How Businesses Use Social Media Listening To Flourish
In this article we aim to give you a better understanding of the benefits of social listening by showcasing real life examples of how companies have used social listening to flourish. Social listening can be used to improve not only business growth and operational efficiency but also to better brand reputation and goodwill. This article will highlight how to use social listening for increased business acumen and ROI, regardless of what industry you are in.
What Is Social Media Listening?
Social media listening, through the use of social listening tools, allow you to keep track of your brand’s social media channels for consumer opinions. It enables you to pick up on direct mentions of your brand or any conversation threads relating to specific themes, keywords, competitors, or people that you consider important, and then analyzes the data for insights so you can develop action plans for those opportunities.
Benefits of social media sentiment analysis include giving you the power to create the kind of marketing content your followers actually want, with the help of social media insights. With the importance of social listening growing worldwide and across industry verticals, a business can now keep up with industry trends, ideate new product plans, and more importantly, improve after-sales and customer experience, by interacting directly with consumers on social channels in real-time.
All it has to do is figure out how to use social listening to its advantage by partnering with, and employing the right software solution. We will expand on this later.
How Are Companies Using Social Listening To Stay Ahead?
Businesses today are leveraging the benefits of social listening to stay connected with their customers so that they are aware of the slightest variation in market trends based on interest, fashion, ideology, etc. as early as possible. It is important to realise that social listening is leveraged not only by marketing and PR firms aligned to fast fashion and hospitality but organizations like political parties, public health offices, security & safety units, are all finding better ways of figuring out how to use social listening for improved effect.
Companies and organizations worldwide are using social media listening to:
1. Grow their brand
With social media technologies at their fingertips, companies are using the benefits of social listening to grow their digital marketing strategies as well. They are using social insights for better email and advertising strategies, improved offerings, and increased outreach by even investing in influencer marketing to acquire more customers. Furthermore, TikTok videos, YouTube videos, as well as videos on Facebook, IGTV, and other social media sites can all be analyzed and evaluated for brand insights through video analysis tasks that employ the same techniques as a text analytics API.
2. Improve public perception
Gone are the days when a company needed to appear serious for fear that their public opinion would come across as being nonchalant. Social listening allows a brand to address an issue immediately as soon as the red flag is set off by the social listening platform based on a spike in negative social mentions or a specific keyword. By appearing approachable and providing a proper response to a query or concern, companies can enhance their goodwill and public perception.
3. Better customer relations
Companies are realizing the importance of social listening and learning how to use it by taking to social media like Facebook and Twitter to engage with their customers and respond to questions directly. It makes your consumers feel that they are better connected to you and that you actually care about their opinions. This leads to better customer relations with your audience and to an opportunity for you to create a stronger affinity with your brand within them.
4. Improve brand experience
A great brand experience leads to better product and service recall when a person experiences a need (restaurant, hospital, clothing, political party). Sentiment analysis of your social listening data helps you improve your brand experience. It gives you insights as to how and where you need to concentrate your efforts in order to design a brand connection with your audience. Here is an example of five popular brands who leveraged the benefits of social listening and managed to build a great brand experience just through Twitter.
5. Explore new marketing techniques
Social media listening allows you to explore new marketing and advertising strategies that you wouldn’t have had the opportunity to do without knowing what’s on the mind of your customers – in real time. The more relevant the advertising content is to your audience, the more likely you are to have return customers as well as favourable returns on all your hardwork in reaching out to new target markets.
Social Listening Use Cases
Social media listening is such a ubiquitous machine learning (ML) powered technique that it can be used in diverse industries for incredible improvement in business intelligence and growth. Below are some real-life examples of how companies have used social listening to their advantage.
1. Automotive Industry
The client is a major vehicle manufacturer who wanted to understand their audience better, coming on the heels of a rather large product recall. Knowing the importance of social listening, they wanted to optimize the technique to track popular social media channels, automotive blogs, and forums to be aware of how the public perception about their brand was in the face of the negative news. Repustate’s social media sentiment analysis solution helped them in their efforts, especially in understanding their international clients better, thanks to the solution’s multilingual capabilities.
With the new insights, the client was able to keep a close eye on its four major markets - English, Arabic, German, and Spanish. Through the benefits of social listening, the client saw that only the German market seemed negatively affected, with the company’s PR efforts not bringing in any real positive effects on public perception. The Arabic demographic seemed to not have been negatively impacted at all, while the English and Spanish markets seemed neutral to the company’s news and related PR efforts. This helped the client focus on different strategies for each market based on their cultural personalities.
