SOCIAL LISTENING
Catherine Reimers
Monitoring your brand’s reputation online has always been a crucial part of brand growth and customer satisfaction. As important as analytics like engagement rate and number of mentions are, we are now able to look beyond these numbers and truly listen to the many conversations happening online at any given time.
This is what Social Listening is.
We are using the trends, mentions, hashtags, and competitor data that we have monitored to gauge an understanding of the online mood; better known as the social media sentiment. This is essential to keeping your marketing and brand development on track as well as giving you the power to respond and engage to positive or negative posts about your brand.
Falcon.io is a tool that draws from 2.7 million online sources to keep you up-to-date and ready to act when opportunities or potential crises arise. The platform not only offers you a goldmine of information but breaks down the results into demographics, sentiment, and influencers. You are then able to track trends and brand perception efficiently and customise your campaigns going forward.
Casting your listening net wide is an important part of this process. It is vital to know not only what is being said about your brand but also where. This includes pin-pointing which conversations and which platforms. Frequency and sentiment will differ according to platform (Twitter often has more of a consistent conversation running than, let’s say, LinkedIn) and will offer you insights into creating a strategy that joins the conversation, whether that be through organic or paid media.
Tapping into the conversation surrounding your competitors is also something you should include in your social listening strategy. This will give you valuable insight into what they’re doing right but, more importantly, a look into what they’re doing wrong so you can learn and be ahead of the curve.
Once you have discovered what is being said about your brand (and what is being said about your competitor brands) you are able to more successfully and efficiently discover new audiences.
With falcon.io your surfaced profiles will be added to your data store and custom audiences. This is a simple, highly effective way to identify genuine prospects you can draw real insights from on an aggregated level
Don’t know where to get started? Below is a social listening preparation pack of keywords/topics for your brand. Armed with this you can use tools such as falcon.io to keep your ear to the ground and begin your journey to a better brand sentiment online and overall customer satisfaction:
Your brand name and social media handles
Competitor names and social media handles
Industry buzzwords
Your slogan or any other phrases associated with your brand
Name of key people in your company
Campaign names, keywords, and hashtags
Branded and unbranded hashtags for you and your competitors
If you’d like to learn more and work on a full digital strategy incorporating social listening together with falcon.io please email Digital Republic at hello@digitalrepublic.co.za or give us a call on +27 66 463 6895.