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Is Social Media Listening Enough?

Business people and marketers today rely more on data to make decisions. 76% of marketers say they base their decisions on data analytics. And in this context, the social media analytics market is the one making all the waves. The social media analytics market is expected to grow to $15.6 billion by 2025. With access to a landscape so rich with data and insights, the question remains “Is social media listening enough?” In the absence of meaningful content to validate the quantitative findings, the data doesn’t provide much value. Hence, current methods of social media analytics offer a deeper social understanding of their audience members. The use of social media listening when limited to online mention monitoring can produce weak results. However, the same technology is being used today to understand the volatile social climate, consumer behavior et cetera. Adding these to the context makes social media listening enough!

Is social media listening enough

Mainstream Social Media Monitoring  

We are past the time when online presence meant maintaining a business page on Facebook and Twitter. Social media listening now informs marketers of every conversation around their brand. These have helped managers control and monitor conversation spikes, understand platforms et cetera. 

However, mainstream media monitoring is like exploring only the surface of an ocean. For instance, say somebody promotes a hoax that involves your brand name. People start talking about it. The hoax has now spread all over the internet. With social media monitoring, you would only know about the number of mentions you’re getting. You will have no idea if it is good publicity or bad. By the time you realize, the news would have spread and the damage would have been done. Your market and your stock price would have taken a hit!  

Qualitative Social Media Listening

In more recent times, a more qualitative approach was adopted for social media analytics. This approach helped marketers to understand how online conversations manipulate or are connected to consumer perceptions, behavior, etc. And to make this happen, a combination of AI tools and human interaction has to work together. 

Simply put, when human beings hold conversations and make comments online today, these tools gather the relevant bits of information from such content. The data is then quantified and processed to deliver a richer understanding of human needs. How does it help? Imagine the scenario mentioned earlier, with this new ability to read into data, the tool is able to alert the brand that most of the mentions are negative. The tool also alerts the team of the trending keywords being used. The team would know about the hoax almost instantly and could jump into action before it spreads around. 

And this is just one example of social listening being helpful in the case of online reputation management. This tool has been and is being used by many to:

  • Filter real-time feedback
  • Monitor industry news
  • Manage influencer marketing
  • Strategize social media plans and business operations et cetera.

Gathering real-time insights helps you understand the immediate needs of your customers. It can be their sentiment towards a new campaign you launched or a certain business function. Getting direct feedback helps you act faster than having to sit and make assumptions about what to do. If you are investing in building a brand, invest in the right solutions. The question of “Is social media listening enough” doesn’t come up if you’re using the right tool in the right way.

How do Marketers Reduce Noise in Social Listening?

Ever seen an advertisement that made you feel that the brand must have read your mind? It may seem like a trick, but this little magic trick has a lot going on behind the scenes. This represents the power of social listening and the analytical tools which come with the platform. The brand that showed you the ad could be practicing social listening. Simply put, it is all about tracking data on social media. Relevant bits of the data collected is then strategically used to inform business operations/decisions.  Listening to customers has been more than beneficial for marketers and hence the use of social listening is on the rise. However, social media is a busy place, with Twitter alone seeing over 6000 Tweets posted every second. And about 80-90% of this data is noise i.e, irrelevant. So how do marketers successfully reduce noise in social listening? 

How to reduce noise in social listening

The Power of Social Listening 

If you’re reading this article, chances are you have already heard of this tool or perhaps even used it sometime. Social media listening tools have already built a massive reputation among marketers. So what makes this tool so powerful? 

  • It uses real-time information to alert you of your competitor’s strategies, strengths, weaknesses, and tactics. 
  • Identifies trending content topics, trends, industry news, and much more.
  • Identifies gaps and opportunities in the market.
  • Improves customer servicing efforts. 
  • Informs research and development activities. 
  • Helps automate most marketing activities. 

Social listening is far beyond monitoring brand mentions. It pays attention to the full picture lurking behind these mentions. Auris, for example, helps you start analyzing things like:

  • Brand name mentions
  • Product names
  • Industry/brand-related buzzwords
  • Campaign keywords/phrases
  • Influencers
  • Audience sentiment 
  • And more…

Social listening lets you look at real-time consumer insights and make actionable decisions. And thanks to the rise of social media, every individual online is literally talking their head off. People are expressing their views at a rate of over 4.5 tweets per day. And 4.5 times of 152 million Twitter users can translate to a lot of irrelevant content. As already mentioned, that is on Twitter alone, without bringing Facebook, TikTok, Instagram, and the likes into the reckoning! Sifting out valuable data from the noise is the key to success at social listening. 

How do we Reduce Noise in Social Listening?

