Learn everything about using social listening for Instagram insights.
Instagram has evolved from a platform where people posted their pictures to a place where businesses sell products and services and engage with each other. It is the one place where customers go to discover new brands, explore what they offer, buy from them or simply engage with them.
But another thing about Instagram is that users are not afraid to voice their opinions on it. From shoutouts and queries to customer complaints and concerns, there’s a huge amount of conversation going on on Instagram. And brands not tracking this is missing out on a giant opportunity for not just growth, but also changing their target audience’s perspective about them.
With Instagram witnessing a recent rapid growth and a surge in its user base of 500 million daily Instagram users, Instagram is the one social channel where you want to use social listening to find what your customers are raving about.
With social listening, brands get an opportunity to track, analyze, and respond to conversations about them on social media and is a crucial component of audience research.
Curious how social listening on Instagram works? Let’s tell you all about it.
If you’re new to the concept of social listening, Please read the complete guide to social listening.
Social listening on Instagram
What is Instagram listening?
Instagram listening refers to tracking conversations about topics, hashtags, keywords, and brands related to your brand and industry. When you listen closely to what conversations happen within your industry, the insights you gather can help you create an informed social media strategy.
A lot of people may confuse Instagram listening with Instagram monitoring. While social monitoring is simply observing conversations around your brand, social listening lets you analyze those interactions to discover opportunities to act. That can range from something as small as responding to a happy customer, or something as big as repositioning your entire branding.
When it comes to their Instagram presence, brands cannot afford to live in a bubble and stay uninformed. With social listening, they can get a bird’s eye view of everything happening within their industry, and contextualizing interactions like comments, shares, brand mentions, ongoing and upcoming trends, that can help brands strategize campaigns better to reach a wider audience.
In addition to staying informed, Instagram listening can also be used to:
Build new marketing and product development strategies
Identify potential customers, partnerships and influencers
Identify and predict trends that your audience is engaging with
Why is Instagram listening important?
With over 1 billion monthly users and over 130 million people interacting with posts on Instagram, this widely popular social media platform boasts of a massive reach to potential consumers of all types, worldwide.
Instagram has made it easier for brands to directly sell products through its platform, and at the same time, also educate its audience. With this, a massive number of internet users not only purchase from Instagram but also use it to discover new businesses, products and services, and the options available to them in general.
As an increasing number of brands shift to Instagram and fight tooth and nail for the customer’s attention, you want to keep track of what people are saying about you and what content they’re interacting with. Your customers could tell you what they want from your brand or how you can help make their journey with you effortless, by simply using the platform as they do every day!
To put things into perspective, businesses are sharing upto 14 posts a week on Instagram. And individuals are sharing about 1-2 posts a week. Your audience is consuming a lot of content in one way or another.
Looking at these insights and acting on them will help you understand your audience better. At the same time, it will help you strategize for better marketing on the platform with campaigns that they are more likely to engage with based on what they have shown interest in.
Benefits of Instagram listening
Instagram listening can not only help you track your brand’s overall position within your industry but also give you much-needed customer insights. You can use them to strengthen your branding efforts or respond to a potential PR crisis in time.
Here are a few ways Instagram listening can help your brand:
1. Strengthen your brand’s performance
You may be posting a number of times on your Instagram account daily and may even be seeing engagements. But without understanding their nature, there is no way you can ascertain how those engagements work in sync with your brand’s goals. Social listening can help you understand how your Instagram business account is doing, what content people are engaging with the most and what you can do to make it better.
2. Build a better understanding of your audience
Instagram listening helps you understand your audience better. You can identify the nuances of emotions within their conversations, decipher user engagement, observe behavior-specific to demographic, record brand mentions and use all of this to ascertain the general sentimentality around your brand, their expectations and how you can fulfil them.
3. Perform competitor analysis
One of the most sought-after applications of social listening on Instagram is competitor analysis. Instagram listening doesn’t just monitor your brand’s performance but also your competitor’s. Ultra-competitive markets such as beauty and fashion encounter changing trends popping up quickly. A brand listening to tags and posts getting traction in their niche can spring onto the trend and position itself better
Moreover, observing how your audience interacts with your competitors will help you identify what they’re doing right that you can incorporate as well.
3. Provide exceptional customer service
64% of internet users would rather message a brand than call them to request support. A number of these people also choose to do this on social media platforms like Instagram. But with all the noise on the channel, it can get difficult to keep track of these queries coming in. With Instagram listening or media monitoring on Instagram, you can identify and fill any gaps in your customer service and actually stay on top of all conversations!
Well, what’s more, is that you can also keep the conversation going. Considering how Instagram is all about engagement now, this one’s important!
4. Improve your product or services
When you listen to how your customers feel about your product or service, you can discover chances of enhancing your product/service like adding a new feature or optimizing the pricing. Since Instagram is a platform where users tend to share a lot about their day-to-day lives, including purchases, they’re bound to also talk about your business. Keeping an eye out always helps!
5. Build deeper engagement
Social listening can help you create a deeper level of engagement with your customers and help you better connect with brand leaders, influencers, and customers. It highlights who’s talking about you, your competitors, and what they have to say about their experience. The insights help you identify who you need to reach out to for positively developing that conversation, and hopefully even reaching more people.
6. Focused marketing
With insights from social listening on Instagram, you can enormously improve your marketing and advertising campaigns. Knowing what messaging works the best for stimulating a positive response from your audience can help direct your efforts and double your ROI in no time. Imagine not wasting a single resource of campaigns that don’t work!
Where can you get customer insights from on Instagram?
Users on Instagram primarily interact using posts, comments, videos, hashtags, Instagram TV (IGTV), reels, and stories. So when you’re gathering insights, you’ll typically have to look into the following:
Posts and Comments: You can extract information from a specific account like account name, followers, people followed, post numbers, likes, etc.
Hashtags: Hashtags are a great way to understand customer sentiment on Instagram. Extracting data around hashtags can reveal commonly associated words and accounts, and also trends.
Videos, Reels, and IGTV: With Instagram’s algorithm giving content creators a positive push to create video content, the number of IGTVs and Reels have been rising; which gives you an insight into what appeals to an audience ‘visually’.
How does Instagram listening work?
Instagram listening is more than tracking @mentions, comments, and #hashtags. It is also about understanding what is happening. Social listening goes hand in hand with analyzing the sentiment behind those interactions.
With a mammoth increase in the number of daily posts and users growing by the hour, Instagram listening will only work for you if you strategize it well.
So how does it all work? When you conduct Instagram listening, you essentially create listening queries based on your business, location, hashtags, and keywords relevant to your business, industry, or campaign intent. This goes hand in hand with sentiment analysis where you discover how your customers are reacting to your brand on Instagram.
Ascertaining whether the general reaction to your posts is a “yay”, “nay”, or “meh”, sentiment analysis with social listening can help you recognize what you need to do differently to win over your Instagram followers (and potentially get more).
Radarr helps brands conduct social listening on Instagram keeping the above parameters in mind. Whether you’re looking for appreciation, grievances, or what your competitors are up to, Radarr can fill you in.
Additionally, Radarr also helps brands create and customize their own listening queries by using rules logic and boolean syntax. In layman terms, this lets you dive deeper into customer conversations without having to do so manually.
Implementing an Instagram listening strategy
Building an Instagram listening strategy is all about implementing a set few steps correctly. Before you start setting up your tools, develop a clear understanding of your goals.
Why are you using a listening strategy in the first place and what do you hope to achieve from it?
If you’re a newbie at this, we suggest you set up a social monitoring tool first and then see what kind of information you can gather. To get you started, here’s a breakdown of the step by step process for implementing an Instagram listening strategy that works for your brand:
1. Set up your listening tool
Listening to social media conversations manually can be daunting. On top of that, working out a sentiment analysis on those conversions can be time-consuming, inefficient, and full of assumptions.
Your solution? Choose a social listening tool to read the millions of conversations going around on Instagram, collate all the social media data in one place, and help you derive actionable insights from them.
One simple way to tap into current conversations, trends, and buzzwords on Instagram is to go for a reliable social listening tool like Radarr.
Radarr is one of the most intuitive social media listening, monitoring, and analytics tool providers that give you insights beyond ongoing conversations. It comes with a sentiment analysis module that helps you understand what is driving the online conversations and how you can leverage them to promote your business better on Instagram.
Not sure how to implement your brand’s social media listening strategy? Book a Radarr Demo.
2. Identify your Instagram listening goals
Identifying your Instagram listening goals is one of the key steps to work on before going forward with your social listening strategy.
Start listing down the goals you want to achieve with social listening on Instagram. Take a look at your branding, marketing, sales, and customer service processes. Identify loopholes and gaps, and take note of what would help you address those better.
For example, one of your goals could be to increase your customer lifetime value (CLTV). This means you will need to closely monitor conversations from the people using your product/ service and what they write about it on their Instagram accounts.
Laying out clear goals and setting KPIs on social listening will help you analyze whether or not the effort is paying off.
