Why and How do We Monitor Social Media Mentions?

Understanding how social media mentions work is easy when you know the benefits of monitoring and know how to do it. Monitoring social media mentions allows you to know every time someone mentions your brand name online. It can be a user leaving a review or a prospect asking for a review. And every time/anytime this happens, you get notified. Primarily this is a great tool to gauge the amount of buzz around your brand. However, when you look deeper, monitoring social media mentions can be a lot more than that. We are here to tell you why it’s important and how to monitor social media mentions.

Why Should You Monitor Social Media Mentions?

The reasons for monitoring social media mentions are limitless. At the outset, it helps your social media manager to listen to and engage with your audience members. Listening to different channels and what people have to say also helps with market research. You have a massive sample audience and genuine comments.

Besides market research, monitoring social media mentions help other departments. To be more specific:

Mentions, when they are comments or reviews from customers, can help your product development and customer service team.
If a user mentions your brand to enquire about your service or product, they are a part of the sales funnel. This in turn helps your sales team.

Overall, the insights you derive from monitoring your social media mentions builds a great foundation for your business decisions.

How do We Monitor Social Media Mentions?

The most obvious method of listening to social media mentions relies on notifications. However, the many limitations of this process make it less than ideal. Firstly, it isn’t always humanly possible to go through the volume of mentions with a fine-tooth comb. Secondly, notifications only send you an alert, not the analysis behind it.

Automation tools like social listening on the other hand make the process flow easier. Most of us have heard of social listening. But knowing how to monitor would help you derive the maximum value out of the tool.

Meet the Audience

When you start listening to the conversation around your brand name/industry keywords, you’ll have access to your niche audience. While monitoring your brand name you’ll know what your audience thinks about your brands. Go through the reviews, suggestions, and comments. This gives you a sense of what they need and expect. Direct feedback is invaluable. Listening to your consumers and acting on their feedback also allows you to build a relationship with them and retain them.

Social listening tools allow you to listen to your competitor’s audience too. And there is a lot to learn from them as well. How are they different from your audience members? Which influencer are they following? What do they like or hate about your competitor’s product? These insights help you make important decisions for your business.

Actionable Insights help Strategize

Listening tools alert you every time your brand or keyword is mentioned. This is helpful because a negative feedback can spread quickly. Dimensional Research’s study concluded that among the respondents, 50% of customers would share a bad experience with a brand on social media. In such a case, an alert can help your team prevent a crisis before it goes too far.

You also know about the people who trust your brand. These advocates help you earn more customers and business. And monitoring social media mentions helps you find your brand advocates.

Lastly, monitoring your brand mentions or industry keywords helps you understand the overall picture. Which topics are trending? What do people like about your brand? What do customers want you to improve? These insights help you to strategically plan for your product development or future campaigns.

Social media marketing is no longer limited to posting digital catalogs and gathering likes. Smart marketers are engaging customers in meaningful conversations. And gaining consumer intelligence by monitoring social media mentions is one of the best ways to do it.

Social Listening helped Grocery Chain Kroger during this Pandemic

When the pandemic set in, every aspect of life shifted to the online sphere. The use of social media which has forever been on the rise saw a phenomenal bump up in the past few months. Brands realized the effectiveness of social listening in managing brand reputation. Here’s how social listening helped the grocery chain, Kroger, during the pandemic.

The Brand in Picture – Kroger, America’s Grocery Giant

The American chain of supermarkets, Kroger Co. is the largest grocery chain in America and the second-largest hypermarket chain in the world. All this without even expanding overseas. This brand boasts of having 3000 locations in the United States and of employing over 435 thousand people.

Being a massive brand with an equally massive reputation to manage can be tough especially during uncertain times. This is why this 136-year-old grocery store relied on social listening during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Grocery stores saw a surge in demand during the initial months of the pandemic. Sales in the grocery sector shot up by almost 27% in March. Though the pandemic increased grocery sales it threw some uncertainty even to this industry, which usually depends on predictable buying patterns. However, the enormous increase in demand put excess strain on the supply chain. Most supermarkets realized their weaknesses in maintaining inventory and handling safe-shopping protocols et cetera.

At such an hour, Kroger keyed into consumer sentiments to know about their needs in real-time.

How Social Listening Helped Grocery Chain Kroger?