Consider the example of Apple Inc. Trying to listen to every conversation around Apple will bring in millions of mentions. And these mentions will also have mentions referring to the fruit. Listening to the right keywords is hence critical. Sometimes, however, the brand name is an extremely common term. 

Here are some tips on how to reduce noise in social listening:

The Right Keywords

Social listening tools aren’t very complicated to use. Setting up the right keywords can be a little tricky though. Getting the right set of keywords is key to yield the best results. The most obvious keyword for your brand would be your brand name, product name, company phrase et cetera. 

To reduce noise while tracking your brand’s name, make sure not to make typos or use generic terms. For instance, for Apple Inc, listening to the term Apple will not be ideal. It would be necessary to add keywords like Inc. and say “Apple Inc.” or “Apple phones” “iPhone” et cetera.

If you wish to track competitor mentions use their brand keywords. You can also use your brand name alternatives like “ABC alternatives” “ABC substitutes”.

The use of negative keywords and industry/niche-related keywords is another way to reduce noise. 

Using Filters

Auris offers many filter options to a user. These filter options allow listening to only the most relevant conversations. Another filter allows you to opt for listening to influencers based on their influencer scores. 

Setting up specific search queries along with the right filter can allow mining the exact data you’re looking for. 

The power of social listening has been realized by most successful brands. They use it for more than merely social media monitoring. This tool can help businesses analyze consumer behavior in generating quality leads. Hopefully, this guide helps you reduce noise in social listening and make the most of the tool. 

Top 5 Marketing Automation Trends for 2021

2021 is now here. Let us take this opportunity to look at the marketing automation industry. Why? According to Emailmonday, an average of 51% of companies are using marketing automation already and another 58% plan to use it in the near future. This only shows that the marketing automation industry is expected to grow and rightly so. Looking at these marketing automation trends, you’ll see how it streamlines your business. 

Top 5 Marketing Automation Trends for 2021

Marketing Automation Trends from 2020

2020 has made consumers stay online more than ever. 2021 will be about evolving in this sphere. It will be about providing unique and engaging experiences to the super-connected consumers. Here are some marketing automation trends which catalyze the said evolution. 

1 Marketing Automation will Continue to Grow

  • The marketing automation industry has been growing year-on-year. A study shows how it has grown by 27% in 2018. Studies also slate it to reach $25.1 billion annually by 2023. 
  • 75% of marketers are already using at least one marketing automation tool for their daily marketing operations. 
  • Over 70% of Indian marketers are using marketing automation for better lead conversion. 

2 Presence on Multiple Channels

  • Creating an omnichannel presence helps brands create a seamless experience for their customers. Automating specific processes across emails, social media, or search engine marketing makes the process less laborious. 
  • Integrating various platforms/channels to a single automation tool helps the brand. They can deliver more accurate, timely, and consistent information to the customers. 

3 Chatbots

  • Chatbots are already being heavily used today for automating the process of conversation with users. It will continue playing a crucial role in customer service.
  • Advances in Natural Language Processing (NLP) are allowing chatbots to become smarter and capable of behavioral recommendations. 
  • Chatbots enhance the customer experience. When a customer drops in a query, the chatbot responds immediately. Such rapid response enables the customer to trust your brand and builds goodwill. 

4 AI in Marketing 

  • According to Gartner, “Artificial Intelligence (AI) will be a mainstream customer experience investment in the next couple of years.”
  • 2020 has seen an enormous increase in the use of AI and Machine Learning for marketing operations. AI is helping companies reach the perfect audience with the optimal message. It helps with segmentation, workflows, data-driven decision-making, and much more. 

5  Automated Social Media Marketing 

  • The time we spend on social media has dramatically increased over the last year. Brands are hence making efforts to get a bigger piece of the audience’s screen time. Social media automation tools have come in handy to reach out to the right audiences. 
  • Social media automation tools like social listening also provide help with regard to other business functions. Brands have been using these tools for competitive analysis, ad targeting, influencer marketing, and much more. 

In Conclusion 

Automation has made its mark in almost every industry. Marketing automation trends for 2020 show us that this industry is not behind either. Brands are scramming for ways to create more engaging content, put out personalized online experiences. And automation tools deliver the best on all accounts. 

How to Track Branded Keywords?

In the world of social media, every user is online sharing their experiences. Your customers too are talking about their experiences. How your customers discuss your product or service online leaves a great impact on your business. It is critical to track branded keywords to understand the context in which your brand is being discussed online. 