Here is a list of a few goals that you might consider achieving through your Instagram listening tool:
1. Improving your Customer Service
With social listening, identify negative feedback made by customers in conversations around your product. This gives you the chance to address a grievance quickly – even if it has been shared on formats like Instagram stories!
2. Generate new leads
To generate new leads for your business, create a list of keywords that people might use when researching a product or service similar to your product and services. Use social media listening tools to track these keywords across all social media channels. In this case, your keywords are essentially your hashtags.
The data obtained will help you understand what your customer expects from your service and how they’ve been searching for it on Instagram. You can then use this information to reach out to them and encourage them to try a free demo of your product/services or use a trial version. Alternatively, you can even create content on Instagram that feeds their searches, leading up to what you have to offer.
3. Keeping tabs on the competition
Create a list of keywords and terms (hashtags) related to your competitors and start tracking them in your social listening tool. By listening to conversations around your competitors, you can get insights on what gives them an edge over you, what their weaknesses are and what opportunities you can tap into. In many cases, this also helps in competitively planning your sales strategy or pricing.
4. Identify influencers
A huge number of shoppers make purchases based on recommendations made by social media influencers. With an Instagram listening tool, track influencers who are sharing positive reviews on your product or service, or raving about one that addresses a similar audience that you want to target.
Reach out to them, build a collaborative relationship and start offering them offers and rewards for spreading your brand’s good name.
5. Improve your promotional strategy
Refine your target audience by filtering out your keywords with demographic-specific data. This helps you understand when is the best time to engage with your audience, their issues with recent purchases, and what makes them happy. Leverage this information to create your ad campaign strategy for Instagram.
6. Drive innovation
Instagram listening not only helps you understand your customer’s needs and behavior but also that of your competitor’s. Track keywords related to negative reviews around your product and services or understand what aspect created a bad customer experience. Use this data to identify an opportunity for change and bring out innovation in the product or improve your service.
3. Define what you are listening for
Effective social listening is all about “what” you’re listening for. That means choosing the right keywords (hashtags) for your brand.
After you set up your social listening tools and identify your goals, choose the right keywords for your brand that you want to stay updated about. These keywords could be your brand’s mentions, mentions of your competitors that you want to keep a close watch on, or phrases and industry trends that help you stay abreast with market trends.
The keywords and topics you monitor will likely evolve over time. In the beginning, you’ll learn what kinds of words people tend to use when they talk about your business and your industry. You’ll also start to discover what kinds of insights are most useful for you.
Here’s a list of important keywords and topics to listen to right from the start:
Your brand name and handles
Your product name(s) (Don’t forget to include common misspellings and abbreviations)
Your competitors’ brand names, product names, and handles
Keywords on Industry buzzwords
Your slogan and that of your competitor’s
Names of key people in your company and your competitors’ companies (your CEO etc.)
Campaign names or keywords
Your branded hashtags and those of your competitors
Unbranded hashtags related to your industry
Another key point to remember is to not just define what you’re listening to but also where you’re listening.
Listen everywhere! Before you jump on what your audience is talking about you, find out where your audience is. This means expanding across various channels and not just Instagram. A social listening tool like Radarr helps you cover all ground on one dashboard.
4. Roll in the changes (Take action!)
As you gather social information from your listening tool, you’ll start sensing the regular conversation and sentiment around your brand. But if you don’t take the requisite action, you’re only indulging in social media monitoring, not listening on Instagram.
Social listening on Instagram is about more than tracking metrics, it’s about learning what your customers want from your brand and how you can provide it to them. Ensure that you analyze the patterns and trends obtained from your listening tools, rather than just comments.
Such analysis has the power to guide your future strategy to stand out on an otherwise noisy platform!
Put the insights to work! Generate social listening reports from your Instagram listening tool on a daily, weekly, or monthly basis and share them along with the actionable items with all your teams.
Use KPIs to measure your team’s performance. Keep track of what’s been implemented and what’s pending to achieve the kind of business growth you’ve envisioned.
A social listening tool like the Radarr platform equips you with everything you need for effective social media listening and digital intelligence.
Applications of Instagram listening
Businesses leverage Instagram listening in a variety of ways. Some of the applications include monitoring brand positioning, reputation management, VoC (voice of customer) reviews, product enrichment among a few.
In addition to the above, Instagram sentiment analysis plays a key role in detecting any negativity or positivity around their products in real-time. This helps them take immediate action on the content bringing them notoriety. Instagram listening is also used for :
Detecting social trends
Customer support
Brand monitoring
Reputation management
Voice of the Customer (VoC) analysis
Voice of employee (VoE) analysis
Analysis of products/services
Competitor analysis
Market research
Want to see how Instagram listening can do this for your brand? Book a Radarr demo.
Additional reads to improve your Instagram marketing strategy:
Has your brand adopted Instagram social listening?
In times when the world is turning to digital and the use of social media platforms like Instagram is increasing by the day, it’s important to leverage Instagram listening.
Think about the number of times you put in a lot of time and resources to create a video for your Instagram account and did not see the engagement you expected. Or think about how you posted a piece of content that suddenly raked up a lot of negativity around your brand’s account, resulting in a rapid drop of followers.
Yes, that’s where social listening on Instagram comes in. It’s not just a reactive measure to perform well on the platform, but a proactive way to remain ahead and capture attention in the right way!
Sure, over the last decade, social media has evolved for business around the globe, and so it has evolved in the same vein for your brand as well. From having a strategic role to play in your company’s overall marketing plan to having a plethora of resources being allotted to make it grow, Twitter today makes one of the most important avenues of marketing for your business.
Yet somehow, there are so many things that even savvy businesses lose out on, when it comes to making the most from the fastest growing social media channel that is focused on conversations!
Enter social listening on Twitter, the art and science of keeping a tab on conversations around topics, keywords, and themes that are of relevance or importance for your business, in order to utilize the maximum benefit your brand could gain out of being active on Twitter.
On any given day, there are about more than 200 million odd tweets that are being made, according to the official data shared by the company. And this number is only going to grow much, much further.
What that translates for you as a marketer or a business owner is to make the most of this opportunity, and work towards acing your Twitter (read: social media) game.
In this guide, we will take you through everything that you need to know about Twitter listening so that you don’t lose another chance to have a conversation that converts. So, without any further ado, let us dive right into it as deep as we can.
Already know what Twitter listening is? Try Radarr to get started.
But wait, what exactly is Twitter Listening?
Now, apart from the basic definition we just gave in the introduction, there is a lot you need to know about Twitter Listening, solely in terms of what it is. According to Wikipedia, this is what social media listening is:
Social media listening or social listening is a way of computing the popularity of a brand or company by extracting information from social media channels, such as blogs, wikis, news sites, micro-blogs such as Twitter, social networking sites, video/photo sharing websites, forums, message boards and user-generated content from time to time. In other words, this is the way to calibrate the success of social media marketing strategies used by a company or a brand. It is also used by companies to gauge current trends in the industry. The process first gathers data from different websites and then performs analysis based on different metrics like time spent on the page, click through rate, content share, comments, text analytics to identify positive or negative emotions about the brand.
If you want to learn more about social listening, read this article complete guide to social listening
Twitter listening is exactly this, but obviously limited to Twitter. You spend some time scrounging through the plethora of conversations around the topics or hashtags relevant to your business in a frequent manner to glean insights that can supercharge how you go about the rest of your social media and marketing strategy.
And voila, you now have an edge over your competition!
Umm, but why is social listening on Twitter even important?
When it comes to social listening, Twitter might be one of the most primed platforms to have ever existed in this world. Why you ask? Its users are active, socially aware, and available, and do not ever shy away from speaking their minds, especially when it requires confronting a brand, big or small, its executives, subsidiaries, and whatnot.
But, in the thick and thin of it, here are some of the reasons social listening on Twitter is important, as compared to other platforms or other ways of gleaning marketing insights:
Twitter is a rapidly growing platform, making it ripe for more and more insights going forward
All of your peers and competitors are there, and people are talking about both of you in the same vein
There are trends and fashions that have erupted from Twitter, and will continue to in the future as well
Bad press snowballs into bigger ones in a matter of hours, if not earlier, so you need to know there’s a fire under you before your back starts to feel warm
Some of these reasons, and a whole lot more that might be relevant to just your brand and vertical more than make up for you having to invest in a social listening strategy for Twitter.
Implementing a social listening strategy for Twitter
Now that we have discussed a bit about social listening for Twitter, and how it is imperial for your brand, it’s time to deep dive into an implementation strategy for the same. One that is actionable, can be followed without emptying your pockets, and is sure to show you the results you’ve been hoping for.
So, without further ado, let’s look at all the steps right here:
Step 1: Identify the goals of your Twitter social listening strategy
Just like any other marketing or social media activity, having a clear set of goals that act as a guiding star for your actions makes it all the more worthwhile and rewarding to pursue an activity. Which is why, for your social listening strategy for Twitter, the very first thing you should be doing is to identify the goals that you are going to want to achieve over a period of time.
One of the ways you can go about it is to have a look at your branding, marketing, sales and customer service processes, identifying loopholes and gaps, and take note of what would help you address those better.
