What do we mean when we talk about brand monitoring?

We refer to brand monitoring when we talk about the process of monitoring different channels in order to find the mentions of your company and be able to evaluate them. Whether they are positive or negative.

Having knowledge of all this information gives you the opportunity to be able to react on these mentions. It can help you to achieve a good reputation or to manage possible future crises. As well as, the opinion of your customers about your products or services.

What to monitor

You can monitor as many channels as possible. Whether you are a small company or a multinational, you can find a lot of ratings on online platforms. Communication is now advancing by leaps and bounds, so it is extremely important to keep up to date.

Some of the channels or areas with which you can do brand monitoring are: online publications such as blogs; broadcast media; social networks; print media, such as newspapers; or forums.

What to track about your brand

The first thing that comes to mind is to think that any company is interested in tracking its mentions, but there are other premises to consider. It is a reality that consumers do not always talk directly about your brand, not knowing this can lead you to error. We explain what things can be interesting to track.

Brand and product mentions

The first, if not the most important step in tracking your brand is to make sure when customers are talking about your company or your products. We are talking about direct mentions. In fact, they can often be the most important and useful.

Mentions of your employees

Monitoring the conversations around your company can go a long way in helping you to understand whether what is being said about your brand is positive or negative. Whether your employees are influencers in their field or not, what your staff is saying about your company can get you publicity.

Inbound links to your website

Many people refer to your brand without the need to name it directly. That is why monitoring inbound links to your website is essential to avoid losing references to your company. This is in addition to the SEO benefit of being mentioned in other blogs or forums.

Influencers and industry-related publications

It goes without saying that knowing in detail the industry you belong to is very important, and with it, the conversations that take place. You have to know the industry trends to know if your strategy includes them. The latter can improve your reputation or cause your company to be left behind.

One thing you can’t lose sight of is press publications. It will help you to be able to prevent possible future damage by association; as it can happen with, for example, a crisis. If there are companies in your sector that are going through public scandals, this can also splash you.

Brand tracking tools that can help you

Since there are many tools that can help you in monitoring your brand, we are going to expose the ones we consider the most important.

Google Alerts

This tool is fast and easy to use. Just enter a keyword and you can receive emails every time it is used on the Internet. It is quite a versatile option, as you can use it to track anything and not just your brand. The disadvantage is that it falls a bit short: it only provides mentions without having a general long-term analysis to support the tracking.

Google Search Console

Google gives you the opportunity to track inbound links to your website. This tool is free and has a simple setup. Still, it falls short when it comes to sorting and analyzing links. It can be a good option if you use it in conjunction with additional data on your website obtained on search terms and rankings.

Ahrefs SEO tool

This tool gives users a deeper dive into their link profile. With it you can see all the links coming into your website, the anchor text and the strength of the domain. This option is very useful to easily find out who is talking about your brand online. Although it is not free, it is worth it.

Atribus Reputation Management

That’s right, our tool for active listening to online conversations, performs all the management of your brand’s online reputation for you. In real time you can control what people are saying about your company in a very simple way.

With Atribus and thanks to brand monitoring you can track the mentions that consumers make about your business and the subsequent analysis of the data extracted. This helps you to build strategies that differentiate you from the competition and to manage possible future crises. It also gives you the opportunity to find out which content or product has had the greatest impact on your audience.

Track print media with LexisNexis

A no ser que desee destinar parte de su plantilla a que lean todos los periódicos, resulta una muy buena opción contar con herramientas como LexisNexis. Esta puede ayudarte a rastrear las menciones sobre tu empresa en miles de publicaciones y, a diferencia de algunas de las anteriormente mencionadas, analizar los datos.

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But first, let’s explain what social listening is and how you can benefit from it.

Social listening: what is it? 

It is a process of observing online conversations and identifying and subtracting data from the various platforms on a particular topic. This can be about a brand, a product or service, a socio-political event or anything else.

All the information that is collected is analyzed to find trends and industry demands that are very useful for companies to understand the consumer’s mindset, how they see their brand and what their position is in the market. In this way, it is of great help for product development processes, marketing and advertising, commercial operations and other departments of a company. 

This methodology has the advantage of being able to know what the population thinks and says about a specific topic without them knowing that they are being monitored, so the results are more natural and therefore more effective.

