How to Monitor Your Brand Online With Social Media Listening

A marketing strategy that does not include promotions on Facebook, TikTok, YouTube and Instagram seems unthinkable. Social media has become the most prominent tool for customer engagement in the era of Smartphones. With more than 78% of Australians using social media actively, these channels have become an indispensable part of the digital marketing strategy. Social media marketing allows businesses to communicate directly with their target audience, create communities, build a reputation, generate website traffic, share valuable content and become thought leaders.

Social media offers a wider reach and higher visibility because of its popularity among all target audience segments. Besides posting and promoting content on these channels, businesses can also utilise them to understand customer sentiment. The comments and reviews customers post on these platforms help assess brand perceptions and associations. It is essential to track brand mentions to know how the business is performing. Here are a few tips for monitoring the brand online with social media listening. It can help maintain an online reputation and enhance brand image.

1. Understanding Social Media Listening

Social media listening is used by every digital marketing agency Gold Coast to help businesses identify how customers perceive their brand. It involves tracking brand conversations on social media channels the target audience uses to detect sentiments, reviews, insights, and trends and get a deeper insight into customer understanding. Marketers also keep track of conversations about competitors on the platforms and evaluate their engagement levels with customers. They take into account the information being shared about the industry and external conditions that can impact sales and revenue. They look for brand, industry and competitor mentions across social media, blogging platforms, discussion forums and product review sites.

2. Set Goals for Social Listening

Social listening requires setting goals and tracking performance like any other strategy used for running a business. Setting clear goals for social listening helps to determine which conversations are to be tracked and evaluated. Without a clear distinction, it can be challenging to look for relevant information that can be valuable to the business. Marketers should know what they want to achieve from this activity to get the desired results. The social listening goals must be aligned with the business goals. These can include increasing engagement rates, understanding customer pain points, amplifying share of brand mentions, analysing brand perception, enhancing response time, etc. The goals should be SMART (specific, measurable, attainable, relevant and timely).

3. Identify Keywords and Metrics

Similar to SEO strategy, social listening also requires determining keywords and metrics to achieve goals. Reputed Gold Coast digital marketing agencies suggest using keywords related to the goals. For example, if the goal is to evaluate customer sentiment, marketers must find keywords related to the brand, competitors and campaigns. They must pick the common phrases and questions asked by customers to choose the right keywords. Marketers utilise the Google Search Console to find relevant keywords. Metrics also depend on the goals. For example, marketers will have to evaluate all the positive and negative reviews, comments and posts about the brand when checking brand sentiment.

4. Social Listening Vs Social Monitoring

They may sound similar, but they are different. Social listening refers to tracking every conversation related to the brand, its competitors and the industry across blogs, social media, forums and review sites. Conversely, social monitoring refers to checking and responding to brand mentions and customer interactions. It involves addressing customer problems, answering queries and providing support through direct messaging. Social listening has a broader approach and is focused on understanding trends, sentiments and emotions.

5. Use Social Listening Tools

Since it is challenging to keep track of every brand, industry, and competitor mentioned across platforms, marketers use social listening tools to automate the process. It requires using software that monitors all the specified platforms using the identified keywords and metrics to be calculated. The most popular tools used by digital marketing agencies in Gold Coast for this purpose are Sprout Social, Hootsuite Insights, Brand24, Keyhole, Awario, etc. These help to gather information from various sources to be presented in a concise manner using visual representations. They can help businesses track online conversations, understand customer sentiment, determine the latest trends, check engagement levels, evaluate influencers and reach.

6. Analyse Social Listening Data

Analysing social listening data is the step where marketers understand how the target audience perceives the brand. It helps them determine what they like about the products and what they do not like. They also evaluate data based on the chosen keywords and metrics to check how the business has performed and whether it was able to meet its social listening goals or not. The results should be compared to the previous periods to assess improvement or deterioration in numbers. Businesses can identify customer satisfaction, engagement and retention levels with the help of this data.

7. Adjust Brand Strategy

The insights gathered from the tool are used by your digital marketing agency in Gold Coast to make adjustments to the brand strategy. It ensures they optimise content according to the needs of the customers, improve products and services based on the requirements of buyers and respond quickly to enhance brand reputation. It is an ongoing activity that allows businesses to keep getting better by analysing their performance. They must test new campaigns, engagement techniques and strategies.

Wrapping Up

Monitoring the brand online is important and can be done easily with social media listening tools. It helps gauge customers’ feelings and thoughts about the brand. Businesses can use this activity to build a strong brand identity and maintain relations with their buyers.