Followed by listing down the goals you want to achieve with social listening that align with the progress you made in the step previous to this. Having clear KPIs on social listening will help you analyse whether or not the effort is paying off.
Some of the other objectives you can achieve through Twitter listening (although you will have to tweak them basis the nature of your business vertical) are as follows: providing better customer service, generating new leads, gaining a headstart over your competitors, identifying up and coming influencers in your industry, driving innovation as a central tenet of your brand, and improving your promotion strategy.
Step 2: Choose a social listening tool for your strategy
You know Twitter literally has millions of conversations going on at any given point of day, so, the tool which can help you get a bird’s eye view to glean insights from the platform needs to be one which puts the T in robust. Otherwise, you might only be setting yourself up for a big failure, whether you are able to identify it well in time or not will decide if you are able to recuperate from it.
Given the plethora of tools out there today, you need to pick one that is able to read the millions of conversations going on, on Twitter, and helps you collate all the data in one place along with helping you derive actionable insights from it.
At the cost of sounding slightly salesy, Radarr is one such tool which empowers you to achieve that, uprooting any of your existing marketing tech systems, and any other contingencies you could think of.
Want to see how Radarr can help you with Twitter listening? Book a demo today.
Step 3: Set up your social listening tool up to speed
Once you have gone ahead and chosen a tool which aligns with your needs, you would then have to calibrate it according to the goals and KPIs you’re looking to move for your brand by doing social listening. You also need to clearly mention what it is that you really want to track for the right kind of data to be captured.
But doing just this much sometimes might not be enough. Imagine having access to millions of data points on ongoing conversations and your audience, and still not being able to put it to work.
So, in the next section of this article, we are going to focus on how you can use the insights you glean from your Twitter listening strategy and make the most of your time and money.
How to use insights from your Twitter Listening strategy
Great, so now you have a bunch of different streams of thoughts coming in from listening in to what your customers, audience and the world at large has to say about your business. The insights that you are now loaded with can help you with the following directions:
Product improvement
Hopefully, when you set your Twitter Listening tool up, you were able to identify and lay some focus on parameters that are relevant to your product. As an example, your product-related searches should likely result in customer feedback, feature request, and some brand sentiment on top of it.
Going forward, you can use this data to understand how to improve your product and identify new use cases for it.
Industry monitoring
It’s likely that you’re already following the top influential brands in your industry or that you’re one of those brands. But discussions move fast on Twitter and monitoring what other industry voices are talking about will help inform your content strategy in a massive, massive way.
For instance, Tweets around a local or international conference are an easy way of tracking what’s an emerging trend and mostly come along with an associated hashtag to ease things up for you.
Informed content strategy & campaigns
There are many different ways to use social listening on Twitter to inform your content strategy and achieve massive results. The very first one is to use your Twitter analytics reports to see what type of content is resonating with your audience the best.
Step two is looking at what your competitors are putting out and what’s resonating with their audience. Is it worth it to imitate whatever is working for them? Where and why are they failing so you can fill that need? Are you dominating the conversation topic in your industry more than your competitor? All these questions and more help you get where you need to be.
And finally, social listening reports can drive your next campaign. What are customers talking about the most online? Identify their needs and create a campaign around them. You can use the listening results from one campaign to inform your next one, ensuring you precisely meet your customers’ needs every single time of the day.
Identify new partnerships
A byproduct of the social listening you put into place is that listening will surface new marketing opportunities. You are most likely to find new influencers for your product and co-marketing partners for your next campaign, and so on.
In addition to identifying the influencers, listening will also help you focus on hot topics in those spaces. Is there a trend of coffee bars in boutique hotels? As a travel company, you can ask your influencers to push that discussion point more. Or you know, whatever is the most relevant and aligned with your nature of business and vertical.
Understand the sentiment of your audience
This one is our favorite – the real growth hack to nailing it on Twitter!
With social listening on Twitter, you will not just be able to keep track of ongoing conversations and trends, but the “emotion” or “sentiment” that led to them. This includes the sentiment of the audience when they start out a conversation relevant to your business, industry or maybe even a competitor.
This gives you a clear direction in terms of what you can double down on – things that lead to a positive sentiment, and things you need to avoid to keep the negative responses at bay.
See how social listening on Twitter can benefit your business? Book a demo today.
Three must-haves to jumpstart your Twitter Listening
Thanks to Twitter’s official blog, they were able to give us a deep-dive into how a brand goes about listening in to conversations around topics relevant to it. And in this section we will just about summarize the key takeaways from the same.
Here is what the day to day of social listening looks like, in the following three ways.
Using tools to drive results home: the brand uses a comprehensive social listening tool that allows their team to execute real-time brand monitoring and listening to analyze social data for marketing analytics.
Fortunately for you, the same can be achieved through Radarr’s state of the art social listening platform.
Keywords: Now, first of all, keywords are going to play by far the most important role in your Twitter Listening strategy. Finding out relevant keywords and keyword phrases people use when searching for your brand. This also includes searches for your product or services.
Engage: Lastly, you have to plan to intelligently respond to the conversations you uncover online. You will likely uncover all kinds of conversations around your brand or keywords. Complaints, compliments, recommendations, reviews . . . you get the drift. Make sure you have an engagement strategy to address each one of those, and do it well.
Hearing what matters: Parting words on Twitter Listening
Now, before you rush to take your Twitter listening game to the next level, there are some things you should know.
The suggestions and tips outlined in this article are just the starting point for you, as a business, and as a marketer, the onus is on you to modify your strategy basis the results you want to achieve, the resources you have at your disposal, and other things.
So, make sure you do justice to this nascent art and science, and glean insights that give you the competitive edge you so very much deserve!
We live in a world where information travels faster than the speed of light. With the advent of technology, social media, the internet, and other related tools and technologies in today’s day and age, interacting and engaging with the latest in the world of news and media isn’t all that difficult. And if there is one aspect of it all where the impact can be seen far and wide, it has to be in the domain of business. This is where media monitoring comes in.
Today, as your business grows, your marketing efforts quadruple, processes get into place, and so on, a word about your brand starts to spill out in various circles.
People start talking about your business – not just on social media, but also online media sites and directories that start to cover your brand, mention it, quote it, review it, and more. Then there are also people interacting with it all in comments.
In all honesty, it is not just hard to keep track of, but also almost impossible to derive any insights from all the scattered media mentions.
This is where media monitoring and analysis comes into your rescue.
Before we delve deep into it, it’s best to set the right expectations about what the rest of this guide will focus on.
If you have never heard the term media monitoring before and would like to learn the A to Z about it without having to overwhelm yourself, you are at the right place. In this guide, we will focus on the aspects of media monitoring that will enable you to leverage it as a marketing moat as well as a brand shield, rather than just something you observe from the sidelines. So, without any further ado, shall we get started?
What is media monitoring?
In a nutshell, media monitoring refers to the process of keeping a tab on news, media, publications, and other outlets to scourge for information, insights, and mentions around particular topics, especially those relevant to your brand and business.
More often than not, the aim of this is to glean insights that could have business value for you.
From covering as many sources of relevancy as possible, including but not limited to radio, TV, print, internet, magazines, social media, online publications, and more, everything about tracking these channels comes under the umbrella of media monitoring.
In today’s day and age, however, with the internet becoming the most important carrier of information for the populace, it has become the most important source of information for a lot of businesses, especially those that are digital-first or have the majority of their activities done online.
For a business, the pieces of relevant data and insights collected by a media monitoring platform (more on that in the later sections) or service can give you valuable insights into your company, marketing, product, campaign, services, or even your competitors’ brand perception, recall value, and similar measurements.
Through the help of media monitoring and analysis combines, you can empower your business to take care of numerous avenues in your marketing or PR, including brand monitoring, online reputation management, customer support, customer feedback, crisis management, public relations, including improving media coverage and media relations, earned media value, market research, PR and marketing campaign analytics, hashtag analytics, and competition research, among others.
Over the past couple of years, the importance of media monitoring, particularly online and social media monitoring and analysis has increased multifold due to a plethora of reasons.
Today, the consumer makes use of the internet to share with the wider world their experiences, exchange ideas on their interests and likes, seek recommendations for products they want to buy, and so much more.
Every other person out there with a smartphone and a working internet connection can be called a content creator as an individual, and their influence on how others perceive a brand they have had an experience or interaction with can have a substantial impact on the brand. So, for businesses and brands with an online presence, it’s a huge opportunity and a huge challenge: to reach consumers, shape, and manage their perception, and, ultimately, win their trust.
With this thought in your mind, it is always good to know what exactly is being said about your business online: by your happy, or unhappy customers – especially by industry media or publications, as they have a wider reach.
You can only remain on top of these things with real-time media monitoring and analysis.
So, how exactly does media monitoring help you grow your business?
1. Monitor your brand’s reputation at any instant, in real time
They say bad news travels fast, but, in all honesty, bad news, especially online, travels even faster. When it comes to your reputation getting harmed online, it can barely take minutes before any sort of such news travels around like wildfire.
