this need and many applications allow mobile notifications when someone is on the move. When some notifications need urgent attention, they can be shared with teammates or escalated to the superiors at work.

Additional Insights with a Social Listening Tool

When the agency is trying to win new clients, they can win brownie points by actually putting forth insights using a social listening tool. This would set them apart from their competitors who may only present vague points and assumptions about their target audience and their thoughts and behaviors. Apart from handling the usual brand reputation aspects, sentiment analysis and monitoring brand mentions for their clients, agencies could offer to help them with competitor analysis. A social listening tool would help the agency to monitor the positioning and strategy of their client’s competitors, and access even their social media performance report without putting in any extra effort. Social media listening tools have inbuilt commands to track competitor activities, which can be activated in no time at all.

Diversify Services

Social listening for agencies is a powerful concept in itself. Agencies can use social listening tools in a number of ways apart from the regular monitoring of their client brands. When a customer plans a digital campaign or an event, the tool can track its performance. Social listening helps you track mentions for events and specific campaigns. It can offer a summary of the social media results, mentions on owned media and consecutive engagement, mentions on earned media and so on. A comprehensive performance report would include insights into how their competitors performed during the same duration.

Social listening for agencies offers a master platform for all their accounts and reviews their own performance as consultants as well, making it a time-saving and efficient investment indeed.

Staying on Top of your Restaurant Chain’s Reviews

The Internet is full of review sites, especially so for the hospitality sector. Online review sites are such a rage because they empower consumers to feel that they can speak up about their experiences and that their voice is being heard. According to a report, 33% of people put up reviews either when the service was extremely good or extremely bad. Social listening to restaurant reviews helps you understand your customers. And in the hospitality industry, providing a positive, if not memorable, customer experience is critical to your survival.

Social Listening to Restaurant Reviews helps improve CX

The real asset that any restaurant chain has is its loyal, repeat customer base. The walk-ins and dine-ins grow with positive word of mouth. So what really drives this loyalty and advocacy? Quality food, a great ambiance, and overall memorable customer experience are what will keep your tables filled. In the age of digital technology, with platforms like Zomato, Yelp, Dine, Zagat, and Trip Advisor, a restaurant simply cannot shy away from reviews. In the case of a restaurant chain, online brand reputation is vital to maintain your business’ health.

You might be checking with your customers if they enjoyed the experience when seeing them off. Some restaurants go a step forward and actually ask for reviews and comments on a paper. But this isn’t 1990. Customers do express their feedback online, which is publicly available. These ratings and reviews keep accumulating over time and show up prominently when potential consumers search for your restaurant.

Hundreds of reviews of great experience drive new consumers to walk in and try your restaurant. Poor overall ratings act as a barrier. Which is what makes real-time feedback so important. It is impossible for you to read a customer’s mind and know what is bothering them. Which is why asking for reviews and actively using social listening to follow restaurant reviews online is a must. Customers who had a bad experience with you may not tell you about it if not asked and will shift to a rival brand. The risk of losing customers is much higher if you do not take care of the standard of customer experience you provide.

Tackling Reviews and Restaurant Chains getting Troublesome?

The key to running a successful hospitality business is making your customers feel special. Personalization is one way to do so. Customer experience management will help you map their likes, dislikes, and recommendations. Work on these insights to woo your customers into becoming your loyal customers. It is important to put together both public feedback as well as feedback collected using your feedback forms and understand what impacts customer experience.

Tackling the many reviews and recommendations coming your way can become cumbersome. The problem intensifies when you own a chain of restaurants at different locations. Social media management platforms specialize in helping you here. Seeking reviews physically at all branches becomes impossible and hence listening to digital insights keenly is all the more essential. Our social listening tool Auris has been custom-made to address such issues. Viewing the performance across locations requires a central system. Auris’ dashboard presents a snapshot of customer experience across all your locations and insights on where and how to improve.

Location-based insights and keyword-based insights really help you to zero in on the minute problems your team/customers might be facing. The analysis breaks down the scenario for you effortlessly. Keywords like “Late Delivery”, “Minnesota” tell you that the delivery team at the Minnesota restaurant failed to meet expectations. Get issues resolved before your customers move to your rival brands.

