7 Ways Brands Use Social Listening

With audiences spending more and more time on social media platforms, businesses can no longer ignore the wealth of advertising and marketing opportunities that these platforms present. Savvy brands are turning to social listening solutions to understand online conversations and gain insights into strategies that would improve brand recognition and customer service that will help them stay relevant.

Brand Health

Brand health refers to how effective a brand is in achieving its business objectives. This effectiveness can be measured by gauging brand delivery, brand positioning, employee engagement, brand equity, brand awareness, and reputation. Large and Small Medium Enterprises can measure their brand health by using social listening solutions to check the volumes of mentions (and sentiments) around their products and organization. Social listening solutions can also be used to measure brand health and positioning by determining if the message and image that the brand is projecting has the intended effect on the target audience.

Industry Trends 

Staying on top of industry trends and terminology is essential to Brand recognition. Businesses should leverage social listening solutions to discover emerging (soon-to-be-viral) hashtags and industry buzzwords that align with invaluable new product development recommendations. Such solutions can also help brands navigate the various stages of their preferred new product development framework by providing extensive, detailed feedback at scale on existing products and new product ideation.

COMPETITION TRACKING 

Social listening enables brands to know the strengths and weaknesses of their competitors by tapping into the social media rumor mill. Marketers can listen to the consumers’ commentary and discover what people like and dislike about their competitors’ products and services. By understanding the shortcomings of the competition, brands can develop marketing strategies that show their products or services in the best possible light and reposition their content strategy to take advantage of competitor shortcomings. 

PRODUCT INNOVATION 

Savvy marketers know that listening to and analyzing audience conversations around their product

and brand is an effective way to improve offerings to consumers. Social listening solutions help brands to do the following:

• Gauge customer satisfaction
• Discover where they have fallen short of consumer expectations
• Whether their products actually solve the pain points of their target audience

CRISIS MANAGEMENT 

Once a crisis occurs, the only thing that brands can do is try to handle the incident by mitigating its spread and impact. When used properly, social listening solutions provide brands with advance warning of potentially disastrous public relations issues, enabling them to take proactive steps to avert or at least reduce the impact of such a crisis.

Such solutions help brands effectively complete the five steps of brand crises management, namely: 

• Get advance warning of an impending crisis
• Ascertain what the main issues are
• Develop a relevant corporate communications strategy
• Ascertain when the crisis is over or resolved
• Analyze the resulting data and take note of lessons learned. 

By leveraging social listening solutions, businesses can monitor and analyze the discussions around their brand (and their competitors’) in real-time, giving them useful insight on the progress of their crisis management strategy. 

INFLUENCER IDENTIFICATION AND MANAGEMENT 

Everyone talks about influencer identification and analysis, but only a handful are actually doing it methodically. When searching for a brand influencer, businesses should look for both qualitative and quantitative metrics to assess the activity  and credibility of the influencer, and determine if he or she is a good fit for their particular niche. 

CUSTOMER SERVICE

Aside from being a marketing channel, social listening solutions can also be used as a channel for customer service. Although there are numerous tools that customer service. reps use to manage customer complaints and inquiries on social media, savvy marketers can use social listening solutions to look into consumers’ concerns, which in turn helps in protecting the reputation of a Brand as well as portrays them as a customer friendly and pro-active brand. Brands get to continuously learn about their shortcomings and can rectify and drastically improve their NPS scores. 

CONCLUSION 

Social Listening has become a key part of a brands journey in order to understand their audience and their preferences. Businesses can no longer afford to ignore the impact it has on brand recognition. Coagent’s state-of-the-art technology captures online data from 300 million sources across 190 countries in 80 languages. It uses Natural Language Processing (NLP) and Automatic. Sentiment Algorithm (ASA) to quickly identify trends in data and measure sentiments. By leveraging Cogent’s social listening solutions, brands can better understand how their products, services, content strategy and other KPIs measure up on social media, thus enabling them to finetune their marketing strategies to get the best results.

Contact us on social@cogentinfo.com to learn how we can help your business.