This is what makes it super-duper essential for you to keep a tab on the media and related coverage around your company. Media monitoring and analysis can help you build and protect your brand’s reputation with ease.
From helping you identify potential crises and mitigating their negative effects, media monitoring and analysis can help you achieve it all with much ease. If you do put in the effort to set up the processes and project management mandates around it, you will be able to receive mentions containing the keywords most relevant to you in real-time.
And once you receive a notification about a new mention for those keywords, you can react right away, preventing a crisis from escalating then and there itself.
With media monitoring and analysis tools like Radarr, you can command the narrative which your brand is built around. Rather than just being a spectator, you will become a more active entity when it comes to the online presence of your brand. Moreover, you will be able to control earned media coverage effectively and to your benefit.
2. Prevent crises before they happen, and mitigate the ones that do
The fact of the world is, sooner or later, you, your company, the brand, or even the employees will face a crisis. Whether you come away unscathed from the crisis situation depends largely on how well you’ll be able to prepare and battle out the cause. One of the key elements of crisis management is having the ability to spot a negative mention early on.
More often than not, a crisis usually comes to hit you in the face from some of the most unexpected places, such as one of your company’s vendors, users, or some others.
A media monitoring and analysis platform will help you to stay one step ahead of the news that is available out in the open, giving you enough time to react to negative mentions and shielding your brand from any further harm.
3. Know your audience, customers, and market inside out
For a business, the most important element that helps put food on the table is the fact that at the end of a good day, you need to be able to serve your target audience, customers, and market the best way you possibly can, and hell, do it better than your competitors.
In order to gain this headstart over your competitors such that it acts as an advantage for you, is to listen in to the online conversations of your customers and identify their pain points before your competitors or a new market entrant can.
Given that media monitoring is all about being able to listen in to these conversations at scale, it helps you discover and deliver exactly the experience, product, service, or campaign that your audience expects you to deliver. Not a bit better, not a bit worse.
In addition to all of this, you will also get to know how to reach out to your target audience more effectively with the insights you derive from media monitoring their online convos and interactions. Hence, in a nutshell, media monitoring is one of the most ideal ways to get to know your target audience better.
4. Measure the results of your PR and marketing campaigns effectively
One of the tenets of marketing is attribution – that is, being able to tell where money is being spent, how well it is performing for you, and so on. This is why you need to measure the results of your marketing and any other campaigns that you launch. Although, a lack of which will not give you insights to learn what is working to your advantage, and what you need to improve in your strategy and communication plans, would you not?
Now, since the most important aim of any marketing campaign, well, most if not all, is to raise awareness around your brand and/or promote its product or services, you must know how the campaign resonated with your target group.
Public relations and communications professionals are able to glean a ton of valuable insights through just monitoring the online conversations that their existing or targeted audience is indulging in. Contrary to how most just end the conversation around public relations and press releases with a generic note that says ‘boosts brand awareness.’
5. Identify public profiles for your brand’s influencer marketing campaigns
When it comes to media monitoring, whether it is on news websites, or elsewhere in places like a community, identifying influencers is of prime importance for you for many reasons.
Endorsements from such easily recognizable public personalities can help your business to verify the brand, products, services, or even your workforce, helping build trust in your company and get ahead of your peers in the industry.
Since the key to a successful media endorsement lies in being able to pinpoint the right influencers, one that has absolute authority over your niche, is trustworthy, and is genuinely interested in promoting your brand, media monitoring helps you in finding such people, and those that are already talking about your business niche, product, or service.
With a list of public profiles, you can delve deeper and investigate for your growth, you can make the most informed decision about choosing which influencer you should invest your budget for the same in.
Think about that one reporter for instance that tends to give you an unabashed take on what’s happening around the world. Media monitoring helps you identify those strong voices as well!
So, okay, by now we know what media monitoring actually is, and how it can affect your business’s growth, top, and bottom line, but, how exactly does it work? And what sources of monitoring does it actually cover? This and the next few sections will be focussed on exactly that.
Thanks to the rapid advent of technology in the twenty-first century, monitoring online conversations around any topic or theme nowadays is a cakewalk.
With the help of dedicated tools like Radarr, you can monitor and collect each and every mention around your brand, its keywords, and more, all in real-time, without having to pull any strings. In a nutshell, the entire process can be easily broken down into the following steps:
First, choose the keywords, clusters, and topics that you would like to monitor. Media monitoring tools then comb the whole wide world to search for every mention containing your query parameters, given that they are indexed on search engines.
Now, depending on the goal and aim of your media monitoring strategy, you could choose the analytical metrics that you are going to be tracking closely. There are a ton of brands out there that do it well, from tracking content performance for their or their competitors’ content, data or insights from the industry, and much more.
Once you are armed with the insights from your media monitoring efforts, the next thing you should do to ensure what you are doing has a long lasting impact, is to share the learnings within your organization. There are tools out there that offer Slack integrations for the same, so you can easily make all the parties involved in the process about their next steps.
In a nutshell, the entire success of your media monitoring efforts depends solely on how well you set up your project and knowing how to act upon the insights that you glean from them.
What sources does media monitoring cover?
In the olden days, media monitoring and analysis used to be limited only to print and broadcast media. However, in the last two decades, especially with the rise of the internet, you can now gather every mention about your organization, company, industry, vertical, or even more granular things as much as you would like to go.
And, it’s not just that you can do so, you need to, in order to make the most informed decision about your strategy, even if they appear somewhere you don’t even know of before discovering. So, what all sources do media monitoring now cover?
Almost all of the cloud-based media monitoring software tools cover the majority of online sources that exist today, however, the scope of monitoring and the number of mentions in each of the projects depend on the media monitoring platform of your choice. For example, Radarr monitors blogs, forums, online news sites, podcasts, newsletters, and other publicly available online sources at your convenience.
Print media
As is clear from the term, print media refers to the portion of media such as newspapers and magazines, and it makes up a big chunk of media monitoring. Some target audiences still consider print media a crucial source of information for their efforts. The icing on the cake is, most newspapers and magazines nowadays have an online edition that can be accessed from a web browser anywhere in the world, so it becomes super easy for you to track the same through your online media monitoring and analysis tool.
Broadcast
It may seem as though streaming services such as Netflix, YouTube, and others have a major, substantial threat to the traditional TV or cable networks, but there’s only so much fact in that. Radio and TV still have substantial advantages over their peers, depending on where in the world and in what context are you comparing the two. While millennials might have never gotten used to these, the majority of the population in the United States still get reached through these.
Social media (yes, it does!)
Now it goes without saying that social media monitoring will make up an integral part of any media monitoring strategy or project, mostly because the majority of conversations about your industry vertical, products, or services will take place on LinkedIn, Twitter, Instagram, and the likes. And add to that the fact that now even YouTube is considered a social media platform first, and a streaming giant later. And already is the second most used search engine in the world.
Ready to know what the media has to say about you and how it is impacting your brand reputation? Book A Radarr Demo.
What should you be monitoring for your brand?
It goes without saying, that for your project to be successful, you need to be monitoring keywords that are relevant for your business and help you gain insights that help move your business forward even in the slightest, if at all.
Here’s where an effective media monitoring software tool will help you separate the wheat from the chaff and get the most return on your investment in the way of actionable insights.
So, what exactly should you be including in your media monitoring strategy for your brand?
Yourself
Obviously, duh? You need to be monitoring what you and your business, its related keywords, and anything even remotely relevant to you is ever referred to in any conversation over the internet. You should know, no matter which media monitoring software you decide to choose for this purpose.
You should be able to track your brand across different services, news sites, publications, and beyond. Tracking your own brand will help you figure out who is talking about you, and what they are talking about. Giving you more information about the sentiment that is out in the market about your brand.
Forget NPS, if you want to figure out who your biggest promoters and detractors are, this will give you a bird’s eye view into identifying them up and close. Use this insight to power your campaigns and reach newer heights with your marketing and communications.
However, two things you need to make sure of is that you monitor the keywords related to you for a long period of time, and even consistently, never losing sight of why it is so important for you. That way you will be able to set up benchmarking metrics for these, and that will give you all the context on the data that you have collected.
Competition
Whether you are a newcomer in your industry, a seasoned player, or a leader, you always need to know what your peers are up to when it comes to how the world is talking about them. So, tracking your competition and its related avenues becomes a no-brainer, really.
Startups know that it is important to know what the goliath, aka the big fish, is doing, and try to get inspired from the secrets behind their enormous success. Especially if you are someone wanting to disrupt the market, you need to know what you are up against.
Industry
Well, this one goes without saying. If you want to succeed beyond a point, you need to know what your industry is up to. Are there any new trends or news you should be aware of? Any new policy changes that you should be aware of?
Any new compliances that are coming your way to take care? Media monitoring will help you be the first to know of anything new happening, and that will be a great competitive advantage for your brand.
Who should be doing media monitoring?
Although it is recommended for any organization or entity that exists in today’s day and age, there are a few that take precedence over others. Especially if you work for a firm that has engaged with other human beings, perhaps as its customers, users, investors, audience, readers, employees, or literally anything similar, and you care about your brand reputation and how the public perceives you, then a media monitoring tool should be one of the things of priority in your marketing technology stack.