It is vital to maintain your online image. When prospective customers visit you, they have expectations set based on your campaigns and marketing efforts. Managing their expectations and delivering quality experience is what will set your business apart and gain you loyal customers. An unhappy customer could cause a with just one bad review. Social listening to restaurant reviews not only helps you stay vigilant but also manages any crisis situation in time.

Social Listening for Recruitment

Social media is being used in every field, from research to recruitment. Social media sites today serve as a friendly place for employers to advertise their openings and for employees to hunt for a job. In fact, Adweek says 92% of companies use social media for recruitment. Recruitment via social media has become so mainstream that we have sites like LinkedIn which serve as a professional platform for employers and employees to connect with each other. However, you should know where to look for the right jobs or star candidates. Social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter too have business pages that belong to small or medium-sized third party recruitment enterprises. People use social media like Instagram, DeviantArt, and Behance to create their portfolios. This is where social listening for recruitment can prove to be of real help, by simply aiding the process of finding a candidate or a job for both parties.

How does Social Listening for Recruitment work?

With 92% of companies using social media for recruitment courting the millions of job applicants whose CVs and portfolios are posted online, one can only imagine the vast sea of data available. Selecting the right candidate is impossible unless we connect with the correct data. Social listening tools help you every step of the way when targeting the right group and short-listing the right applicants.

Define Keywords and Filter your Data

Every social listening tool is meant to accumulate data, group it and analyze relevant bits for you. Social listening for recruitment follows the same process. You may set up keyword-specific searches based on the industry, job skills or the specific roles being targeted. You can simply listen to the chatter related to “#interiordesignerjobs” to seek or fill a role in the field. Social listening helps you procure specific as well as generic data results. Search filters are a great feature within social listening tools which help you to narrow down your search to the very specific requirements.

Encourage the Social Media Participation of your Employees

Businesses suffer serious losses when open roles go unfilled as prospective applicants are turned away by negative online reviews left by previous employees, on online forums like Glassdoor and even Quora. Listening to what your existing employees have to say about you on social media can also help to build your image as an employer online, and act as the best way to attract wary job applicants. Happy employees generally spread the good word about you, and help you to attract similar-minded, talented candidates. Engaging with employees and helping them to succeed at work can be an employer’s way of ensuring that their employees go on to share their success stories and positive feedback about the office online.

Monitor Employer Brand Image

Online reputation management is a critical element for businesses today. It is critical on two critical fronts – one as a sound online reputation is what attracts more customers and then as an employer who needs to attract the right talent to apply for open roles. Monster’s Joe Buzienski says “make sure your company’s image, in words, photos, and videos, is consistent across Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, and other platforms”. This makes monitoring your employer brand image important. Monitor not just what your customers think about your brand. Listen to all the chatter from professional forums like Reddit, Glassdoor et cetera to know what potential future employees think of your brand and whether your present employees are liking it at work.

Many companies have come up with other creative uses of social listening tools for recruitment. Some use listening tools to track popular hashtags for recruitment and use them for their posts to help candidates understand their company’s culture and so on. Social recruitment has a lot of aspects related to it. Emilie Mecklenborg, social media manager at Alexander Mann Solutions spoke about them during her recent #RecruitWithData chat on Twitter. She believes social listening can be a powerful tool for employer branding. And that it could be used to engage with passive candidates and help them to get to know your organization. Experts have long predicted that social media would completely change the process of hiring, and maybe social listening is another step towards it.

Are you using a Social Media Scanner?

Do you know what your target customers want and expect from your brand? Marketers often get confused about how to effectively use social media analytics or retrieve insights and put them to use. Social media scanners like social listening tools allow you to track and analyze the conversations which happen online. Social media marketing comes in many layers and strategizing your social media listening efforts can help you understand your customers better and stay ahead of your competitors. Social media scanners can include social media monitoring and/or social listening tools.

What is Social Media Scanning?

As the name suggests, social media scanning includes scanning mentions, comments, and reviews over the Internet to get a sense of what the audience thinks about you. This can typically be take two approaches – social media monitoring and social listening. The most common misconception today is the belief that social media monitoring and social listening are the same. Though both act as social media scanners, they have distinctly different jobs to do.

Social monitoring is scans social media mentions on the surface. It alerts you about the mentions, comments, and reviews involving your brand name or tracks a keyword which you wish to monitor. This helps you stay alert in case there is a bad review or even a positive one. Acting immediately can help save a crisis moment and/or gain you a brand advocate.

