Create an Appealing Social Listening Strategy for 2020

Social media sites have matured influencing the way businesses are carried out online. And this information may not be new to you. Social listening has become a tool to drive online sales. Savvy brands today listen in to their customers and stay informed of the sentiment around their brand.

As brands strive to survive amidst rising and falling trends, they are required to constantly keep an eye out for their rivals. Brands adopt creative marketing techniques like influencer marketing to be in sync with current trends. In 2020, one of your marketing goals should be to build a social listening strategy.

How does Social Listening Work? What exactly is Social Listening Strategy?

Social listening is made possible by a software tool, an application that monitors online conversations. Say your brand is called “A2B3 technologies” and the name gets mentioned online, on a social media site, a review platform or elsewhere. The social listening tool tracks the comment and send you an alert. It also tells you who commented, their age, gender, geographical location and even the tone of the comment.

Now with billions of Internet users, there could be hundreds of people talking about your brand. The tool aggregates all of this data. It then analyses the overall percentage of comments, whether negative or positive and presents them to you. It will also analyze the other demographic details to offer you insights into your popularity or lack thereof, by geographic location.

Social listening tools also help you zero in on a potential pain point or strength. Say 68% of your users commented repeatedly that your product is great but they would like “A2B3 technologies” to provide free installation services for their product. As a result, your potential customers might hesitate to buy your product and start looking for alternatives who do provide installation.

With the right social listening tool, you can learn about reviews that are likely to snowball, in real-time. You can respond to the unhappy customers almost immediately, get them to change their minds about you and avert a PR crisis for your brand. You can also gain insight into how to provide better customer service and improve your customers’ experience.

A social listening strategy is nothing but you planning your goals and selecting a social listening tool to get optimum results.

Let’s get started with creating a Social Listening Strategy

You now know what social listening is all about, which is great. In addition to this, you need to understand the steps to getting the process started. What you want from your social listening tool is usually dictated by your business goals. So here we break down the steps to offer some simple pointers for your social listening strategy.

Fix your goals

The basis for building a robust social listening campaign lies in knowing what you need from the tool. As we mentioned before, a social listening tool can be your ultimate stop for all your marketing needs. It can offer you information and insights into all the following:

Leads
Business insights
Real-time feedback
Sentiment analysis
Influencers and advocates
Pointers for customer service and many more

You might just be looking for a way to know your customers better, and gain leads. Or you might be looking for the current marketing trends and influencers. Once you define your goals, you can fine-tune the platform to deliver the results.

Engage in Market Research

With social listening tools, you have access to digital data. Use this for thorough market research. The information you receive from social listening comes directly from the users and usually isn’t biased. You can use it to know about your target audience. When you enter your brand’s name and the names of your competitors, the tools pull up the handles of people who mentioned you. Analyze their kind, the demographics, location, preferences et cetera. You will know who your target audience is. Similarly, use the data to monitor current trends or industry news. Trends are heavily discussed online, so it’s impossible to miss it if you wish to monitor trends related to your brand.

Customer Service and Reputation Management

The most common use of the real-time alerts you get via social listening tools is customer service. Marketers study the data to know the queries and perception their audience has. When you analyze the feedback from your customers, you understand the overall sentiment towards your brand. This helps you gauge ways to improve customer service and to monitor your brand’s online reputation. And when you engage with your customers in real-time, the focus and commitment demonstrated will only help your brand. According to research reports, 71% of customers who receive a quick response from a brand are more likely to recommend them.

Influencer Outreach

The purchasing behavior of youngsters today is driven by online and word-of-mouth reviews. If an influencer talks about a favorite product on his or her blog, chances are that his/her followers will try out the same product. It’s human nature to trust fellow human beings. In this scenario, social listening tools help you search for your perfect influencer. If you are into a tech business, find an influencer whose forte lies in tech reviews. If you wish to work with micro-influencers, social listening tools can help you find them too. Just set the filters to highlight the influencer scores.

An effective social listening strategy will require multiple iterations. But once you invest the time and energy, the results will prove worthy of the efforts you put in.

How is Social Media Influencing your Customer?

It shouldn’t come as news to anyone that social media is continually growing in the number of its users and in terms of how much it influences people. People continue to shop online, and the e-commerce sales figure last year made up almost 12% of all retail sales as per Statista. With the continued expansion of online sales, marketers are doing everything to ensure the presence of their products and services at the top of the list.

One way to attract an audience is to adopt traditional advertising methods of print ads and billboards. But times have changed and those are no more really effective options to gain you visibility. Social media network is on its way to becoming the biggest marketplace of all.

How Influential is Social Media?

To put things in perspective we found some statistics. Hubspot says that 71% of customers are more likely to buy a product/service based on social media referrals. Another survey report by PwC says 45% of global respondents said that online reviews, comments, and feedback effectively influence their decision-making and shopping behavior.

How the Big Three Social Media Platforms can Influence your Audience

The three best social media platforms that can help you capture your audience’s attention are Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. These social media platforms are essential for your marketing toolbox based on your requirements.

Facebook

Facebook has the world’s largest active user base. With nearly 2.41 million monthly active users it also has the largest diverse audience. And despite the numerous controversies, Facebook has held its ground in terms of popularity. The company has had to rewrite some of its regulations and policies yet has seen a growth in its advertising revenue. Some experts have pointed out that the growth is slowing but Facebook still drives 50% of total social referrals.

Twitter

Twitter is quite popular with over 330 million active users worldwide. Twitter is one of the USA’s top 10 websites and hence is the go-to place for influencers and decision-makers for the latest news and trends. According to Hubspot, “42% of Twitter users rely on this channel to learn about new products/services, and 41% of them share opinions about products/services via Twitter.” The audience on Twitter also tends to be younger with over 36% of users within the age group of 18-29.

Instagram

Instagram has been growing slowly but steadily. The platform has now come to boast more than 500 million monthly active users. Its audience engagement rate has been measured to be 70% higher than that of Facebook. According to Ad Espresso, 80% of the users follow at least one brand on Instagram.

Social Media as an Influence

You may have known that these platforms are the most productive in helping you to impress your customers and to get them to buy your wares. But it is also essential that you know how successful brands are using these platforms and associated tools to make the most of it.

According to a study, almost 50% of Twitter users have bought a product as a result of a direct Tweet from an influencer. 84% of millennials are swayed by user-generated content and the resultant trends. Besides influencer marketing and trending content, word-of-mouth from friends and family both offline and online can be another way social media influences your audience’s purchase decisions.

Tell your Story

How do you leverage this incredible power that social media offers you as an influence machine? Social media isn’t only an influence machine, it also helps you find the right way. You can opt to monitor the trends or use a social media listening tool to track the influencers within the industry. You can opt to collaborate with them or tell your brand’s story in your own way keeping the trends in mind.

Clearly, social media has a large impact on how people spend their money. However, the online space of influencer marketing is really getting crowded. So, you need to act fast before the trend itself goes stale.

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.