In a similar vein, if you are someone who likes to think ahead of time, and want to be able to spot opportunities and threats that could jeopardize or alter the course of action of your brand, vertical, or industry as a whole, you should invest in media monitoring in whatever capacity you can manage to.
Media monitoring and your brand’s reputation: The real game
Since we already established that online conversations can hurt brands and organizations in dramatic ways, it is also important to learn how the different applications of media monitoring works, especially in the context of crisis management, or whenever something breaks and might need a good fixing.
One of the top benefits of media monitoring and analysis is that it helps you prepare for a public relations crisis, and saves your brand a ton of shame and public loathing, if not revenue.
The very first step which comes in trying to recover from a public relations crisis is to be fully aware of what is happening, that is, knowing the situation at hand well enough to be able to think of solutions to control it effectively. We bet you can think of numerous instances where brands suffered from getting flak for things they could have responded to easily and mitigate all the trouble.
Just to reiterate, there’s a reason they say bad news travels fast, but bad news, especially online, travel even faster. So, how does media monitoring help combat a public relations crisis effectively?
Prepare before a crisis
If there’s one thing you should know about a crisis, which is also true for literally everything in life, it’s that it can come anytime, and especially when you least expect it. This is why, you should always have your preparation with the worst in mind so that even if the best happens, you are only pleasantly surprised. And not blown out of your wits!
When it comes to dealing with a crisis, preparation is one of the key elements of coming out on the other side a victor. As a suggestion, you should invest well in a crisis response plan, just as you would have other processes and plans set up for literally every other thing for your business.
A ton of companies, especially the savvy ones out there, run drills and mock tests to manage such crises, and we believe that is a good way to get yourself familiarized with the same.
Here, media monitoring can empower you in two specific ways:
First, you should monitor mentions, keywords or anything that you can regarding your brand. Pay special attention to mentions from social media and similar platforms. Complaints made on various social media platforms tend to catch people’s attention faster than other avenues.
Secondly, you should monitor mentions regarding your most important competitors. You can learn from your competitors’ mistakes. What’s more, you might be blamed by association, so you need to always have an upper hand.
During the crisis
During a crisis, the role of media monitoring becomes even more crucial. Once the volcano erupts, you want to be the first one to know where the lava is going to spread to. This is why your media monitoring tool should have a solid real-time alerts and updates system.
Media monitoring will help you catch complaints made by your customers and react to the problems before they escalate beyond the point of no return. Moreover, a media monitoring tool will monitor the sentiment. That will help you assess the severity of the crisis and act accordingly.
After the crisis
Might be the last step, but definitely not the least important. If anything, after the crisis you need to be even more vigilant and proactively prepare from your learnings to ensure you do better the next time. Now would be the perfect time to reassess your crisis management plan.
Conclusion
To sum up the entirety of this guide, which wouldn’t really be a simple thing, media monitoring is definitely something that can benefit your business if you are able to comprehend and execute it well.
With the help of its numerous insights and features, a media monitoring tool can help you glean valuable info into your brand’s online presence, your competitors’ status, the latest industry trends, and much more.
We hope that through this piece you would have been able to learn more about media monitoring and analysis, and why it is worth your attention, and investment. For more, stay tuned to more such informative content from Radarr.
But if you’re ready to take the next step and make media monitoring your go-to on how to reach your audience positively, book a demo with us!
To put things into perspective, there are 350 million photos that are uploaded every day on Facebook. There are 8.95 million photos and videos shared on Instagram daily. And there are about 280 billion feed updates made on LinkedIn on a day-to-day basis. We’re not even covering platforms like TikTok, Snapchat, Quora, Reddit and others yet.
What we’re trying to say is that the number of social media conversations happening at any given time is massive.
From seasonal trends to debates around ongoing topics, brand campaigns and more, there is just too much going on.
And believe it or not, if your business is not listening to social conversations, you are missing out.
But to be able to understand the conversations happening in your audience segment, joining every platform seems like too much work.
Imagine logging into each account every day and scrolling through endless posts. It’s going to take you hours…even maybe the whole day! By the time you put that information to good use, the topics of conversation have probably changed, and it’s time to repeat the exercise.
But there’s a smarter way out. Social listening.
Before you go looking for a social listening definition, hold on. This guide is going to cover everything you need to know about it and how you can get started.
What is social listening?
Social listening refers to the process of analyzing conversations and trends across the internet. This does not just include posts or comments around your brand, but also the industry as a whole, giving you insights into what your audience is interested in and what grabs their attention.
Keeping track of these conversations not only gives you insights into your target market, it also allows you to discover opportunities and make better branding or marketing decisions to promote your business.
You may be wondering…”Wait, isn’t that the whole point of social media monitoring?”
Social listening vs social monitoring
Social media monitoring typically tells you what is being spoken about online. But social listening adds another layer of data on top of it, letting you know why something is being spoken about in a positive or negative way.
Social monitoring tells you what, but social listening tells you why!
When a business is monitoring social media, they’re typically tracking ongoing conversations and responding to them where it seems fit – or taking an action to directly address something. It helps them strike a conversation with the internet user, understand grievances or expectations and take note of that data.
Let’s take this example from Zomato:
On the other hand, social listening not only helps businesses track and respond to ongoing conversations – but goes one step further. It helps them use interactions to draw conclusions about the audience sentiment behind the conversation.
Social Listening gives brands insights into which segment of their audience has grievances, the reasons behind those grievances, and a clearer strategy on how they should address this before things escalate on any of the social media platforms.
There is no black and white when it comes to social media monitoring and listening. The two have some overlapping traits and are equally important for brands as the digital landscape grows by the day.
But we are going to tell you why getting the bigger picture with social listening is so important!
Why social listening matters
Well, the only way to truly know what people really think about your brand and expect from your business, is to listen to their conversations. (Don’t your friends always tell you to listen to?)
Not using social media listening means leaving a lot of valuable insights on the table that could give you a competitive edge in the market.
But let us explain this a little more.
1. Your customer engagement improves
Social listening gives you the chance to engage customers in contextual conversations at the right time to get more insights.
Let us paint you a picture:
A customer tweets about a purchase they recently made. They’re clearly excited about it because they are willing to share it with their friends on social media. Now if you are using a social listening tool, you can jump right in and welcome them to the community or link them to resources that could help them put the purchase to use. Boom!
Let us paint you a different picture:
Someone is making a purchase online and gets stuck during the check-out process. They’ll obviously take it to social media as an immediate negative reaction. Brands like Nike leverage social listening to address it right away!
In fact, you can use social media listening to tune into what your audience is asking online and address it in your content. Walmart does a fantastic job at it!
But that’s not all. They also keep the conversation going based on the sentiments their content generates!
2. You get better at tracking competition
Social listening is more than tracking ongoing conversations around your brand only.. It also gives you the opportunity to know what they’re saying about your competitors aka businesses that are targeting a similar audience segment as you with the same (or similar) products and services.
This gives you insights into the areas your competitors are excelling in, where there’s an opportunity for you to tap into, what campaigns they’re running and how you can improve yours. All of these, in real-time!
Take a look at these two tweets from Pepsi and Coca-Cola:
The long-standing competitors are trying to tap into the same audience emotions, but are doing their own thing with it. While one starts it, the other follows through with something either similar, bigger, better, or longer running!
3. You understand the pain points of your audience
Aside from your competitors, you can actually look at what’s happening in the entire industry to understand your audience better. Social listening uncovers an array of insights about who is doing what and what seems to be working. But more importantly, it highlights what’s NOT working for your ideal customer.
The pain points.
It gives you a peek into how they ‘feel’ about the products and services available to them that are currently in the market. Furthermore, it highlights what other additional value-adds they expect out of them and why.
That data is a goldmine for your branding, marketing, and product teams!
Imagine you are a coffee brand that is soon to launch its first collection. With social listening, you can tune into your market to see how your target customer feels about the coffee sachets available to them right now.
Let’s assume:
You see a myriad of conversations around the filtering of the coffee in the present market, to realize that the quality that exists right now is lackluster. . That’s an indicator enough for you to go back and check if yours is! The same holds true for the flavors available and the ones that they ‘wish they had.
92% of internet users resort to social media when they have a bad experience with a brand or a purchase they made. Use this behavior to get you actionable that help you grow!
4. You identify influencers, advocates and detractors for your brand
Influencers and advocates are people who take to social media to share their experiences and knowledge on topics of interest. But more importantly, they are people who can have a huge influence on how their network (followers and fans) feel about you, as well as your competitors.
With social listening, you can identify conversations that tip in your favor, the initiators of the conversation, what motivates them and the overall sentiment they are generating with their following.
According to surveys across industries, 89% of businesses say ROI from influencer marketing is comparable to or better than other marketing channels. But it all depends on finding the right influencer who truly believes in what you do and can ‘naturally’ promote your business.