But let’s take an example to show more clearly how social listening can be applied to a brand’s strategy.

Ben & Jerry’s and the New York snowstorm

Knowing which is the season of the year where most ice cream is consumed, it is logical that a company like Ben & Jerry’s invests more advertising budget in social media during the summer and the sunny and hot days of the year. It’s a pretty sensible strategy, add to that a snowstorm hitting New York City, and it’s only common sense that the advertising budget should be maintained or even reduced. Because who’s going to want ice cream during such a snowfall?

Surprisingly, during the weekend that the advertising campaign was active, click-through rates skyrocketed and with them, sales of their products.

How is this possible?

With the help of a social listening tool, Ben & Jerry’s figured it out quickly. We explain.

Observing mentions of their products on social media like Twitter and Instagram, something happened that caught their attention: there was a spike when it was raining and the weather was bad. Thanks to consumer digital intelligence, they combined two sources of data, meteorological and social, and realized that when the rain forced people to stay at home watching TV, they wanted ice cream to accompany the moment. 

The brand’s strategy changed when they got their hands on all this information. Their new marketing plan would be to look for rain and sunshine in the forecasts. In fact, they created an ice cream flavor in line with the situation: “Netflix & Chill’d”.

The development of the strategy was possible thanks to the approach that social listening provided. With this tool, it was possible to carry out brand management, monitor the consumer-product relationship and influence product design. 

Do you realize how powerful social listening is?

Social listening, analysis and intelligence: Main differences

Once we are clear about the definition of social listening, we would like to explain the differences between these terms as it can lead to confusion.

Social media analysis

We talk about the analysis of social networks when we refer to the process of analyzing the data that is extracted, with tools such as Atribus. 

It consists of finding the relevant information from the data provided to us, such as: what the population thinks of your brand, which influencers are talking about your company or your product, where people are talking about your brand, and so on. For this purpose, tools are used to analyze topics and sentiments, pages or authors. This term is also referred to when talking about social network monitoring or social listening. Since the analytical part is necessary in these phases.

Intelligence in social media

Social media intelligence is known as the knowledge or insight that is gleaned through the analysis of social media data. For example, discovering that your customers don’t like part of the product you are offering them. In this way, it is possible to provide useful information to the product development team.

Another practical case of the application of social media intelligence can be discovering that your target audience likes hip hop the most, a fact that can help you develop your marketing strategy. 

Therefore, we understand that it consists of providing useful and efficient information, the result of the analysis of data extracted from social networks, for business decision making. In fact, we can also find it referred to as social business intelligence.

Can social listening be used in any company?

The answer is yes. Virtually any company or organization can use social listening tools, since there are conversations on any topic in the networks.

B2B companies

One of the great utilities of social listening in the case of B2B companies is the comparative analysis of the competition and to know potential customers in a more optimal way. With this tool it is possible to identify the reputation of the competition or industry trends.

Behind every business department there are people, and if your company sells to another company, you will need to connect with those workers. With social listening you can find out who the decision-makers are and what they are interested in, to improve your brand strategy.

B2C Companies

In this case, social listening provides you with a wealth of useful information about how your customers feel about your product or your company. Did your consumers like the new product you just launched on the market? By analyzing online conversations you can find out. 

Not only that, but you can also build a profile of your ideal customer, learning more about their demographics, interests and behavior.

Charity organizations

Whatever the reason for their struggle and work, charities can also make use of social listening. This tool can be used to gain perspective on socio-political issues of interest or concern to society and, in this way, be able to act by bringing this information to the table. 

Many charities take advantage of what social listening offers them. Another great use that can be given is to know the reputation of the organization and whether it is able to attract new audiences and potential donors.

Financial sector

There is no end to the amount of useful information on investment decisions that social listening provides. Unlike how it has been done traditionally, where the process takes months to close because of how costly it is, with this tool it is possible to gather large-scale information about consumers and, to top it off, in real time.

The Government 

Government departments can also benefit from social listening. With it, they can learn the opinions of citizens on new policies or strategies to be implemented.

There are many examples of governments that have developed their political strategies with the help of this tool. For example, to promote a tourism plan, knowing what interests can attract more tourists, what services the country can offer and so on.

How can you use social listening

To carry out social listening you need to use a specific tool or platform. It is true that there are some basic things you can do with Google Alerts, such as tracking mentions of specific terms in a superficial way. 