Kroger adopted a three-pronged approach to marketing during the pandemic. They worked closely with a partner agency to listen to and analyze daily conversations in the US. The three pillars of their marketing strategy included:

Educating customers,
Customer support, and
Sending out positive/uplifting messages

Helped to Identify Trends

The brand paid attention to the conversation about the cultural unrest and the Black Lives Matter movement. “The team did a really nice job of quickly identifying and elevating black creators,” said Emily Hartman, Kroger’s director of brand building.

Helped in Managing Marketing Operations

Kroger had been investing millions in forward-looking technology over the years. However, the suddenness of the pandemic caught the brand off guard and they were failing to keep pace. This is when Kroger worked extensively with the partner firm to get insights via social listening analyses. The executives knew that such reporting is important for any business. However, they noticed that it had become one of the top things on the agenda as a driver for customer engagement on social media during the pandemic.

“It was the quickest way to get feedback from our customers and consumers, in general, on what was going on in sort of the macro [sense],” Hartmann said about Kroger’s social listening. “Some of the things you were reading, you could actually [take action] on it far more [effectively].”

Helped Derive Key Consumer Insights to Stay in Business

Being able to listen to the needs of the customers helped Kroger stores to install customer needs faster. This allowed the stores to give out the information. They answered consumer concerns regarding safety measures and changes in store operations. Kroger was also able to implement changes quickly, like when people suggested early shopping hours for senior citizens.

Helped them Advertise Better

The team at Kroger was able to listen to what people were saying on social media. They could even pick up on the rising sentiment of empathy for frontline workers. And almost immediately, they were able to deploy messaging centered around the employees, particularly store associates.

The Coronavirus hit businesses across the world and most businesses were caught off-guard. As a grocery chain, Kroger is just another one among such brands. How they dealt with the adverse conditions sets them apart. And, the way social listening helped Kroger during the pandemic shows the power of social media and automation when they work together.

How Social Listening Drives Market Research?

Every company indulges in an extensive market research procedure. As they should. Proper market research is key to how successful a business is. This activity helps you understand and plan the most crucial aspects of your business. You may want to know about your campaign effectiveness, competitors, or customer segmentation. Even for this, market research is the way to go. However traditional approaches to market research have their limitations. Most businesses are now shifting to more modern techniques of doing market research. Social listening is one such tool and we are here to explain how social listening drives market research.

Why Social Listening over Traditional Techniques?

When we say traditional techniques of market research the most obvious options come to mind. Options such as surveys, focus groups, interviews et cetera. The disadvantages of all these options are almost the same. They reflect the feelings and opinions of a small sample group. The researcher might not ask the right questions. Sometimes participants may feel shy to voice their true thoughts or say what they truly feel. Sometimes consumers may answer the survey, without even knowing about the product or having formed any opinion of that product or service at that time.

All these factors can lead to a very skewed perception of your business’ performance or success rate.

Real-Time Actionable Insights

Social listening drives market research in a more scientific way. Social listening to social media conversations happens in real-time. So the feedback and insights which come in are in real-time as well. For traditional methods, the data collected for research may become outdated by the time the whole process is wrapped up. While on the other hand, social listening companies have access to current information.

Speed and Convenience

Social listening analyzes the information at a much faster rate than traditional methods of surveying and reporting. This tool also makes the entire process extremely convenient. There is no need for a massive team to run the tool and make sense of the insights. The tool makes most of the work automated.

Accuracy

With social media listening, the responses from the consumers are unprompted. As netizens, we often talk about our experiences with brands on social media without being actively asked. These words truly represent our thoughts and feelings about the product or service. Listening to these makes the data more accurate than the data collected via traditional market research methods.

Affordable

One of the primary reasons why social listening is booming as a technique for market research is that it’s affordable. Owing to the fact that the tool is fast and simple to use, it doesn’t need other inputs such as a large team to operate it. In traditional methods, most of the work is done by individuals. This means a lot has to be invested in setting up the team, training them, and then carrying out the process.

How does Social Listening Drive the Market Research Process?

The most interesting ways social listening can supplement your market research is by:

1. Helping you Know your Target Segment

Your reality might not be the same as your customer’s reality. What you may perceive as an excellent marketing message may backfire. Social listening tools filter data based on sentiment analysis, demographics, influence scores, and a lot more. This allows you to know your audience’s wants and needs. This also helps you make decisions about market segmentation based on the detailed analysis.

2. Setting a Competitive Benchmark

The first thing any business owner wants to know is how they are going as compared to others within the industry. A major chunk of traditional market research reports is dedicated to competitors. With social listening, the whole process becomes even more exciting. In addition to you being able to monitor your brand in real-time, you get to monitor them as well.