What’s more? You actually get to identify your detractors in a timely manner. Social listening gives you the opportunity to reach out to these people, offer a resolution and stop the bad word of mouth around your brand before it gets out of hand! You can even take note of conversations that are fuelled by negative emotions to prevent people from reaching the point of becoming detractors.
5. You discover new sales opportunities
Customers are no longer seeking deals and discounts when interacting with businesses. The things that they are looking for are value and an experience that’s unmatched.
No matter what segment or industry your business is in, customers love it when you take the first step to solve their problems. Whether that’s something your marketing and sales team was currently focusing on – or not!
And it goes without saying, this is because they no longer like being ‘sold’ stuff. They want to be able to see the value in everything before investing their money and time in it.
Social listening enables you to reach out and build connections with those who show intent or interest in your business. It also lets you understand the information you’d be required to share with these people to strike contextual conversations. This doesn’t just get you more sales opportunities, it also helps establish your name as a brand that is informative, authoritative, and out there to ‘help’, resulting in more word of mouth referrals for you!
6. You manage crises better
Ever heard of brand stories going viral when customers accused the business of not ‘understanding their situation’ better?
Well, it’s common.
Nearly 49% of consumers tend to share negative experiences online. It’s their way of seeking a resolution from the brand, getting them to respond faster, and also alerting those like them who may be thinking of making the same purchase.
With social listening, you don’t just get alerts on ongoing conversations, but you are also able to segment them based on positive, negative, and neutral sentiments.
If you suddenly seem to be getting a lot of positive engagement, seek the reasons behind it. Join in the conversation, invite these happy customers for interviews, and reverse engineer their journey with your brand. This will help you recreate the same experience for new customers.
Similarly, if you see a rise in negative sentiments, look at the marketing and PR campaigns you recently ran. Identify the reason around the negative word of mouth, acknowledge them, offer a resolution, and fix the processes before things get out of hand!
Concrete reasons for you to focus on social listening, right?
If you believe that simply staying logged in to all the social platforms is the answer to being able to keep track of conversations, you are wrong.
You’ll always miss out on the conversations happening parallelly on other platforms while manually monitoring one.
What’s worse is that you wouldn’t be able to tap into the ongoing conversations in online forums or blog comments that tend to run in multiple threads.
Step 1: Identify your social listening goals
Take a look at your branding, marketing, sales, and customer service processes. Identify loopholes and gaps, and take note of what would help you address those better.
The next step is to start listing down the goals you want to achieve with social listening. Having clear KPIs on social listening will help you analyse whether or not the effort is paying off.
For example, one of your KPIs can be increasing the customer lifetime value (CLTV). This means you will need to listen closely to the conversations from the people using your product/ service online.
Step 2: Define what you are listening for and to
By that, we mean choosing the right keywords for your brand that you want to be notified about. Or mentions of your competitors that you want to keep a close watch on to stay at the top of the market with your offerings.
For example, if you are running a fashion and apparel brand, listening to keywords around a local meat shop will not help you get any actionables for your promotional campaigns.
A few things that you should be listening to closely include:
Own brand name and your social handles
Product and collection names
Brand/ products’ common misspellings
Competitors’ brands/ products/ social handles
Industry buzzwords/ trends
Current slogan and your marketing messages
Competitors’ slogans
Key stakeholders and their names
Competitors’ key stakeholders and their names
Campaign names and keywords associated with them
Branded hashtags
Competitor’s branded hashtags
Unbranded hashtags related to your industry and audience
PS. The keywords you listen to will evolve over time. Your social media listening tool should be able to highlight these new phrases for you!
Step 3: Get a social media listening tool
As we said before, listening to social media conversations manually can be overwhelming. Identifying and analyzing the sentiment behind those conversations can be extremely time-consuming!
If you want to be able to tap into current conversations, trends, and buzzwords, you need a foolproof way to manage social listening.
This is where having one of the best social listening tools like Radarr comes into play.
Radarr is the most intuitive social media listening, monitoring, and analytics tool provider that gives you insights beyond ongoing conversations. It comes with a sentiment analysis module that helps you understand what is driving the online conversations and how you can leverage them to promote your business better.
Daily Social Media and News Monitoring
Daily Brand Health & KPI Monitoring
Campaign Monitoring
Real-Time On-Screen Alerts and Notifications
Crisis Management and Mitigation
Competitor Tracking and Intelligence
Influencer Discovery and KOL Tracking
Powerful Audience Insights
Real-Time Alerts and Automated Reports
Trend Spotting and Predictive AI
Sentiment analysis and segmentation
Not sure how to implement social media listening? Book a demo here.
Step 4: Put the actionables to work!
Don’t just listen to social conversations.
Make sure you implement the insights and actionable items you gather from them as well. Generate social listening reports on a daily, weekly or monthly basis and share them all your teams along with the actionable items that fall under each one’s roles.
Create tasks for the actionable items set and the KPIs to measure the performance. This will help you keep track of what’s been implemented and what’s pending, monitoring the impact it has on the word and growth of your business online.
A social listening tool like the Radarr platform equips you with everything you need for effective social media listening and digital intelligence.
To be able to leverage it all, there are a few tips we always recommend!
First things first, identify all the channels that your audience actively uses to interact with one another or engage with brands.
Knowing where your audience is talking is as important as what and how they’re talking about anything related to you, or your competitor.
This should not just include social media platforms, but also online forums, communities, and websites they tend to engage on. Look for those that are specific to your market – in your local language.
2. Learn from your competitors (the good and the bad)
Don’t just use social media listening to learn about what people say about you. Use it to also get a peek into what they say about your competitors.
Take note of and learn quickly from the campaigns that generated positive responses and those that resulted in negative reviews or sentiment.
Learn from their mistakes and successes and implement them in your strategies.
3. Collaborate with other teams
Social listening gets you a wide range of information around the whole company, the target market as well as the industry.
This data is beneficial for many different departments in an organization. Right from those working on the branding, marketing, sales, product development or even customer service.
For example,
If you see your customers talking extensively about a topic or wanting more information on it, include it in your content marketing strategy and create a blog or an ebook around the same topic.
Similarly, if you see customers struggling to put their purchase to use and seeking answers in online forums, you should create knowledge centers, how-to guides or maybe even have your customer service team follow up with them!
4. Embrace the conversations
Once you start tapping into social conversations regularly, you will be able to identify what is happening around your brand. You will also be able to see what the general sentiment around your business looks like.
So when something changes, you will be aware of them instantly!
If you see a sudden change in how people are interacting or engaging with your brand or the sentiment around your campaigns, you know the perception around the business has changed.
That is an indication for you to embrace the conversations and bring in the changes that will help you get back on track!
5. Identify patterns and trends
Humans have a certain range of emotions associated with certain things – and these tend to remain more or less constant.
Look through your social listening insights and trace patterns that may have been repeated over time. This could be seasonal. This could also be based on certain ranges of products/ services that you promote every now and then.
Clearly and carefully take note of patterns that get you a positive response and those that tend to tip towards the negative, and align them with your overall business growth goals.
6. Put all that data to work
The last and the most obvious one, yet not done so often – put your data to work.
About 51% of marketers say social listening plays a crucial role in their strategizing. But that also says 49% of marketers are shying away from using social insights in their campaigns.
If you are not taking action, you are only doing social media monitoring. That is not social listening!
Remember, social listening is not just about tracking social media metrics. It is about gaining insights into what your existing and potential customers want from you, and identifying ways in which you can give them that.
But just as with other marketing tactics and business growth strategies, you should be tying social listening to tangible metrics that help you measure success.
Social listening metrics matched to your business KPIs
Business KPI: Brand awareness
Metric 1 – Volume of Conversation
This not just includes the @mentions of your brand, but also the references to your business when there is a conversation happening online. While these aren’t conversations addressed to you necessarily, it’s a good idea to keep watch on what people are saying to join them at the right moments!
Metric 2 – Reach of mentions
Reach is a metric that shows how many people have actually seen your brand name, and it need not be directly proportional to the number of mentions you get. This metric is often dependent on ‘who’ mentions your brand.
Metric 3 – Share of voice (SOV)
The share of voice metric basically takes into account the number of mentions you have versus the number of mentions your competitors have,, to calculate how much of the target market you take up in comparison to your competitors.
Business KPI: Conversion rate
Metric 1 – Engagement
The engagement metric typically covers a number of actions that your audience takes on social media and other digital channels. It includes likes, follows, social shares, comments, direct messages, link clicks, and similar. This metric comes under social listening because each user will have a different reason for engaging that way.
Metric 2 – Number of leads
While engagement gives you an estimate of conversions, the number of leads you actually generate has a direct impact on your sales. A lead is basically a potential buyer of your product/ service. So when you are listening to social conversations, a lead is a person who may have clicked on an ad campaign or followed your page to get more details on your offer.
Business KPI: Campaign target
Metric 1 – Demographic data
When you use social listening and monitoring tools like the Radarr platform, you can uncover and understand a lot of information about your audience. The languages they speak, where they live, gender (inferred), interests, occupation, the types of online platforms they use, and so much more. Don’t worry – no social media listening platform or service can track any PII (Personally Identifiable Information) or get information from any Private accounts).
