How Marketers Can Use Social Listening
Here are a few ways social listening can directly impact your marketing and sales activities.
Building Customer Insights Pre-Launch
If you’re gearing up for a big launch, you can leverage social listening to gauge how your customers might respond to campaigns. For example, you could:
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Tease some messages and see the reaction: For instance, if you’re launching a new feature for your platform, you can publish posts about the problem it solves to see how people engage.
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Listen to conversations already going on: Then, you can craft your campaign and key messages based on existing conversations.
Netflix is a great example of a brand that pays attention to what people are talking about online—and then brings those insights into its marketing.
For example, they jumped on the “Demure” trend within days and posted their Netflix-ified spin on it, showing that they’re not only a world-class media company, but also in tune with current trends.
Understanding The Response To A Campaign
You put time and effort into planning a marketing campaign. How did it go?
Of course, you will get some idea by tracking key metrics like impressions and reach, link in bio clicks, and conversions.
But what are people saying about your campaigns?
This is where social listening is valuable.
If things go well, you will often see it reflected in online conversations. You might see people getting excited about your brand, even if they don’t “convert” in the ways that you’re tracking through your analytics platform.
Alternatively, if the campaign didn’t go well, listening may help uncover the reason.
For example, if conversations suggested your campaign misused a phrase or the tagline didn’t resonate, it might help to explain why the product didn’t sell as well as you’d hoped and help you reposition the campaign for success.
Learning About The Competition
Let’s say you’re worried about a key competitor. Maybe they just raised a new round of funding or put out a product that might draw your customers away.
But that’s only half the story.
With social listening, you can see what people are saying about your competitors so you can monitor the conversation and even participate if it makes sense for your brand.
Social enables your team to track topic performance by hashtag and competitor profile giving you a comprehensive overview of the top-performing content in your industry.
Wendy’s is a great example of this; the fast-food chain regularly uses its sassy social media posts to promote its brand. Often, this is done at the expense of its key competitors like McDonald’s and Burger King.
By responding to a McDonald’s campaign with its trademark sass, Wendys drummed up over 570K views on a single tweet.
Identify Key Influencers
As you execute your social listening strategy, you might notice some people driving the conversations.
These people may not be professional creators or influencers. They may also not have the largest followings, but they are potentially impactful partners or ambassadors for your brand.
Keep an eye out for the surprise perfect partner with social listening, but also apply a more scalable approach and look through pools of vetted influencers for your projects.
’s new Social Listening tool is the easiest way to connect your social insights with your influencer marketing program, with curated creator recommendations for your next campaign.
Book a demo today to be one of the first to try it out.