How to track Branded Keywords

Most brands, these days, use social listening or have a regular Google check to keep up with the conversations. However, most of them are not receiving much value out of it! Tracking branded keywords brings in a sea of information most of which is noise. Filtering out valuable insights is a form of art. But it is not entirely difficult. With the help of these tricks, you’ll be able to derive the most out of online consumer insights. 

Tracking Branded Keywords

For most marketers, the objective is to find out more about the brand’s position in the market. Tracking branded keywords can help with this and a lot of other metrics like competitive benchmarking, sentiment analysis et cetera. 

Some of the proper ways to track branded keywords are:

Using Google

If your main focus is finding brand mentions on search engines, Google offers powerful solutions. Simply login to Google’s tool – Google Alerts! Set it up for your brand name and it will religiously track down all mentions of your brand across blogs and other articles. 

You can also use Google Analytics to see how queries related to your branded keyword are leading people to visit your website. 

Twitter/Instagram/Facebook Analytics

Managing your brand reputation online also means being aware of your social media reputation. One of the most common ways to check your social media performance is to opt for the platform’s native analytics. 

These tools are perfect for a quick look at the metrics. They tell you about your brand’s engagement rates, basic audience demographics, and even the time of the day/week at which your posts have the maximum engagement. This is all useful information when you’re trying to judge when to post your content or which audience to target. 

Social Listening – The Best Way to Track Branded Keywords

Think of your branded keywords and all the words or phrases related to them. Now imagine how wonderful it would be to have one tool tracking all these keywords at the same time. The tool also goes beyond basic metrics and analyzes the data for you. Does this sound like it would make life easier for you? Social listening tools do exactly what I just mentioned and more. 

You can use social listening to track branded keywords or campaigns or trending hashtags – anything you like. And the features don’t stop at this. 

Social listening helps you:

In addition, Auris presents customizable reports to help brand marketers receive timely updates about actionable insights. Head over to our previous blog posts if any of these use cases particularly interest you. 

Why are Branded Keywords Important?

The secret to the success of every brand marketer/content strategist is branded keywords. Branded keywords are also one of the best bets for an SEO win for any company. These  keywords offer valuable insights like:

  • How many people know about your brand?
  • What is your audience talking about you?
  • Your Top Competitors, and so on…

And chances are, you already know about monitoring branded keywords. However, for most of us, the concept of monitoring our brand is limited to looking for comments mentioning “@ourbrandname”. But that’s not always enough. Sometimes people forget to attach the official handle when talking about your brand. Or they might make a mistake while typing your brand’s name and so on. In such cases, you will miss out on these conversations if you’re only relying on app notifications. And missing out on such conversations can mean missing out on a wealth of information. 

Branded Keywords

What are Branded Keywords?

Technically, a query that includes your brand name or variations of it is called a branded keyword. For instance, Apple, iPhone, iPad, are all brand keywords associated with each other. 

Sometimes, however, branded keywords can be deceptive. Apple itself is a classic example. Without any context, it is difficult to know if a user is talking about the fruit or the brand! This is where we start talking about the role of social listening in analyzing online chatter to better understand your brand’s performance. 

Why are Branded Keywords Important?

The answer to this question seems like a no-brainer. Every business owner, every person, in fact, wants to know what others think of them or their brand. Marketers, however, worry about SEO and SERP when they think of brand performance. Branded keywords often aren’t the first metric marketers think of. But they should. Here’s why:

  • Direct access to more meaningful conversations. People are overwhelmingly invested in social media these days. Naturally, they share each experience with friends and family over social media. Filtering relevant data from here can offer a world of insights for companies. 
  • Monitoring branded keywords help you to listen to every conversation around your brand whether or not the user tags your brand’s official handle. And when you listen to every customer/lead and take the appropriate action, you make them feel valued. This helps you build a healthy relationship with the customer. 
  • Brand-related keywords also are a powerful tool to spy on your competitors. Monitoring the chatter around the keyword – [‘your brand name’ competitors] or [‘your brand name’ alternatives] can highlight what your competitors are up to. 
  • Most importantly, branded keywords inform you about your customers’ sentiments. Measuring your brand’s share of voice and customer sentiment are two critical steps. Measuring the brand’s share of voice lets you know how many people are talking about you. While listening to customer sentiments tells you how they feel about your brand. What do they like, and what do they not like? These insights further help you to improve customer service or your products or whatever is the pain point. 

Trying to get a comprehensive hold of your brand’s marketing and operations? Tracking branded keywords is one of the key steps. Social media intelligence tools like Auris can help you through the entire process. Want to experience the tool? Take it for a trial run!

How Social Media Analytics Helps the Airline Industry?