With our Atribus platform you can enjoy everything you need for social listening. If you want more information, do not hesitate to contact our team. Although it is true that there are free alternatives, you will only be able to obtain superficial information compared to a paid option that will help you to know better your customers and the sector in which you move.

Having all this clear, let’s now clarify some questions that may arise.

What are your objectives?

That is, what do you want to measure? As we have explained above, social listening provides a wide variety of things you can do with its use. From knowing the opinion that your consumers have about your product, to foreseeing possible crises that may affect your brand. 

The first thing you have to analyze is whether you want it to be part of an ongoing strategy or just use it on an ad hoc basis, i.e., looking for the answer to a specific question. Some examples of what active listening can offer you are: brand health and reputation; campaign performance tracking; industry trends; competitor research; crisis management; content creation; consumer profiling with demographic data.

What data will you need?

Once the objectives have been laid out on the table, it’s time to clarify what data you will need, keeping in mind at all times the heads of the different departments of your company involved.

That is to say, the customer service department will know the usual topics of conversation of consumers, just as the development department knows what potential customers like to hear.

We recommend you to have a good communication to create a list of useful data to achieve the set goals. And with this data you can set the parameters of the data collection to be carried out. For example, look for mentions of your brand.

How much data is needed?

Another important step in the use of social listening is to establish how long we are going to be listening socially. 

Depending on certain projects it will be one time or another, as in the case of customer service where this will be continuous. You will have to ask yourself questions such as, for example, if you want data from your country or from all over the world; if you only want to focus on Twitter or on all social networks.

Your objectives will determine all of this, but it is important to cover a useful period of time, as you cannot identify trends in just one week.

How to use social listening data

There are many reasons that can lead you to make use of social listening, it is impossible to cover them all in this post. Even so, we want to give you some general advice on how to use this data.

Information away from the noise

The amount of data we can extract from social listening can be limitless, for that reason, it is likely that noisy data will be collected that is not relevant to the objectives we have set for ourselves. 

First of all, what we recommend you do is to manually check everything that has been retrieved. Obviously it will not be necessary to look at the data one by one, but it is true that if something is not right, you will be able to detect it. For example, if the British soccer team, Chelsea, wants to collect its mentions on social networks, mentions of “Chelsea” will be collected, including the location, the TV program Made in Chelsea and people with the same name.

In order to filter this data, you just have to redefine it. That is, we will only collect mentions in which the word soccer is mentioned within the five words of Chelsea. It is also possible to include hashtags related to the sports team. 

That’s when we’ll get our aim right. Our advice is not to take for granted the first data provided to you. This is a process of constant refinement, you have to check and test the results before considering them useful.

Analysis of collected data

At the beginning, it can be difficult to know where to start, especially considering the large volume of data that social listening provides. Little by little, we may be able to interpret and analyze the information.

We would need another blog post to be able to advise you more extensively on how to analyze the data, still, we want you to know some common things to look out for. These are: changes in sentiment, differences in conversation about specific products, sudden peaks and troughs in the volume of mentions, conclusions that go against what we had previously assumed, or seasonal trends.

Track data continuously

If you have decided that you are going to collect data over a long period of time, we recommend that you keep track of it constantly. Why? In the event that you have collected erroneous data, it is better to realize it as soon as possible. 

With the involvement of all departments in your company, it will be easier to obtain the information needed to detect any problems. Our recommendation is to always check your results and update what you are tracking. If a new competitor appears or a new product is launched, your brand will need to collect data that covers the situation.

The power of social listening

Once again, and by way of conclusion, it has become clear that social listening is an extra advantage for brand strategies, since the information they can get is unlimited for the different departments of a company. 

If  you would like to receive more information, do not hesitate to contact us.

The post The definitive social listening guide appeared first on Atribus.

Conversations on the Internet generate massive amounts of unstructured data. For this reason, it’s important to understand what a company is trying to achieve with a social media listening program. Depending on your goals, the right tool can be a set of free Google Alerts or an expensive software suite that includes ad hoc analysis and full integration with legacy CRM (customer relationship management) applications.

Both social media and in-person gathering of information have value, but social listening is fast becoming an important customer intelligence tool. The many ways to use social media to gain insight are as follows:

• monitor online customer support forums;
• Use software tools to collect comments from social networks such as Facebook and Twitter; and
• Customers are encouraged to recommend new product features and vote on their favorites.