Social Listening builds upon the data monitored. It dives deep into analysis. Social listening helps you derive insights from the gathered data, for instance, the overall sentiment, consumer interests, trending topics and campaigns, competitor analysis et cetera.

Does Social Media Scanning Benefit all Businesses?

In the digital age, social media presence is as crucial as breathing for a living being, provided they have a business that has an online presence and wishes to grow it through online marketing. Social media marketing involves an intricate level of strategizing too. Before you post any content, you should know what your customers are interested in. Social media is a place that can earn your brand name overnight fame or destroy it with one negative comment or review which could go viral. Examples of such debacles include names like Starbucks. Starbucks faced public backlash over a racially charged incident. They had to shut down 8000 U.S stores in an attempt to restore the community’s faith in them after a video went viral.

J.W. Marriott at Chandigarh India recently got smothered by Twitter comments after actor Rahul Bose commented on the overpriced bananas they served him.

Research your target audience and their persona a little before you launch your social media profile and campaigns. Monitoring them diligently thereafter can be your mantra to successful social media marketing.

Benefits of Social Media Scanning

Social media scanning is crucial to the health of your brand. But how exactly does it help? Imagine knowing everything each of your customers or prospects thinks of or wants from your brand. Once you know what they require, you would know whether you meet expectations or not. You would know what to improve, or how to convince them that your product can meet their needs. Well, with social media scanners you would no longer have to estimate or guess your consumers’ thoughts and reactions. People today are active social media users and they express their opinions and thoughts quite openly on the Internet. Tracking such relevant comments and drawing insights from the data is the job of a social media scanner.

Real-Time Consumer Feedback

Social media scanners keep a check on every mention or comment that is made online and keeps you alerted through real-time notifications. This helps you prevent a crisis moment in case of a negative review or to engage actively with customers looking for or appreciating your service. Real-time feedback helps you improve your audience engagement and can easily earn you loyal customers.

Consumer Insights

Listening to online reviews can help you zero in on the problems your teams might be facing. It might be a tactical or an operational issue. Social media scanners can really help here in the case of franchisee chains where it becomes mandatory for all the establishments to maintain a specific standard in customer service. Social listening can interpret any glitches based on locations. Pinpointing the problem becomes much easier as does solving the issue.

Understanding the Industry and your Competition

Keep your friends close, your enemies closer. Social media scanners help you notice the changes, trends, and innovations happening within your industry thus helping you adapt to them in time. Also, keeping an eye on your competitors gets easier. Social listening can help you understand the demographics, the specific audience your competitors are targeting, and what exactly they are pitching and how. Are their customers happy, why or why not? It can become easy to take inspiration and adapt your business model based on the intelligence gained.

Whether you own a small business or a large one, social media and digital marketing need to be managed correctly. Homegrown businesses have become popular thanks to the power of social media. But the same platform can ruin businesses, so it is important that we dedicate the required time and ongoing efforts needed to manage the perception we created online and the reputation we established.

How do you Run Social Media Analytics for your Brand?

Companies have experienced the horrors of instant defamation as well as the power of overnight success, thanks to social media. It could take just one viral Tweet or a poor review on Facebook to make your brand lose all its shine while a glowing review could make it shine even more. There’s no doubt that social media provides an excellent platform for your business to grow but not everyone knows how to navigate its complex boundaries. How is anyone to know which of their Tweets or posts would be received positively and which might fare badly and actually get them trolled? The answer depends entirely upon how well and how much you understand your audience. Social media analytics helps you with this research.

How do Social Media Analytics help?

Social media analytics is a tool that helps you gauge relevant information to measure your brand’s performance based on the data collected from social media and review platforms. These numbers may showcase both quantitative and qualitative aspects of your social media presence like audience growth, click-through rates, content engagement, sentiment analysis, topic clouds et cetera. Sounds simple? The insights which can be drawn are quite complex though. These numbers and charts can tell you everything from how well your posts are performing, how many click-throughs resulted in one sale, how to capture/convert buying signals and so on.