With travel resuming moderately after the pandemic and the subsequent lockdowns, flights are finally taking off. Now is when the airline industry needs to be in touch with its customers more than ever. The SimpliFlying Airlines Social Media Outlook Survey reported that 87% of airline executives wish to use social media analytics to develop consumer insights. Airline companies receive millions of mentions each day. These range from travelers posting pictures of clouds outside their window to angry customers complaining about the service. Social media analytics helps the airline industry cut through the noise to gain real-time insights. 

How Social Media Analytics Helps the Airline Industry

Social Media Analytics for the Airlines Industry

One of the major worries for any marketer is how to create a strong brand voice? This becomes more challenging for any airline to promote its unique niche among customers. To tackle this, marketers should first be asking another question. Which airlines are people and potential customers talking about? This is just the beginning of social media analytics. This gives you some insight into the biggest players from the industry, their strengths, and weaknesses. 

When we looked into the discussion online around airline brands, U.S airlines were the ones most discussed. Most of the mentions, however, were negative. People were complaining about delayed flights, missing baggage et cetera. Winning a battle against your top competitor while providing the best customer service can be challenging. Social media analytics specializes in making the job easier!

Why does the Airline Industry need Social Media Analytics? 

Like every other industry, the airline industry too needs a loyal customer base and a strong online reputation. But managing a business while keeping up with the constant online chatter and trends can be tricky. Not to mention that social media analytics helps in different aspects throughout the whole business. 

Real-time Feedback 

Airports are a busy place and each airline company has multiple flights landing and taking off every hour. Amidst all of this, there is a lot of scope for disruptions. There might be flight delays, change in boarding schedules, an IT system failure, etc. All these can cause disruptions which affect the service to passengers. 

While the ground force manages the situation, social media analytics can help alert the management. Passengers are constantly online and talking about their experiences. A quick alert can help the team identify any chaotic scenario. Social data also helps the team analyze the information and dive into action with an emergency response arrangement. This is exactly how Southwest Airlines used its social listening command center to overcome a crisis situation and deliver excellent customer service. 

Spotting Trends

The airline industry witnesses patterns and trends. There are times when people are in a festive mood and travel a lot and then there are times like these when everyone is locked up. Seeing the trends is one huge advantage that comes with social media analytics. 

For instance, looking at the current scenario and while listening to the chatter online we saw a lot of concern among passengers with regard to the safety measures. In response to this, Delta Airlines has been occasionally communicating with its customers regarding its safety protocols. The brand’s content is relevant and is exactly what people want to know. And since they are talking about the trending subject, they enjoy increased visibility. 

Delta's communication

Competitive Analysis 

The airline industry has recently been through a major slump in sales. And now that the fleet is back up in the air, every airline company is trying to get their audience’s attention. Every airline company has a strategy to bounce back into the business. 

Social media analytics helps identify competitors and track their activities. You can set up a competitive benchmark to measure your performance in the market. Keeping close tabs on your competitors also allows you to find out any gaps in the market. For an airline company, it can range from providing excellent onboard services to adding a flight route!

Handling a Crisis or Negative Feedback

Of all the chatter around the airline industry, a predominant portion is negative. People have complained about poor service quality, boarding facilities et cetera. In today’s digital age, one negative comment can cause a ripple effect. This in turn can cause considerable damage to your business. 

One example from the recent situation shows how one negative feedback can cause an explosive reaction on social media if not handled urgently. American political journalist – David Corn recently spoke about his experience with United Airlines on Twitter. He reported that the airline company was being negligent about safety protocols. He had spotted two passengers traveling without masks and the airline company did not take any action. These tweets got retweeted over 5000 times and attracted thousands of likes and comments from other angry customers. 

United Airlines David Corn

United Airlines David Corn Tweet

 

 

 

In this scenario, the onboard flight attendants had to be careful and enforce their own rule about the mandatory wearing of masks by the passengers. The next best thing that the airline company could do was issue a public apology instantly and get into action to reduce the damage. This immediate action would have been possible with effective social listening and analytics. 

Social media has made the world more connected than ever. Customers and companies have come closer. Every company has been making use of this platform to stay relevant, to stay connected, and offer maximum value. Customers expect the same from the airline industry. Forwarding a Twitter update about a delayed flight or upgraded safety measures goes a long way to build a trusting relationship with your customer. And social media analytics helps the airline industry focus on every important consumer insight in the most effective way possible.

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. 

Social Listening Helped Kroger during 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:

  1. Educating customers,
  2. Customer support, and 
  3. 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. 

How social listening drives market research
Image Attribution: Business vector created by vectorjuice – www.freepik.com

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. 

Social media analytics for small businesses

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. 

Generate more Sales with Social Listening

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:

Catering services recommendation

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.