How can social media listening revamp customer advocacy?

What if we told you there's a simple yet powerful way to transform even your unhappiest customers into your biggest brand champions?

The answer lies in social media listening - an often overlooked goldmine of customer insights. By closely monitoring online conversations, you can uncover a treasure trove of data to sharpen your value proposition, foster authentic connections, and ultimately drive unparalleled advocacy.

Keep reading to discover the must-know tactics for leveraging social media listening to revolutionize your customer relationships...

Social media listening is exactly what it sounds like. It’s the act of monitoring, reviewing, and insteracting with customers through social media. Social channels are a treasure trove of customer sentiments, criticisms, and praise - a dime a dozen for all!

Where social media listening works better than other customer feedback strategies is that you’re able to get a better understanding of what customers are talking about when it comes to your brand, without your direct involvement.

Sometimes this means you can get a better understanding of true customer sentiment when they’re interacting with peers and fellow customers rather than your brand itself.

Understand the customer sentiment landscape

Speaking of sentiment, lets talk about using social media listening to it’s fullest potential.

As mentioned already, social media listening can give you a more unbiased outlook on your customer’s attitude toward your brand. Analyzing brand sentiment on social media is important, but how do do you do so without getting overwhelmed?

Tip one: Identify positive, negative, and neutral conversations

This can be done through simple manual tracking or through the use of a tracking tool. The main aim of this is to get evidence of conversations across the range of different sentiments.

Make sure to identify any consistency between conversations - If usually positive accounts are talking about the same things as negative ones, its a quick identifier for high priority pain points to fix.

Use your listening to respond promptly to negative feedback - While social media is a good space for finding unbiased feedback, it’s also a space with lots of engaged customers.

Finding and responding to negative feedback on social media platforms gives you an instant audience to your actions.

Social media means that people will be aware that you are not only monitoring conversations and finding negative feedback, but also taking actions to solve them. It’s a fantastic way to transform unhappy customers into advocates.

Tip two: Utilize keyword monitoring

Identify relevant keywords, phrases, and hashtags associated with your brand, products, or industry

Scan social media posts for the occurrence of these keywords - Simply going through your companies mentions and tags will restrict your view and potentially miss vital information that can help with your customer awareness and advocacy.

Picking relevant keywords will make sure you’re seeing conversations outside of your immediate customer bubble.

Classify the sentiment of the post as positive, negative, or neutral - Keywords will help you find the conversations, but you’ve also got to make sure to analyze and classify these conversations based on the context surrounding the keyword.

Tip three: Use tools like Natural Language Processing (NLP)

Natural Language Processing (NLP) are artificial intelligence platforms that analyze, understand, and generate human language. These tools have features like:

Text preprocessing
Semantic analysis
Sentiment analysis
Language generation

NLPs also often have speech recognition and processing, meaning your social media listening won’t be limited to just text-based posts and comments, but videos as well.

Finally an easy way to understand the wild landscape of tiktok!

Staying ahead of competitive trends

Monitor how customers discuss competitors

The great thing about social media is that it encourages debate and conversation. Specifically in places like reddit, people actively look for peer suggestions and recommendations for a whole host of products and services.

Knowing which brands come up in conversation alongside your own name is essential. It’ll help you keep a pulse on competitors you’re already aware of, and highlight any new or upcoming competitors too.

These kinds of conversations will also make you aware of new and upcoming products and features your competitors are putting, so you can prepare and react accordingly.

Identify market gaps and whitespace opportunities

Where social media listening can make you aware of your competitors activities, including upcoming product and feature launches, it can also make you aware of the gaps within your market.

Customers are always talking about things they want to see, pain points they currently have, and perks they enjoy within the products they use.

Keeping track of these customer need and customer wants will help you develop a plan for future product updates, and offer direct evidence for convincing stakeholders to invest in your strategy or product.

Differentiating your brand's unique value proposition

If you’ve utilized the previous tips, you’ll already have a strong sense of brand identity that’ll make you stand out from the crowd.

Specifically it’ll help to:

Foster authentic brand personality by using information about how customers organically engage with your brand to develop and adopt a consistent brand voice and tone that resonates with your audience.
Anticipate industry trends by monitoring your market at large, and how customer preferences and behaviors are evolving within it.
Develop a clear rapor with customers by playing with the “rules” of company and customer interactions. Social media brings you closer to a large portion of your audience than any other kind of customer interaction.

Here’s an example of what we mean:

In this ad, KFC took real comments from across their social media platforms to tease a product customers have been asking about for years: the turkey christmas burger.

But instead of producing this product, they doubled down with their decision to NOT make such a product and reinforcing the brand image they’d fostered for so long.

And all you need to do is look in the comments to see how well this ad was received:

“Proper laughed hard at this! Best ad of '23! More troll than a rick roll!”

“Great ad. I laughed out loud when I saw it on TV earlier. Props to the marketing team!”

“I almost fell off of the sofa laughing, when i first saw this!! The blunt, to the point honesty is just fantastic! “

Conclusion

Social media listening is a powerful tool and closely monitoring online conversations can be invaluable to better understand customer sentiment, address pain points, and inform product and marketing strategies.

Analyzing brand mentions, sentiment, and industry trends allows companies to identify competitive differentiators and whitespace opportunities.This customer-centric approach helps foster a more authentic brand personality that resonates deeply with the audience.

The key is to continuously leverage social listening to transform unhappy customers into devoted advocates. By demonstrating responsiveness, showcasing customer-driven improvements, and anticipating evolving preferences, brands can build lasting loyalty and positively differentiate themselves in the market.

Embracing social media as a real-time customer feedback loop is essential for any organization seeking to drive meaningful advocacy and long-term growth.

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