Whatever you are undertaking within your business, knowing what your Key Performance Indicators are and the direction you want these to go in is essential. After all, if you don’t know what your starting points are – how are you going to know if the changes you have implemented have made any difference?
Paying attention to your KPIs, listening to social listening metrics and generally understating your business data is essential. It gives you facts to work on and rather than guessing whether things have made a difference, you have changes in data to back up what you have done.
Social media listening is no exception. It is all well and good taking steps to listen to social media, be part of the online conversation and see where and when your business is being talked about, but it is also important to understand this on a deeper level. Social media listening metrics allow you to see if the online conversation surrounding you and your business is changing & whether what you are implementing is making a positive difference.
H2 Heading – Social Media Listening Defined
It will come as no surprise to anyone that an understanding of your audience is essential when it comes to the successful running of your business. The better understanding you have of your customer needs the more you’ll be able to ensure that your business offers what they want. However, customers aren’t always forthcoming with what they need. In fact, often they know they have a problem but they don’t have an understanding of what the solution could be – and that is where social listening and your business can team up perfectly.
Social media allows social media teams to monitor social media for any time you and your brand are being talked about. This isn’t just when your brand is tagged or you receive a DM but instead, it’s when people just ask a friend about you, or they’re looking for you on social media and have a typo in the name. It also allows you to keep a beady eye on industry chatter online – keeping you ahead of the competition and helping you understand business decisions you could be making to increase customer satisfaction and sales. Social media is a fantastic tool for any business and social media listening is just one way to make sure you get the most out of it.
Metrics every marketer should track for social media listening
Whilst social listening is most definitely a vital part of your business growth and improved brand awareness, it is what you do with this data that really matters. After all, just listening in and not doing anything with the information you have is a waste of time.
When you look at the data in the right way and keep an eye on metrics you get an idea of things like brand mentions, brand recognition, how customers are feeling and even whether people are likely to recommend you to others.
The great news is that there are several social listening metrics you can look at to help you build a bigger picture.
Share of Voice
Understanding how much your customers are talking about you online and comparing this to your nearest competitors is a great way to understand your market share. In the past, a share of voice online referred to simply online advertising efforts, but we know these days that being talked about online is bigger than just what adverts you have put out there and what promotional material is being shown to your customers. Measuring how much you are being talked about and knowing how things like online adverts and product launches effects this is a great way to have a solid understanding of where you stand in terms of market share compared to other similar companies within your industry.
Customer Feedback
Everyone wants to know how happy their customers are, but getting feedback when the experience with a company hasn’t been expected is vital too. After all, if you don’t understand what is causing your customers to be unhappy, how can you make changes within your business to improve this? Customers sometimes feel as though they shouldn’t contact a company with problems and instead turn to social media. Measuring this in terms of how often this happens and whether customers have similar grips online is a great way of getting to grips with what is happening and making any business changes you need.
Lead Generation
Social media often falls by the wayside when companies start to look into lead generation and how they can generate more sales, but actually, it is a great way to generate more says. Social listening allows you to look for people that are asking for what you sell and you can then recommend your product to them. For example, someone might ask for recommendations on which estate agency to use to sell their house. They haven’t mentioned your brand specifically, but you could reply and offer them a free valuation – hence generating a solid lead. Any successful business should be looking to explore as many lead-generation avenues as possible, so dismissing social media as one of these is short-sighted. Just ensure you look at stats and data as you go along, so you can see what is working and what you might need to change in the future to get a more positive lead generation result.
Social Media Reach
If you are putting hard work into any social media campaign then it stands to reason you are going to want to make sure your efforts aren’t wasted. Social listening allows you to see when your brand is being talked about and whether this increases as you change your social media campaign. Not only that but you can monitor the reach your posts get; analyzing whether certain posts do better than others – allowing you to perfect your social media campaigns moving forward. Algorithms within social media can seem hard to crack, which means that reaching the right audience can seem impossible. However, analyzing your reach and seeing what difference it makes when you post different types of content gives you a firm idea of what is working and what isn’t.
Positive Mentions
One metric you most certainly want to keep an eye on is what positive mentions you are getting online. Understanding the level of mentions you are currently getting and then whether this goes up or down depending on your business behaviours is essential. This gives you a firm idea as to whether what you are doing is working (I.E. your positive mentions increase) or if you need to do something different because the number of positive mentions your brand gets is on the decline. This allows you to be confident that what you are putting in place is making a positive difference. Of course, going the extra mile and interacting with these positive mentions can help with your social media reach too; so once you have it all in place it really can start to come together quite quickly.
Telling the story with your metrics
One of the greatest things about having visibility of how your brand is doing online is that you have solid information to share with the rest of your business. It is easy to assume that online the social media teams within your company would be interested in things like social media reach and brand mentions but actually presented in the right way this data can be vital for your whole company.
For example, if the whole company has been working hard on a new advertising campaign then metrics that show this has increased positive mentions online could be just what your teams are looking for. If your customer service teams are feeling overwhelmed by the number of calls then showing them how people are talking about your great customer service online means that they can see their hard work is paying off.
Use social listening data to give examples to your teams where they can see what difference the work they are doing behind the scenes is making. After all, everyone wants to see their hard work paying off and social media mentions are a great way to put this into real-life data that everyone can understand.
The truth is that social media gives us so much information on our company, our customers and our competitors that it simply doesn’t make sense not to be making the most of this. Social media is a solid way to collect as much of this data as possible and the right tools can help you put it all together. This allows you to see things like how many people are talking about your competitors and whether this reduces when they start to talk about you more – all of this is exciting data and definitely should be used to talk to your employees about how your business is doing; which is why monitoring your social listening metrics is so important.