2. Geriatric Healthcare
The American Association of Retired Persons (AARP), one of the largest interest groups in the United States, wanted to develop a nutrition and weight loss app for persons over the ages of 50. The app was meant to focus on health and dietary issues affecting those over the age of fifty, while allowing them to follow a healthy plan for weight loss for a healthy body mass index. The organization has more than 38 million members and therefore needed a partner who knew all the particulars of how to use social listening to mobilize the data for research.
Repustate’s social media listening solution was able to track comments on social media channels, especially Twitter, in relation to all existing weight loss and nutrition apps to understand what people liked and disliked about them. The solution discovered a number of insights from the gathered data that included topics such as ease of use of the app, accountability, frustration at not being able to follow the diet plan, etc. Based on all the insights gathered, AARP was able to come up with a strategic plan for its new app, thus proving once again the importance of social listening if you have the right partner and solution.
3. Public Sector
The client was an Asian government ministry that wanted to use the benefits of social listening to proactively know what developmental activities citizens wanted the government to handle based on priority. This included issues like transportation, traffic management, public office challenges, etc. Repustate’s customizable AI-driven social media listening solution was able to discover valuable information from all publicly available social media data.
With the information available in a pristine, categorized manner, based on entities and aspects identified by the sentiment analysis API, government officials were able to see the exact areas that required focus. This allowed them to set aside resources quickly, allocate funds more efficiently, and improve public services more rapidly.
4. Education
A very good example of the importance of social listening in the education sector is when the Ministry of Education in Egypt realised that it needed to resort to social data mining. The Ministry realized that it was the most efficient way to understand the needs and opinions of the people to ensure improved educational content and outreach to its English-speaking and Arabic population. It looked to the benefits of social listening to ensure that its education app was useful and able to provide the relevant content from its academic repository. In this particular case, they also needed a video content analysis (VCA) solution that could semantically organize the educational video content based on language, subject matter, speakers, themes, and grades.
Repustate’s social media solution helped the Ministry gain the benefits of social listening. It helped them understand the opinions of the Egyptian population regarding the efficacy of the app, and improve the education outreach. Meanwhile, Repustate’s search inside video solution ensured that the videos were classified and categorized based on subjects and themes specified by the Board of Education. This success story essentially proved that not only is it important to know how to use social listening, but also to employ a sentiment analysis platform that is agile, scalable, and that hosts top-notch video content analytics capabilities.
Why Is Video Content Analysis Important For Social Listening?
We have seen in the above example, how having a video AI technology boosts the effectiveness of a social listening tool. This is because video content analysis helps you go beyond text and take advantage of the benefits of social listening even from video-driven channels like TikTok, YouTube, OnlyFans, and others. You can learn how to use social listening to not just track discussions on text mediums like blogs, online articles and news sites, forums, etc, but also to understand what your customers are saying about your brand from video-centric platforms.
VCA ensures that you never miss an opportunity when it comes to consumer likes and dislikes, and you leverage the importance of social listening by always staying ahead of industry trends even before your competitors join the bandwagon.
Getting Started on your Social Listening Journey
Get to know more about how you too can extract the benefits of social listening. Here’s why Repustate’s social media and sentiment analysis solution stands out against other ML models in the market.
NER capability:
It boasts an enviable engine with the most advanced and accurate named entity recognition capability, even against major software giants like Google and Amazon. See the competitor analysis chart based on four criteria of accuracy, granularity, language, and speed.
Social media & video specific:
More importantly, the solution is meant for social media, including videos. It understands social media abbreviations, code switches, special characters, emojis, along with social media colloquialisms so that none of the information out there goes unnoticed. Other solutions usually leave out emojis and special characters, which means that they don’t understand sarcasm or semantics, thus giving half-baked, inaccurate information. Plus, it’s the only engine that can analyse videos on social media with the same accuracy as text.
Multilingual:
Furthermore, Repustate’s social media listening interprets 23 languages including Dutch, German, Korean, and Arabic, natively, and gives impeccable results in minimum iterations. We will be happy to walk you through the platform so you can see it live. Begin your journey of social listening and increase your return on investment with a social listening API that gets smarter with every iteration - thanks to its sophisticated AI-powered algorithm.