All brand marketers want to know – what are our customers thinking about our products, services and our brand? What are they saying about our competitors? What do they like about us? And what do they don’t like?
Brands no longer have to resort to using conventional surveys and feedback forms to understand customer insights. Social listening has taken over. It helps a brand track, analyze, and respond to conversations customers have about their products/services. Social listening today is a key component of audience research.
Social Listening is Different from Social Media Monitoring
Social listening has two major steps. One you have to monitor different social media channels for mentions of your products, services, brands, competitors, and other keywords related to your brand. The second step involves analyzing the information you have collected and taking the right action.
Social listening is not social media monitoring. In the latter, you collect data and use it for future action. It’s about collecting metrics like number of mentions, and engagement rate. Social listening, on the other hand, is looking beyond the numbers to understand how your customers and potential customers actually feel about your product.
You try to gauge the social media sentiment regarding your brand and take steps to get it on track. Social listening boosts customer engagement, respond in real-time, tweak your marketing strategy on the go, resolve the pain points of customers in real-time, develop sales leads, identify influencers, generate user-generated data and more.
Here, in this post, you can find out the top four social listening metrics to track and how to use it to achieve your business goals.
1. Brand Awareness
In simple terms, brand awareness measures how familiar your brand is with the target audience. For brand awareness, you have to track the following social listening metrics.
- Number of mentions – The most straightforward metric – the higher the number of mentions, the more people are aware of your brand.
- Reach of mentions – This metric shows the number of people who have come across your brand’s mention.
- Share of voice – This helps you compare your brand’s mentions against that of your competitors.
Tools like Talkwalker, Brandwatch, and Awario help in tracking mentions of your brand on social media platforms.
2. Conversion Rate
This is the ultimate goal of all marketing – you want people to convert into your customers. Use these metrics to determine conversion rates.
- Engagement – This includes likes, comments, social shares, follows, and direct messages.
- Number of leads – This includes tracking clicks on your landing page, ad clicks, etc.
Remember that conversion doesn’t happen quickly. A single like on Instagram doesn’t mean that the customer will make a purchase. It’s a multi-step process, and you need to build trust with your potential customers before you can get them to convert.
3. Campaign Target
For your marketing strategies to be successful, you need to have the right audience. Social listening helps you:
- Research your audience before you launch a marketing campaign
- Monitor your campaign to ensure that it’s targeting the right audience
To track campaign targets, you have to measure the following metrics:
- Demographic data – You can use social listening to find out where your audience is from, the languages they speak, their gender, their occupation, their age groups, interests, and so on.
- Influencer Analysis – By analyzing the most popular voices in your niche, you can understand more about your target audience – what they like, what appeals to them, who they trust, and so on.
4. Customer Satisfaction
Ultimately, all brands want to earn the most revenue, and that’s possible only when customers are happy. This is why you have to evaluate customer satisfaction levels. Social listening helps you collect unbiased customer data about your business. Most people post on social media to either vent or rave about a brand.
The Sentiment Score metric helps you identify whether a social post about your brand is positive, negative, or neutral. It uses natural language processing to identify the sentiment of a customer post.
Wrapping Up – Social Listening is a Great Tool if you Track the Right Metrics
Social listening can help you increase the success of your brand. Make sure to track the right metrics and use this rich data to boost your brand’s performance and profitability.
For more details about the latest social media monitoring and listening tool, please write to us at social@logicserve.com