Numbers tell Half your Brand’s Story

Most marketers track the numbers, but not everyone gets the real picture. Numbers definitely speak of the growth in audience engagement or the increase in the number of click-throughs. And it is great when the numbers are positive. Only, all of it is very relative. The quantitative has to be included with the qualitative to understand the complete scenario. When there’s an increased number of brand mentions or an increase in the engagement rate, we need to check if it is positive. Customers could be posting negative reviews. An increase in negative reviews may see an increased number of brand mentions but it will not exactly be a desirable state of affairs. A comprehensive social media strategy needs to be in place to look at the total picture and initiate suitable corrective measures based on the situation.

Social Media Monitoring and Social Media Analytics

All the reasons stated until this point tell us why it is important to keep an eye on the other metrics which measure our performance on social media. You can also use a social listening tool to monitor social media to gather data and analyze the public mood for your brand. Social media monitoring tools also help you to analyze the trending topics and may help you to zero in on the pain points of your customers or target groups. If your company has received 100 comments on a given day and 40 of them mention “delayed delivery”, it could be taken as an alert and a call to take immediate corrective action and make appropriate amends. Tracking social media metrics also helps you see the influencer scores of all your supporters. Any user with a high influencer score who has enjoyed your brand’s product or service can be recruited to act as your advocate on social media. Spreading a positive word of mouth can never hurt.

Social media tracking can also help you to improve your customer service by being actively responsive to their concerns. According to J.D Power, “67% of consumers have used a company’s social media site for servicing, compared with 33% for social marketing”. These efforts might not affect the numbers immediately but can definitely help build the brand’s image.

It’s time you took advantage of social media analytics to boost your own brand’s image.

Listening to what the Internet said on World Mental Health Day

Our world is a curious place and the people around us are beset by many problems. One of them is the growing number of people falling prey to mental health issues. This World Mental Health Day, we decided to take a peek at the discussions happening on the Internet to get an idea of how the public engages with the issue. If it is still considered a taboo, whether the awareness is spreading and whether there is more acceptance. According to the National Institute of Mental Health, one in every five people suffers from mental illness in the US. Despite the numbers being this scary, people are afraid to speak out about their discomfort because of the fear of being judged. This year, the day was dedicated to increasing the focus on suicide prevention and building awareness against the stigmatization of mental health.

World Mental Health Day 2019 on Social Media

Gender Issues

We found that women talk more freely about mental health on social media; when we tracked the chatter related to World Mental Health Day for over 2 weeks. Of the 15000+ comments, 60% were from female social media users.

This higher number of female commentators can perhaps be a result of the fact that women are generally the guardians of a family’s health matters or perhaps because men tend to be reticent and speak less about matters which involve their emotions. We refer to the commonly held belief that ‘real men’ do not talk about their feelings or that is not masculine to be weak. This could be a reason why men do not open up about their mental health issues.

Focus on Awareness and Suicide Prevention

This year’s world mental health day posts were focussed mainly upon spreading awareness about the symptoms, suicide rates, and the prevention of suicide.

One of the opinions worthy of mention was how every day should be considered a mental health day. It should be okay for people to talk about mental issues and discomfort every day. Not just on one day in a year.

Many companies participated in spreading awareness as part of their social media campaign for the day. Stubborn Raven Publishing House shared an interesting post highlighting literary works with messages in them regarding mental illness.

Concerns about Patients dropping Treatment

Posts that expressed negative sentiments on the topic were from Jammu and Kashmir, where the restrictions and curfews are making it hard for patients to go in for their regular reviews or obtain the necessary medications which treat their condition. Social media posts and top retweets from social media users in Jammu and Kashmir were such complaints. These should be taken as positive developments because people are willing to seek treatment/medication and worried when they or their loved ones are unable to do so.

Trending Hashtags on World Mental Health Day 2019

Some of the most-used hashtags on the day included:

#HelloYellow – a movement started to support children and young people’s mental health on World Mental Health Day. People were encouraged to wear yellow and make donations to support the cause.

#ItsOkNotToBeOk – This hashtag took on alongside #HelloYellow highlighting the fact that it is OK to speak about your illness/feelings. People tend to consider mental health issues to be a stigma and refuse to talk about them.

#WMDG2019 – Almost every post related to mental health on Oct 10th used this hashtag making it one of the top trending tags.

Location-based Mentions

The United Kingdom was among the top locations with the most number of mentions.

Prince Harry visited communities in Nottingham which work with mental health issues on the occasion of World Mental Health Day to make the mentions skyrocket for places in the UK.