3. Harnessing both Quantitative and Qualitative data

Data-driven decision making is the way to go. Checking up the numbers before you invest or implement a change is always the right thing to do. However, numbers alone do not always tell the whole story. Let’s look at an example. Let’s say your brand has been running a marketing campaign across all your social media accounts. You are using a brand hashtag (say #ABC) for the campaigns. While looking at the metrics you see a massive engagement score for your brand’s hashtag #ABC.

Now, simply looking at the numbers you arrive at a conclusion that your campaign is doing really well. But in fact, if you were to look into the qualitative side of it, you would see that most of the engagement your hashtag has been getting is negative. People are not happy with the campaign and they are commenting negatively on your posts.

Social listening helps you put things in perspective as it presents the quantitative and qualitative sides of analytics together.

4. Getting Actionable Feedback in Real-Time

You can gauge your brand’s strengths and weaknesses by monitoring social media conversations in real-time. And since you get an alert immediately every time someone mentions your brand, you can just move into action and manage your online reputation. The most important application is that it helps you prevent negative feedback from turning into a crisis moment well in time.

Artificial intelligence – the force behind tools like social listening is evolving each day. And even at this nascent stage, it is powerful enough to help businesses and world organizations predict trends and make decisions. Hopefully, this article helped you see how social listening drives market research and is the best-suited method in the current age of technology.

Social Media Analytics for Small Businesses

Companies in modern times do not require a massive capital budget to get started. The costs and methods of marketing one’s products are transformed beyond all recognition. This has been made possible by the advent of social media and the tools that complement its use. With social media, even a small business has the largest audience to reach out to. And with the right tools, they reap profits with minimal investments and in no time. Social media analytics for small businesses does exactly this.

What makes Social Media Analytics Crucial for Small Businesses?

Social media analytics tools are more important for small businesses than for larger corporations. When you are running a small business you have to focus on building a strong brand image. You have to keep working on improving your reach and visibility while ensuring that your reputation is positive. All this, while you are on a little budget. The CMO Survey reports that over 60%of marketers face pressure about proving ROI. And as a small firm with a tight budget, it is understandable that you would want to only implement things that work.

With social media analytics, it’s smart-work more than hard-work. The difficulty of marketing your small business lies in the fact that you have limited resources. Unlike MNCs, you might not have a large team or a big budget. Also, you will have to take care of every aspect of the business within your limited time.

Social media analytics helps with each of these limitations. With a proper tool:

You don’t need much time or a large team. The tool makes your job easier by making most of the work automated.
Powerful analytics help you optimize your social media and online performance.
Every strategy or campaign you plan is data-driven.
You get automated insights and recommendations from across multiple online sources on a single dashboard. Some tools also deliver customized reports built around your company’s performance on a daily/weekly/monthly basis.
You get help with not only the marketing side of things. The tool brings you data about your target audience thus helping your sales team. It brings you real-time customer feedback and sentiment analysis helping the customer service aspect of your business and much more.

Why Use Social Media Analytics for Small Businesses?

As a business owner of the new age, you already know the value of online marketing. Social media Analytics only helps you perfect your efforts. Let’s look at how social media analytics helps small businesses specifically in generating the following:

Visibility and Lead Generation

As a new brand, you need to find your customers before they find you. One of the greatest ways to do that without splurging on lead generation applications is to invest in social listening. Social listening is a part of social media analytics that allows you to listen to every comment or conversation happening online across the globe on any topic. Just feed in your topic of interest and listen to who is saying what. This gives you a sense of the kind of people looking for your service/product. This brings to light the people who are interested in your industry. You even find out the experts/advocates/influencers from your industry.

Better Insights for your Business Functions

Invest in a quality social media analytics tool and monitor every possible metric on one dashboard. What does that do? It helps you make data-driven decisions for each function within your business. Identify which content works best for your audience members. What are the common complaints? Which are the most frequently asked questions about your product/service? What more needs to be done?

And the metrics do not stop at that. You get to compare your performance across social channels with that of your competitors. Keep an eye on how well you are doing against your competitors. Get personalized reports and suggestions to help improve your performance going forward.

Save Time and Money

Most importantly, social media analytics helps small businesses save the two most valuable resources – time and money. You get quick updates/alerts about every comment/mention made mentioning your business online. You also have access to automated engagement features and an easy-to-use dashboard to help you understand and respond to your audience.

