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How To Develop a Social Listening Strategy for 2023

A social listening strategy is of utmost importance for marketing teams in a digital age where you don’t even need a brick-and-mortar shop anymore. Through social media listening you can flag keywords like competitors, products, and topics, and analyze the gathered data to gauge customer sentiment. In this way, you can enhance your products or improve your marketing to satisfy your existing customers and attract new ones.

But what is social listening and how can you develop a great social listening strategy for your business? Does survey data analysis play an important role in social media listening? In this post, we’ll look at these questions and more, in detail.

What Is Social Listening?

In a world where more people are using social media than ever before, it’s becoming increasingly important to monitor social media platforms to find out what your customers’ real opinions are about your product or service. Did you know that, in the US alone, there are about 240 million active social media users? It means that social media is one of the most popular platforms for customers to express their opinions, feelings, and sentiments.

You need to harness this information to gain deeper insights into these opinions and sentiments and use them to your advantage. It will not only allow you to improve your products and processes but also throw open new avenues to generate more revenue. Social listening allows you to do this.

As mentioned earlier, it gives you the ability to monitor social media platforms by flagging keywords like your products, competitors, or topics relevant to your business. Through the data you gather, you’ll then be able to gather valuable insights about what your customers really think and what they expect from your brand.

How To Develop Your Social Listening Strategy for 2023

Now that you’ve seen what social listening is, the immediate question that arises is: How do you develop your social listening strategy? For this, there are 4 simple but important things that you need to focus on first:

  1. Set business objectives

You need a cross-team discussion and bring to focus what your overall business objectives are. This is important because this will set the pace of the next phases.

  1. Choose a social listening platform

You need to choose a social listening platform that will cater to the kind of customers you have, the languages they speak, the format of your data (text, image, or video), and the industry you are in, and should have the capability to do survey data analysis.

  1. Select the keywords you want to measure and track

This will depend on your goals, products, service, customer demographic, and the areas you want to improve or simply get more information about.

  1. Create an action-plan

Once you have received the insights you are looking for, you need to plan how you will bring the necessary changes that are needed to address the discoveries you made to improve your product or service, and business processes.

Discover more about the social listening process.

Once you have done the above to give yourself a broad framework, you need to ask yourself these six questions and follow them step by step.

  1. What are your goals?

Before you implement a social listening strategy it’s vital that you decide what your goals are. Knowing your goals will form the foundation of your strategy and will shape how you act on the insights you get from your survey data analysis.

  1. Which channels will you focus on?

The next step is to decide what social media platforms you will focus on. To do this, you’ll need to find the platform that your audience uses and where they interact with your content. Simply put, it’s not worth focusing on a social media channel that your audience doesn’t use.

  1. What tool will you use?

You’ll also need to use the right tool. Here, you’ll ideally need a social media sentiment analysis tool that simplifies the process of gathering data, makes survey data analysis easier, and provides deep insights into your audience.

  1. What do you want to track?

One of the crucial things you’ll need to track is mentions of your brand. However, based on your goals you decided on earlier, there might be some other keywords and topics you’d want to focus on. These can, for instance, include your competitors, industry keywords, company executives, and more.

  1. How will you interact?

One of the major benefits of social media is that it gives you an opportunity to interact with your customers or audience. As a result, you’ll need to plan how you’ll interact with your audience as you track their interactions through your social listening strategy.

  1. What will you do with the insights you get?

Through social media listening and survey data analysis you’ll get deeper insights into your customers and how they truly feel about your business and your products or services. It’s therefore vital that you decide what you do with these insights. This can include everything from tailoring your marketing to the needs and expectations of your audience to making improvements in your products or services.

What Are the Major Factors To Consider While Developing the Social Listening Strategy?

There are additional factors you need to consider when developing your social listening strategy. These include:

  • Knowing who you are

An important part of implementing your social listening strategy is understanding who you are. In other words, you should know and understand your brand, how people perceive it, how they refer to it, and how often they talk about it. This will allow you to set up the sentiment analysis tool in such a way that it gives you the most relevant insights.

  • Knowing who your competitors are

Apart from knowing who you are, you should also know who your competitors are. You should therefore study them, what they do, and how they interact on social media. In this way, you’ll see how they interact with their customers and give you a benchmark against which you can compare your company.

  • Finding your social persona

Once you know who you are, who your competitors are, and you understand your audience through the use of survey data analysis, you’ll be able to create a unique social persona that allows you to stand out from your competitors.

  • Being ready to take action

Because social media listening gives you great insights into how your customers feel, you must interact with them when they mention your brand or products. This allows you to build more engaging relationships with your customers and preemptively deal with any issues with your products or services.

  • Being authentic when you engage

When you listen to your customers through social media listening, and you understand their issues, you’ll be able to address the problems they encounter. This helps you to establish trust with your audience and build your brand as an authentic one.

  • Using direct communication

You shouldn’t hesitate to communicate directly with your customers. This not only allows you to build stronger relationships with existing customers but also allows you to attract new ones.

  • Highlighting your positives

Based on survey data analysis and the insights you get from social media listening, you’ll be able to see what customers like about your brand and products. Once you know this, you shouldn’t be afraid to highlight these positive attributes in your messaging.

  • Considering influencers carefully

Through social media listening you’ll discover influencers who engage with your content and share it to their audience. You must study who these influences are, what they say about you, and whether their sentiment is positive or negative. Ultimately, you want influencers who are relevant to your brand and whose followers are those people you want to attract as customers.

  • Using a progressive social listening tool

Simply put, you need to use the right tool when you implement a social listening strategy. As mentioned earlier, the tool should give you deep insights into your audience, what they feel, and should simplify survey data analysis.

  • Implementing video content analysis

With video becoming increasingly popular, you’ll need to implement video content analysis that allows you to search inside video for mentions of your brand or products.

  • Studying your social analytics

Social listening and survey data analysis provides you with a wealth of data which gives you insights into your audience, their needs, expectations, and their behavioral patterns. As a result, it’s crucial that you study this data to see whether what you offer as a brand aligns with what your customers want.

You Might Also Like to Read: Benefits of social listening.

How To Choose the Best Social Listening Tool?

This is a very key part of your strategy. The only way your social listening strategy will be truly effective is if you get the right tool. Here are some of the must-have features:

  1. Video content analysis capabilities that will give you the ability to analyze and extract insights from videos on social media platforms.

  2. The ability to read and understand social media specific characteristics like hashtags and mentions using named entity recognition (NER).

  3. The ability to analyze and extract data from logos and images.

  4. Real-time analytics that give you real-time insights into trending data which, in turn, allows you to act immediately on negative mentions and changing market conditions.

  5. Speed and accuracy that gives you the ability to deal with millions of API calls a day. This is especially important considering how many interactions there are on social media.

  6. The ability to gather and analyze data in different languages. This multilingual capability allows you to gain insights into your customers’ opinions, no matter where they are.

  7. A text analytics API that allows you to extract insights from text like that found in comments.

  8. A sentiment analysis API that incorporates artificial intelligence and gives you the ability to get a comprehensive view of your customers, what they like, and what they don’t.

  9. A feature-rich sentiment analysis dashboard where you can see all the insights the tool provides in one place. This gives you a better understanding of your data and your audience.

Learn more about the top features of a social listening tool.

Boost Your Brand With Repustate IQ

Considering how many users there are on social media, it’s vital that you collect and analyze customer and employee opinions and feedback and gain valuable insights from it. You can serve your existing customers better, and in the process revv up your brand reputation and awareness, and help in new customer acquisition. For this, you need an effective social listening strategy that incorporates video content, text, sentiment, and survey data analysis as this article illustrated earlier.