How to Use Social Listening to Monitor and Improve Your Brand’s Online Reputation

Social media platforms are often the first place customers turn to when they have a question, complaint, or praise for a brand.

As such, social media can have a significant impact on your brand’s online reputation, especially in an age where a negative comment can cascade into massive damage to your brand reputation within minutes.

What if there was a way to know what is being said about your brand online so that you can interact with your audience effectively and use that information to improve your products, services, and customer satisfaction?

Sounds too good to be true. Well, it’s not. It’s called social listening, and it’s one of the most powerful ways you can monitor and improve your brand’s online reputation.

What is Social Listening?

Often, many people erroneously reduce social listening to simply tracking mentions of your brand online. But there is a lot more that goes into this.

Social listening is a strategic approach to analyzing online conversations related to your brand and then using that data to gain a deeper understanding of your audience and online reputation.

With social listening, you are not merely concerned with how popular or influential you are on social media or how your most recent posts perform in terms of engagement. Rather, you want to extract information that could be used to inform your marketing strategies, product development, and customer services efforts.

In short, social listening is a business growth strategy, and if your business has a presence on social media (which it should), then you cannot afford to ignore this tactic.

For instance, through social listening, you can monitor what is being said about your brand in real-time, allowing you to respond quickly and appropriately. Addressing customer concerns and resolving issues can transform a negative situation into a positive one.

Tips for Effective Social Listening

How do you do social listening effectively? How do you find the right conversations to listen to and use them to make better decisions and actions? Sit tight and read on.

1. Define your goals and metrics

Before you start listening, determine why you are listening and define what you want to achieve. Perhaps you want to increase brand awareness, generate leads, improve customer service, identify influencers, monitor competitors, or spot trends.

What exactly are your objectives? Depending on your goals, then you set the metrics with which you will monitor the progress and success of your efforts.

When attempting to increase brand awareness, for example, metrics you could track include mentions, reach, impressions, etc. On the other hand, metrics such as response time, resolution rate, and feedback are more relevant for improving customer service efforts.

2. Choose your tools and platforms

Many tools and platforms are available for social listening, ranging from free to paid, as well as from simple to complex. Some of the most popular ones include Hootsuite, Sprout Social, Mention, Brandwatch, BuzzSumo, etc.

Besides using these tools to monitor conversations about your brand, they are also useful for creating alerts, reports, and dashboards to help you manage your reputation on social media.

3. Identify your keywords and queries

Once you have your goals, metrics, and tools in place, the next step is to decide what keywords and queries you want to use to find the conversations that matter to you. Searching keywords multiplies the ease of your task as against running through every post mentioning your brand name.

For example, you could use the Eye10 Keyword Planner tool to research and identify some relevant keywords and phrases that customers might use when discussing your brand or industry. Then enter these keywords into your social listening tool to measure instances of results.

An interesting thing you should note: be sure to include misspellings and variations to capture as many mentions as possible.

4. Listen and analyze

Now that your keywords and queries are ready, it’s time to start listening and analyzing the social media mentions and conversations that match them.

Depending on your tool or platform, you should be able to filter, sort, and segment the conversations by various criteria, such as date, source, location, sentiment, or topic. Also, take advantage of visualizations such as charts, graphs, and word clouds, among others, to identify patterns, trends, or outliers in the data.

The goal is to find the most relevant and valuable insights to help you achieve your goals and answer your questions about how your brand is perceived among your social media audience.

5. Act and engage

Ultimately, listening and analyzing are not enough if you don’t have a well-mapped-out strategy to act upon those insights that you have gathered.

We don’t have to speak much here. How you act is totally up to you and depends on the goals you set for yourself at the initial stages. However, some of the options you might want to explore include the following:

• Reaching out to potential customers who have expressed interest in or need your products or services. Don’t leave them hanging or in the dark.
• People often use social media to complain about your business, even if you have a separate dedicated complaint channel. It is up to you to respond to inquiries and complaints quickly and professionally.
• Build meaningful relationships with influencers to take your word-of-mouth marketing game to the next level.
• Determine how your social media is affecting your SEO performance. Here, the Eye10 Rank Checker tool comes in handy.

Ultimately, you should aim to adjust your marketing tactics and perhaps even product offerings depending on “what the streets are saying.” After all, every business wants to keep its customers happy.

Conclusion

Amidst all these, it’s important to emphasize that social listening is not a one-time activity. It’s an ongoing process that requires constant monitoring, analysis, and action. By doing it regularly and effectively, you can improve your brand’s online reputation and achieve your business goals.

Like SEO, social listening also never ends. Hence, you should invest in excellent SEO tools that help you enhance your strategy through real-time data. Eye10’s SEO tools are available for a trial of just $3. Sign up now and start experiencing the difference.