Intrigued? We don’t blame you. The tool comes with a whole array of essential features to make anyone want to try using it for their business. To help put your inquisitive mind to rest, we are inviting you to take Auris for a trial run and realize the power of social media analytics for yourself.

Generate more Sales with Social Listening

Social media is increasingly being used each passing day. A study puts the screentime of people at 3 hours 15 minutes a day – liking, commenting, or conversing with each other. Tapping into these conversations can prove to be really valuable for your business. By using the right social listening tactics you can zero in on relevant information while drowning out the noise. Taking proactive business decisions based on these insights can help the brand in many ways. Generating more sales with social listening is one of the most significant uses of a social listening tool.

But before that, What’s Social Listening?

Social listening is the act of monitoring and tracking mentions of news about your brand (or any keyword you wish to monitor). Social listening tools track the data, organize and analyze it, and present actionable insights to the end-user.

The traditional uses of social listening include real-time alerts, online reputation monitoring, influencer marketing, content generation, etc. But the insights can help you generate leads for your brand too.

How to Generate more Sales using Social Listening?

The most obvious way this works is that you get notified every time someone is looking for a service or product related to your industry. If they comment online mentioning the keywords you are tracking, you will get notified.

Say you own a catering service company. And you are tracking mentions for “Catering services” across social media platforms, you would be notified of this:

However, this is a straightforward way of landing leads and isn’t the only way. Let’s look at some other options to help generate more leads and sales.

Know your Target Audience and Their Needs

To get more leads you need to be reaching out or advertising to the right set of people. A diabetic person might not react as enthusiastically to your sweet shop advert as other people. However, in case you do wish to offer them your product, they might have specific needs. They might want a low-sugar/sugar-free version of your product. It is key to know about your potential customer’s position, their wants, and needs.

Another fitting example of listening done right is the one about the medical brand Tylenol. They discovered that a large number of knitters complain about eye strain and the resultant migraine headaches. As a result, they found a new target group. The brand adjusted their SEO to reach more of this target audience.

And you do not need to go around guessing the information. Believe it or not, people share a lot of their preferences online. They speak about what they like in a product or what they don’t. Your social listening tool helps you to find these out. You simply need to make sure you are listening to the relevant keywords. And although this might seem like an easy step, marketers often make the mistake of not including the right keywords.

Boost Brand Awareness

The more people know about your brand, your products, and services, the more they are likely to try you out. In today’s exceedingly competitive marketplace, every brand is fighting for a percentage of the customer’s attention. Keeping an eye on who is talking about your brand helps you know what market share you own. Social listening tools make it easier. Tools like Auris help you determine your overall SOV, SOE, sentiment analysis, and much more.

Once you are aware of these counts, you can dive deeper into the analysis to find ways to fix the problems and gain more hold. Social listening tools offer the complete package – from diagnosis to cure!

Reach out to Unhappy Customers and Convert them

While listening to the conversations online, you may discover that sometimes unhappy customers are the reason you’re not gaining many sales. This is because, in today’s world, reviews are extremely crucial. If an unhappy customer leaves you negative feedback, others are reading it and forming a bad impression of doing business with your brand.

It is important to reach out to these customers who are unhappy with your product/service. Resolve the matter and take a positive testimony from them when they are happy. This not only makes that customer feel valued, but it also shows others how important your customers are to you, making it easier to attract more customers.

Millions of people are online every second and almost every one of them is a customer for some commodity or the other. People often end up buying products on social media that they are not even looking for, such is the power of this platform. How you are using the platform for your business depends on you. In case you were looking for some guidance, we hope this article on generating more sales with social listening helped.

The Ease of Business Decision Making with AI

Artificial Intelligence or AI is an ever-evolving field. We have only begun to scratch the surface in finding suitable uses and applications for this technology. The use of AI in deriving insights from data has changed the world of business decision making. Which is why we are here to talk about the ease of business decision making with AI.

How does Artificial Intelligence Positively Influence Business Decision Making?

The biggest benefit of artificial intelligence here is how it speeds up the process of business decision making. AI-based automation tools often help companies to improve operational efficiency. From scheduling posts to sending automated replies, AI has been helping us with everyday operations. However, most marketers stumble when it comes to business decision making. These decisions affect the entire organization and hence need to be carefully considered. And what better way to make decisions based on data directly from the horse’s mouth.

Analysis of Data in Real-Time

Marketers already know the value of social media. These platforms are buzzing with opinions, information, and data. This wealth of information can help business owners decipher how to improve their products or organizations. They can get an understanding of what customers want or what they don’t like.