Metric 2 – Influencer analysis
Analyze the most prominent, active and popular voices in your niche. This will help you understand what your target audience gets attracted to and what they choose to engage with. It is also always beneficial to know who your audience perceives as an authority or a leader in your industry to know who you are competing against or who you can partner with.
Business KPI: Customer satisfaction
Metric 1 – Sentiment score
Sentiment analysis is an essential part of social media success today. With social listening tools like the Radarr platform that leverage NLP, natural language processing, you can identify whether a post or conversation about/ around you is negative, positive or neutral.
Metric 2 – CSAT/ NPS score
When you monitor the sentiment score, you will also be able to keep a close watch on how it impacts the customer satisfaction levels. Based on the feedback framework you use, you should be measuring your CSAT/ NPS score at regular intervals.
Wondering if social listening is for you?
Just as social media presence, social media listening is important for everyone. Let’s take a quick look at the industries that are currently leveraging the insights from social listening.
Social media listening by industry
Travel and hospitality
By leveraging social listening, businesses in travel and hospitality can look into what’s trending in the industry. Some of them being:
most searched and talked about destinations
the experiences people want and are dreaming of on social media
how they feel about the itineraries available to them right now
These insights will not just get you market demand but also actionable that you can implement to grow your business.
Read more about intelligent itineraries using social listening here.
Consumer packaged goods (CPG & FMCG)
The demand for goods used on a day-to-day basis changes every season and it is sometimes based on what is happening around us. The global pandemic is a perfect example.There is a general increase in demand for health supplements all over the world! Spotting and building actionables using these trends can help you predict the demand for products or the lack of it, the sentiment around it and how to promote yours to the audience that is actively interested in them.
Here are some reports we generated using social listening for the industry:
The retail industry (online and offline) tends to see fluctuations in demands for products. These fluctuations also exist in responses to campaigns based on current trends. With social listening, your retail business can continually adapt marketing and sales strategies to fit the current demand and conversations. Take for example how “loungewear” or “athleisure” became a buzzword during the lockdown across the globe!
Here is a report we generated using social listening for the retail industry:
With everything moving to the digital sphere, education as an industry is suddenly seeing an increase in the conversations happening online.
Students are discussing topics, courses, the lack of material and more online. Parents are also a huge demographic in this topic of discussion due to the difficulties they face at home when their children have to go through school at home. As an institute, you can leverage this data to not just plan your campaigns to get more sign ups, but also your curriculum.
Health & Wellness (both Mental and Physical)
With the pandemic changing our lifestyles forever, most of us have become conscious about how we fuel our bodies. From home-based remedies to additional supplements, ready-to-eat meals and more, there are a lot of conversations happening online that when listened to carefully, can get you insights to meet the demands of customers in every way.
Here are some reports we generated using social listening for the Health & Wellness industry:
With the average time spent on social media increasing to 2 hours and 24 minutes per day (and increasing), there is a lot happening online.
So the short answer is YES.
Social listening if done right can fuel your business growth and how the market perceives your brand, giving you an opportunity to build authority by establishing meaningful relationships.
The purpose of social listening, of course, varies from business to business. So if you want to learn more about social media listening, the importance of social listening, and how your business can leverage it, reach out to us today!
Here’s a hard to digest fact – It’s 2021 and if you aren’t proud of your brand’s social media presence, you probably need to rethink your entire marketing strategy. It’s no news today that a robust and promising social media strategy should be one of your foremost marketing priorities.
Why, you ask? Because 3.96 billion people use social media worldwide. That’s more than 50% of the world’s entire population! Moreover, 1.3 million new users joined one or the other social media platform every single day in 2020. So, if you aren’t using social media wisely, you are leaving more money on the table than you can imagine.
But, is creating a business page and regularly posting on various social platforms enough? Not anymore. To stay ahead of the curve today, there is so much more to social media that you need to learn and leverage. For starters, you must know how to make use of the under utilized goldmine of wealth of data that social media has to offer. Business intelligence is one emerging technology that will help you make the most of social media and turn your brand into a social centric one.
In this guide, we’ll start with the basics of what social media business intelligence really means and then deep dive into how it can be transformational for your brand.
What are social media insights?
Social media insights are nothing but consumer insights that are gained from social media platforms such as Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and others. These are gathered by analyzing and monitoring product or brand related conversations that are happening on social platforms so that marketers can strategize how to engage their potential audience better. And not just product or brand, these conversations could also be around the needs, aspirations, or problems of a target audience. These insights help brands understand audience behavior and requirements better and devise products or solutions that cater to them.
Take a look at a snapshot from Facebook insights:
Facebook insights shares numbers on critical metrics such as views, likes, reach, engagement, followers, and so on, to tell marketers exactly which of their activities are working, which aren’t, and how their audience is engaging with their brand, competitions, and with each other.
What is business intelligence?
Put simply, business intelligence involves the usage of various tools, platforms, strategies, and software to transform data and information into actionable insights that can be implemented to make better marketing, business, and growth decisions. Business intelligence takes raw data and presents it in the form of reports, dashboards, charts, or graphs that can be analyzed to understand trends and patterns and accordingly use them for future strategies.
For example, if an eCommerce business realizes that their cart abandonment rate is extremely high, they would need to leverage business intelligence to figure out actual roadblocks in their online user journeys that are causing customers to drop off. Similarly, business intelligence tools are used to track and monitor all key business metrics for online businesses and present them in a digestible format to decision makers.
What is social media business intelligence?
Social media business intelligence is the science of leveraging business intelligence to comprehensively report, study, analyze, and use social media insights for making better business decisions. Very often, marketers confuse social media business intelligence with social monitoring or listening, which are more surface level techniques to keep a tab on social media sentiment and conversations so they can be responded to and utilized for later. They don’t really involve presenting the collected data in a meaningful and strategic manner so that various teams can draw actionable pointers from it. However, they are subsets of social media business intelligence and are important steps of the process.
Social media intelligence, on the other hand, involves digging deeper into insights, analyzing customer behavior patterns and trends, tracking a brand’s social share of voice, creating and understanding audience segments, discovering new potential markets and untapped opportunities, identifying what customers love, appreciate, or hate about a brand, figuring out the kind of conversations the audience prefers to partake in, and so much more – all with the help of business intelligence tools that help break down each and every interaction a user has with a brand and present it in a visual, more understandable, and explicit manner.
Social media business intelligence is super critical in today’s day and age in improving a brand’s overall health. The entire idea behind this technique is to make the most out of every little and every substantial insight that social media can offer into making a better business decision, tweaking marketing strategies for enhanced results, and delivering superior customer experiences, both on owned properties as well as social media.
Global behemoths are increasingly dependent on social media business intelligence to tell them what colors/types/styles of their products are more popularly preferred, how customers want to be marketed to, what emotions they resonate with the most, features or functionalities they wished their favorite products had, which category of audiences a certain product is the most sought after in, and much more.
What is the role of social media intelligence in your brand’s growth?
Before getting into it, you must understand that social media business intelligence isn’t something you take on simply because it is a norm these days. It has a profound role to play in your business’ growth. Let’s break down the most critical reasons for it:
Potential crisis aversion and risk mitigation
They say any PR is good PR, but the same can not be true for a crisis. Infact, one may say, any crisis is a bad crisis, and one on social media, is especially the worst of the lot. Given the unpredictability of the business world, and the art of trolling that the internet generation has mastered, a social media crisis can occur at any given time of the day, for reasons beyond anyone’s comprehension.
You never know what trend goes viral for the wrong reasons, or what post some community ends up taking offence of. Which is why, it becomes imperative for you to keep a tab on the potential crisis that might be brewing towards your business, and being able to manage it before it is too late to control. And which is exactly what comes under the purview of social media business intelligence.
Leveraging this the right way gives you the power and control over not just how well you are able to engage with your audience, but also your brand image, follower growth, and other intangible but important metrics.
Continuous competitor analysis
If all your business does on social media is to post company updates, marketing content, and the lot, you are doing it wrong. There is so much more that can be done, and the one thing which most savvy businesses do that their unsavvy competitors do not even think about, is to analyze what their peers in the industry have been up to. In short, competitive analysis.
Studying your competitor’s social media strategy can open a gold mine of insights for you as a marketer or business owner, right from being able to understand where their focus is, to knowing how the package, position, and promote their products and offerings.
Despite popular belief, achieving this through robust social media business intelligence is not all that tough. You just need to be willing to put in a little more effort (which you should if you really are serious about taking your social media game to the next level).
Identification of upcoming game changing trends
Do you wish there was a trend you were able to latch on to before your competitor did and blew it out of proportion? Or do you have a popular one that you missed out on while the rest of the world capitalized on it like it was the internet’s gold rush? Whatever it is, one thing that social media business intelligence can help you ace is identifying upcoming trends that would do great.
Today, almost all of the social media is being the most creative to pick a topical subject, and creating engaging content around the same. This is why everyone from the fortune 500, to young startups, invest so much into it. But, and again, this is another misconception, you do not need deep pockets or investor funding to be able to afford a tool that can help you achieve the same. We will get to it later in this article, but for now, know that you can achieve what Durex or Wendy’s does with its social media.
