How to Use Social Listening to Monitor Conversations Around Your Brand

Social listening is great for generating content ideas, but did you know about the additional strategic benefits? Social listening can shine a light on how people feel about your brand and help you forge closer relationships with the fans who already know and love it. Wondering how to get started? Here’s how to use social listening to gain deeper insight into the conversations around your brand.

Understand brand sentiment

Are you curious to learn how well people know your brand and whether they feel positively about it? Social listening can help you do just that by highlighting both awareness and sentiment surrounding your brand.

By using social listening tools to monitor conversations about your brand, as well as discussions on certain topics related to your industry or profession, you can get a sense of how people perceive your product, service, or creation — and what you can do to appeal to them even further. You can also follow influencers to gain a sense of how your brand is perceived among people who have particular sway with your audience.

There are plenty of social listening tools out there: Hootsuite, Buffer, Sprout Social, SumAll, TweetReach, and BuzzSumo are just a few. You can also select social monitoring services that are tailored to the specific social media channels you use for your business.

Engage your audience

Audiences want to know the person behind your brand, especially if you’re an individual creator or a small business owner. For this reason, it’s a great idea to engage with your audience on social channels. By responding to their questions and joining the conversation, you can spot opportunities to be of service to them. This way, you can forge meaningful relationships and greater trust among current and prospective customers alike.

You can also level up your social media engagement by sharing content that appeals to your audience’s emotions, inspires a debate, or provides a unique perspective they haven’t considered. By engaging your audience with timely and thought-provoking content, you can generate engagement around your brand and even inspire advocacy among your most passionate supporters.

Another powerful way to engage your audience is by responding to complaints. According to Convince and Convert, answering a complaint increases customer advocacy by as much as 25 percent, while not responding to a complaint can decrease customer advocacy by as much as 50 percent. Proactively responding to your fans — even when gripes come up — can give your brand loyalty a nice bump.

Keep tabs on your competitors

If you know one of your competitors has a strong social media game, then it’s definitely worth keeping tabs on how they’re engaging customers and fans on social channels. You may also want to pay attention to what influencers are doing on social media, since they likely have already hit upon winning strategies for engaging your audience. This strategy will help you spot opportunities to improve your offerings, and it may even show you areas where you can differentiate your brand and bring unique value to the table that your competitors cannot.

The Value of Social Listening

What’s the value of social listening? As it turns out, it could be more than a billion dollars.

In 2010, a 24-year-old Vogue fashion assistant named Emily Weiss launched a beauty blog as a side project. She bought a high-quality camera, created a logo, built a website, and began interviewing supermodels, fashion executives, and magazine editors.

Her candid interview style and conversational brand voice helped Weiss gain a significant following. Eventually, she quit her 9-to-5 job, assembled a small team, and landed millions in funding to launch her own beauty line: Glossier.

As of March 2019, Glossier is valued at more than $1.2 billion, according to Forbes.

Similarly, in 2007, a developer named Andrew Mason started a daily deal blog where he shared offers for deeply discounted products and events. Mason quickly grew his audience and used his blog to measure market demand for the concept that would eventually become Groupon — a business recently valued at over $2 billion.

So how did Glossier, Groupon, and other well-known blog-turned-megabrands reach success in a sea of startup failures? It’s simple: they built a following, listened to their audiences, and delivered exactly what people wanted.

Here’s how you can do the same, in three steps:

1. Identify what’s missing in the market

Your audience is likely visiting your WordPress.com site because they have a need to fulfill or a challenge to overcome. It’s up to you to prove that your offering can not only meet their expectations, but do it better than your competitors.

The best way to start is by evaluating your market and determining what’s missing. In some cases, this might be a product, whereas in other cases, it might be a method of delivery. Then, use this insight to guide everything from your offering to the way you market your business.

For example, Weiss recognized her industry lacked authentic, honest, down-to-earth beauty advice targeting a younger audience. Over time, through her blog, she also discovered a need for a no-nonsense, accessible, affordable cosmetic brand.

2. Test your idea

A blog can give you the opportunity to test your idea and perform valuable market research without making a hefty upfront investment.

For example, Mason recognized his industry lacked a solution to help people find deals from local businesses — especially small companies hoping to build more recognition within their communities. He used his blog as an inexpensive way to gauge interest in his idea and prove demand.

The insight he discovered helped seed the Groupon brand and encouraged further growth.

3. Cultivate a sense of community

When a brand successfully fosters a sense of loyalty, they earn life-long customers. In fact, a staggering 77 percent of consumers say they’ve held relationships with a brand for a full decade or more, according to data from InMoment. But to earn consumer loyalty, you first have to make your audience fall in love with your brand.

In Glossier’s case, Weiss recognized that many people — especially women — feel self-conscious about skin issues such as acne and melasma. So, she tackled these concerns head-on in her blog and urged interview subjects to discuss their own struggles. This refreshing honesty helped build her following and establish a community via her website and social media.

Then, through social listening, she identified what her audience wanted when they invested in beauty products. As it turns out, Weiss’s audience didn’t want to hide their flaws — they wanted to enhance their natural assets. When she and her team developed their product line, they focused on meeting this exact need.

As these two brands have proven, it’s possible to achieve massive success through blogging — even in crowded and highly competitive markets such as cosmetics and coupons. By leveraging social listening and taking time to understand the unique needs of your audience, you can fill gaps in your market and create your own community.

With a better understanding of how to use social listening to boost your brand, you can start analyzing brand sentiment, engaging your audience, and keeping tabs on competitors. You can also connect your WordPress.com site to social media, attracting further social interest in your brand. By taking advantage of the insights found in social listening and joining the conversation around your brand, you can discover golden business opportunities you might not find anywhere else.