Overall, the sentiment was positive on social media. Many people shared their issues online. On the occasion of World Mental Health Day, let’s all pledge to listen carefully to the issues of our friends and family, support them in their efforts to cope with their anxieties and mental disturbances and do our bit to help save a life, perhaps.

Social Listening to Instagram – Why is it Critical For Lifestyle Brands?

The number of social networking sites online keeps growing by the day with no signs of abating. Given the high number of players, the competition to be at the top of the list and be top-of-mind as the most used social media platform also keeps on growing commensurately. Facebook has long been recognized to be the platform with the most active users but has fallen from grace with the cropping up of privacy issues and concerns. Instagram is now a strong contender for the top position among social media platforms and has over a billion monthly active users and sees 60% of its subscribers signing in on a daily basis. The fact that the engagement on Instagram happens through visual images, which are always far more attractive than other media, may have contributed to its popularity. So, it should come as no surprise that marketers have also started embracing Instagram for businesses to diversify their social media marketing portfolios. This makes social listening to Instagram a top priority for marketers.

The top three countries to use Instagram are the United States, Brazil, and India. Among business users, of the top 100 brands in the world, 90 have an Instagram account. In fact, it has been observed that engagement with brands is 10 times higher on Instagram when compared to Facebook.

Is Social Listening to Instagram Necessary for Lifestyle Brands Too?

As mentioned earlier, business engagement is higher on Instagram than on any other social media site, leaving even Facebook behind. This fact was established by a News Whip’s study, which compared the engagement rate for some well-known lifestyle brands across Instagram and Facebook.

And it is quite evident that Instagram is really ahead. If you are a lifestyle brand, your target audience is the younger generation, which makes Instagram the place to be. Over half of Instagram’s user base is aged 34 years or under. This is how Harley Davidson engaged with the younger audience by launching an Instagram carousel ad targeting men between the age groups of 18-35. The ad showed illustrations inspired by the so-called biking culture.

By now we have established the fact that as a lifestyle brand, Instagram is one of the prime locations for you to advertise on and get consumer insights from. It is, after all, a social media platform that the millennials take really seriously. So you would want to know if your product or brand received a negative comment or mention there.

The Benefits of Social Listening to Instagram

Instagram’s growing popularity makes it important for businesses to follow every comment, every mention with the utmost attention. Social listening to Instagram is meant to keep you updated on every mention, shout out or question your customer may post.

Measure Brand Health on Instagram

Social listening to Instagram does not necessarily include tracking mentions and hashtags only. Your customer may have tagged their friend to your post and added a mellow comment. Social listening tools such as Auris help you pick up such comments and analyze the tone, the sentiment, whether your customer likes your post or if it is a criticism. Social listening tools can draw up a bigger picture of how your brand is performing online. They present a true snapshot of what customers think of your brand/ad campaigns/products. And the need for specificity is handled well too. The search facility available with such tools allows you to track very specific aspects. If you want leads, set up a search for comments/hashtags mentioning “Recommendations for” and so on.

Understand the Demographics Better and run Targeted Campaigns

You can reach your target audience better if you know more about them. Social listening tools can also help you to understand the demographic details of your audience better. Information about your target group’s gender divide ratio, the age groups et cetera is important for you to plan a campaign right. Trying to attract a youthful hip population with ads showing vintage materials might not work out as well as you might have imagined. Social listening into the interests of your audience, however, allows you to crosscheck.

Discover Great Content using Hashtag Monitoring

Many brands have tried to promote their stories using brand hashtags. Texas tourism is a great example of this. They encourage their audience to use their brand hashtag #TexasToDo. It is one trendy hashtag among Texas travelers these days. Tracking hashtags within your own industry can tell you about all the other trending hashtags within the industry. The top posts help you discover great content that might just act as an inspiration for your upcoming campaigns. It can also help you find influencers within your industry.

Engage with Users on their Comments and Direct Messages in Real-Time

What more, you can interact with your customers on a first-hand basis and learn of their opinions in real-time. Customers enjoy such attention to their needs. This may also be useful to promote a positive image for your brand.

Listening to your customers and improving your brand is never a bad idea. A top-notch product and world-class customer service are always welcome. If you need to know how to reach there, all you have to do is ask your customers using surveys and questionnaires, investing time and money. You can also simply listen to them using a social listening tool. Instagram is one very popular platform which offer up a lot of data to help you gain precise insights.