AI tools for social listening can be helpful in this regard. Social listening captures raw data straight from actual people and customers. The data stream can be as wide, as global, or as specific as you want. And with time and accumulation of more historical data, the insights are almost extremely precise. This can help a company know its own position in the market and put in efforts to improve it.

Decisions powered by AI Predictions

Making business decisions is a part of every business function. And sometimes it is impossible to predict or identify trends through human analysis. Here’s a perfect example of the ease of business decision making with AI:

AI helped the management of a major store notice a trend that they otherwise would have never noticed. Their AI tool found a correlation between the purchase of diapers and beers on Friday nights. Though confused by this counterintuitive insight, they tried placing the items closer together, they did see a significant upswing in the sales of both items. Such specific and precise insights can help your business plan some strategy around it.

One of the major contributions of AI tools like social media listening has been in the field of research and development. It has helped businesses understand the complexities of different buyer personas and their requirements. This information helps the brand to align its product or service by the requirements. Similarly, insights about marketing campaigns or customer service experiences help business owners. They know where to look in a department to fix pain points.

Automated Processes

Automation in business usually brings to the mind an image of a manufacturing assembly line. In recent times, however, AI has brought automation to a lot of other business activities. Brands already use automation in various marketing and sales activities. From building and implementing sales funnels to sending emails on auto-pilot to a mailing list, automated processes make your process flow more efficient and quicker.

We have spoken a lot about brands that have been using AI successfully. These are famous brands like Netflix, Arby’s, Southwest Airlines et cetera. And if it weren’t for the ease of business decision making with AI tools, not many companies would be investing in these tools. If you still need to convince yourself about the power of AI tools for consumer insights, take Auris for a ride and see the difference it makes!

Tips to Boost your Ecommerce Business

The future of eCommerce looks bright. It is estimated that over 15% of all retail sales will shift to eCommerce by 2021 on a global scale. The retail eCommerce sales in the Asia Pacific are expected to be greater than in the rest of the world by 2023. With such massive growth within the industry, you can’t afford to lag behind. It’s time you start and boost your eCommerce business. The best way to boost growth for any business is to excel at customer service. It’s also a given way to build more loyal customers. Here’s the strategy for you to get going.

Boost your eCommerce Business by Building Customer Loyalty

When is a buyer more inclined to return as a customer? When we offer quality products!? Sure, but your brand isn’t the only one offering quality products. It’s for how valued you make the customer feel. Data shows, about 40% of customers are likely to buy more from brands and keep returning to them when they acknowledge their birthday. This is a classic example of personalization in marketing.

People move away from generic messages. The best way to hold on to their attention is to show them you value them as customers. Imagine sending maternity gown promotional messages to a 70-year single man. It doesn’t make sense and hence does not convert into a sale. Knowing your audience is key to building an emotional connection with your potential customers.

1. Know Your Audience

When it comes to attracting new customers or even retaining existing customers, content plays a critical role. It could be via a blog post, a social media post/ad, or via a video promotion. More personalized content means more chances to convert a lead.

The best way to put forth personalized content is to study your audience well. Knowing about their interests and other demographic details helps to plan your message. Moreover, getting complete insight about the times when they are the most active, their purchasing habits, etc. helps you boost the organic traffic of your posts. You do not necessarily have to do the analysis on your own. Social media listening tools help track and measure each metric you require.

2. Expand Into Newer Markets

We mentioned tracking consumers’ conversations using social listening tools in the previous section. Now, while you are at it, you also have access to every need and requirement of your consumer. You also know what your audience thinks of your competitor brand. Use these insights to pick up on opportunities and market gaps.

If there is a need within your business scope, you will know thanks to the global stream of data feeding into your dashboard in real-time. Fulfill the need and boost your eCommerce revenue.

3. Post-Purchase Follow-Up

It is obvious that you need to retain your current customers before you try to attract new customers. The cost of attracting new customers is higher than retaining current customers. So you do not want to lose them. To make sure you have a loyal customer base, make sure you connect and follow up with them. Set up real-time alerts on your social listening platform. Every time a review or mention comes up, reach out to them and fix the issue to the best of your ability. This also helps improve your brand image and could help you gain more potential customers via word-of-mouth.

Final Words

Every time you strategize and implement a campaign or any business plan, it is critical that you monitor the results. Keep tracking and improvising to get better results. Social intelligence tools such as social listening are here to help you with all the analytical decision making.