How social media and business intelligence go hand in hand?
If you are wondering why you even need to think about integrating business intelligence with social media, allow us to break it down for you. Let’s understand how coupling business intelligence and social media can do wonders for your business and brand:
You get to build and scale a company wide competitive intelligence program
What comes to your mind when you think of conducting user research or understanding the customer purchase experience? Sitting through hours of session recordings, interviewing customers, conducting focus groups, incentivizing customers to fill out long surveys, and going over Google Analytics over and over again – if that sounds like an accurate estimate of what audience/customer research typically entails for your business, you need to give social media business intelligence a shot.
Social media and business intelligence have the power to present you with all the information you would ever need about your target audience as well as customers by tracking social media alone. The massive volume of conversations happening on social media at any given point is a virtual goldmine of insights that serves as excellent fodder for any and all strategic decisions you might need to make. It gives you a competitive edge and helps form the foundation of a robust intelligence program that will redefine how you collect, track, and analyze social data.
You get access to valuable primary research data for your marketing campaigns
No marketing campaign can be planned without extensive market and user research that guide your efforts and ensure you are putting your money on the right thing. With social media business intelligence, that preliminary research is always accessible to you without having to go out of your way to start it from scratch. What this means is that social media business intelligence gives you a ready repository of insights to base your campaigns on. This includes understanding audience sentiment and emotions towards a certain topic, idea, or hook as it would tell you whether or not a marketing campaign is likely to work based on how users have reacted to it in the past, the conversations that have happened around it, and what worked and what didn’t in the past.
You get to streamline your social ad performance
If you own an online business in 2021, you are probably already running social media ads to reach your potential customers. But, how effectively are you able to do so? The answer to that question depends on a myriad of factors, but your efforts can certainly be amplified if you are able to target your ads better and more granularly. Combining business intelligence with social media gives you a sneak peek into who your target audience really is, what their behavioral and demographic attributes are, which of your products are popular among which customer segment, and other valuable insights that you can directly use to improve your ad targeting. This will also ensure you don’t end up spending your budget on something that isn’t likely to work and get the most bang for your buck.
Guesswork and hunches are completely out of the question; you get access to some invaluable insights that can drastically improve the performance of your social ads by ensuring they are granularly and accurately targeted and are engaging and relevant to the receiver.
You get to optimize your content marketing strategy
While creating a content marketing strategy or plan, you are bound to struggle with questions like – what does my audience want to read? What do they care about? What are the most pressing issues in their lives? What are some concerns they wish were gone? Despite conducting primary and secondary research, there could be some blind spots that you are not able to reach in terms of figuring out what to write about that your audience would happily spend their time on and appreciate. Utilizing business intelligence for social media can fetch you answers to those questions.
By constantly tracking and monitoring social media for relevant conversations and discussions, you will most definitely run into some interesting ones that give you insights into the gaps that your content could fill. This means you will find tonnes of ideas and boundless inspiration for your next content marketing strategy by analyzing what people are talking about. You can not only use these to feed into your strategy, but also rest assured that you are creating content that your audience wants to read and not something that would inadvertently interrupt their online experience.
How can you gather social media business intelligence data?
Step 1: Social listening and monitoring
Social listening and monitoring is the very first step of social media business intelligence as it involves collecting data from social platforms and forums to track and observe every interaction and engagement that your audience and followers have with your brand. This is done on the basis of brand or product-related keywords that you can track and uncover every conversation surrounding your brand on these platforms. Social listening and monitoring would help you understand your overall brand sentiment including what people are talking about you, what are their emotions, their motivations, apprehensions, likes, and dislikes, their problems and roadblocks, and so on.
Social listening also helps collect competitor data so you can better understand what they are up to, the strategies they are leveraging to drive engagement, and the mistakes that they are making.
While this data is also commonly used to take immediate action and crisis management, in this case, we shall talk about the merits of social listening and monitoring to later integrate it with business intelligence and drive business modifications, adjustments, and innovations.
Use your dashboard to record your brand’s performance on social media for key metrics and KPIs, so you can later use this data to uncover trends, patterns, and information by leveraging intelligence for decision making.
Step 2: Analyze the collected data
This step involves making sense of the enormous amount of data you have collected. You would need to set benchmarks for your key metrics, analyze data, establish trends and patterns, and start filtering it for your audience segments, product cohorts, and other intelligent segments. This is the stage where you look out for upcoming industry trends and marquee events that you can leverage and scrutinize discussions and conversations about your products and brand and accordingly bucket them.
You can start involving various teams including sales, marketing, and customer support to examine data and start analyzing it for their actionable insights.
Or you can make use of a social media business intelligence tool like Radarr that will do all the heavy lifting for you, bringing all the data onto one dashboard.
Step 3: Extract insights from the collected data
In this stage, you must involve your business intelligence team to comprehensively report, dissect, and slice, and dice data to create advanced and sophisticated segments that can be analyzed to drill down complex insights that can be incorporated into business strategy. Here, you must use mature software tools to create reports, charts, graphs,f and other visual representations to uncover valuable information that couldn’t be found in plain sight.
This happens to be the most critical step of the entire cycle. Be sure to not look at data in silos or in isolation. Instead, take your time and create comparisons, combinations with other data points, and think comprehensively about how data can be leveraged for various business functions. Don’t rely on obvious or surface-level insights as the goal of social media business intelligence is to dig deep and discover information about your customers, target audience, and brand you wouldn’t normally find otherwise.
Step 4: Incorporate and utilize the gathered insights
Finally, the only task remaining is to properly share data with various teams that could benefit from it. Not just that, here you also put to use the information and insights you have gathered to ensure your marketing, sales, and growth strategies are in line with customers’ expectations and demands, you have incorporated the key takeaways from the exercise into your day to day customer interactions (on social media or otherwise), and you have built a clear and crisp pipeline of insights that you can steadily utilize for future decision making.
How do you choose an intelligence tool?
Well begun is half done. And the first step to achieving success with social media intelligence is zeroing in on the right tool. However, there are more tools in the market than it’s feasible for you to evaluate. Each with its own nuances, USPs, and processes. So, how do you pick one that is best suited for your use case? Here are some of the criteria you can assess the tools you have shortlisted on:
Features and functionality
Social listening Social monitoring Business intelligence Prediction using AI Intuitive reporting
These are all features and functionalities that social intelligence tools offer. Some specialize in one, some in the other. But, which of these would you need to accomplish your business goals? Could be one or all of them. What are your specific use cases that you need social intelligence to solve for. Your task is to first create a wishlist of the features you absolutely want so you can look for a tool that perfectly fits the bill. Be sure to take detailed demos of each of the tools and speak to sales representatives about your requirements so you make an informed decision.
Maturity and sophistication
Would you need a tool that offers basic features to help you get started or would you rather go for one that is robust and sophisticated and has a range of features suited for mature social media teams? You will have to make the decision based on your requirements. No matter what your answer, be sure to choose a tool that aligns with your needs so you don’t end up disappointed.
Pricing and value for money
You might want the fanciest tool out there, but you also have to be reasonable. Therefore, before you begin evaluating tools, make sure you finalize your budget and then go out hunting for one. You want to make sure that you purchase a tool that best meets your requirements and also fits your budget.
Radarr, for example, is a social & digital intelligence tool that we are sure would do both. It is a cloud-based solution that integrates seamlessly with your social handles, listens and monitors conversations, and gleans real-time data, news, trends, and insights to help you understand your brand sentiment, the share of voice, brand health, and monitor your campaigns and social KPIs. It presents data intelligently so you can use it to build and tweak your strategies and turn your brand into a social-centric one.
With Radarr in your arsenal, you can not only track relevant conversations, analyze sentiment, and engage constructively well in time, but also predict upcoming trends that you can leverage to prepare for the future and stay ahead of the curve. Radarr uses social intelligence to make social media marketing worthwhile for your brand by arming you with every data point, statistic, trend, and insight that you need to know to gauge your social performance and improve it with each passing day. Still confused? How about you take a personalized demo to make up your mind.
Frequently asked questions about social media intelligence
Is social media intelligence the same as social reporting?
Social media is not the same as social reporting. While social reporting involves gathering actionable insights by regularly tracking social engagement, reach, and awareness numbers, social intelligence comes way after and refers to putting the information gained from social reporting to good use. Social media intelligence involves various teams analyzing social reports deeply and using them to make better informed and more promising business and growth decisions. Put simply, social reporting answers the question ‘what’ is being said about a brand on social media, social intelligence answers ‘why’ it is being said so.
Is social media intelligence the same as social listening?
Social listening is the process of closely monitoring likes, tweets, mentions, and comments to gain an understanding of the overall sentiment and emotion regarding a particular brand, the amount of buzz and hype it is generating, and the conversations surrounding it, on social media. Social media intelligence, on the other hand, is an extremely descriptive and detailed way of keeping social data at the forefront of all business decisions, analyzing why the numbers are so, and extracting deeper insights and trends from social data.