Social media monitoring tools can search for text for specific keywords on social networking sites, blogs and forums, and other social media. Monitoring software converts specific words or phrases in unstructured data into numerical values ​​associated with structured data in a database. This allows the data to be analyzed using traditional data mining techniques.

Why is social listening important?

Social listening helps businesses understand the conversations surrounding their brand and the products and services they offer. It provides valuable consumer data that companies can use to measure brand awareness and improve their products and services.

Companies benefit from the following benefits through social listening:

• Campaign analytics provide feedback on how specific marketing campaigns resonate with social media audiences.
• Competitive analysis provides insight into competitor performance based on social media conversations.
• Event monitoring allows companies to see in real time how audiences are reacting to specific events, eg. B. Virtual Meeting Response.
• Industry trends emerge when companies listen to discussions that mention their industry and use social features like hashtags.

Businesses can use the conversational data they collect through social listening to change the way they approach these things. For example, if the conversation about a particular marketing campaign is negative, the company may change the current campaign to address the issue. It can also use this information to create better campaigns in the future.

If the social conversation about a company’s competitor is positive, it can mimic the competitor’s behavior. Gathering social intelligence from social media conversations is a great way to gauge real audience sentiment and reactions.

Social listening and social monitoring

Social surveillance explains what people say on social media. Social listening explains why people say what they say. Monitoring is tactical, while listening focuses on long-term strategic decisions.

Each example is as follows:

Social supervision. A restaurant monitors Twitter for mentions of its new product — a hamburger with cream cheese on the bun. Once identified, the company may or may not respond to mentions. Monitoring focuses on gathering information. There is not necessarily an appropriate strategy. The company can see all the different ways their hamburgers get people talking online.

Social listening. The same restaurant monitors social media for mentions of its new burger and aggregates the data for sentiment analysis of what people are saying. Restaurants use the information collected to develop broader marketing strategies. Using sentiment analysis, it can determine:

• whether people like burgers;
• what they like;
• what they like to eat;
• how long hamburgers remain on the menu; and
• New ideas for the next featured product.

In the audio samples, the company is not involved in every mention of the product. No attempt is made to influence conversation or change people’s perception of the product. Instead, it’s designed to read emotions and gain insight with the goal of developing strategies to improve emotions in the future.

Social listening and social monitoring are not mutually exclusive. The social listening strategy goes one step further to better understand brand-centric conversations on social networks.

How does social listening work?

The goal of social media listening is to monitor relevant conversations on social media platforms, understand underlying emotions or emotions, and respond with marketing strategies that positively impact the emotions. The social listening process consists of three main steps:

• Monitor. This includes monitoring multiple social media channels for mentions of brand names, topics, competitors, keywords and products in social conversations. Companies can do this type of brand monitoring manually by checking social media sites on a daily or more frequent basis, or they can use tools to automate the process.
• Analyze. This is the step that differentiates social listening from monitoring. Businesses analyze the information collected during monitoring to find out what customers like and dislike about a product or service, and look for patterns and trends. There are various customer sentiment analysis tools that use automated software to give businesses insight into the sentiment behind texts written or spoken by customers.
• Reply. The company can then decide on an answer. This can be as small a response as an online customer communication, or it can be a repositioning of an entire brand strategy.

Businesses may use information collected through social listening for other purposes, including:

• Identify potential customers and dissatisfied existing customers;
• Measure the quality of customer experience (CX); and
• Gather information that can be used for ROI monitoring or A/B testing different versions of campaigns to compare their performance.

Social listening skills

Best practices for effective social listening include the following:

• Know your audience. Learn which buyer personas appeal to brands and their products and services. Learn how to target your audience on the platform of your choice.
• Determine what you want to hear. There will be tons of data from which insights can be drawn. It’s important to have a clear understanding of what your company wants to learn from data. This helps companies ignore noise in the dataset.
• Find data using keywords. Keywords are a great way to filter conversations on social media. They can be related to a company, its brands, products and services, or to a larger industry.
• Use social listening tools. Tools to collect unstructured social data can help extract insights from the collected data.
• Develop a strategy. After analyzing social data, it is important to use the results to develop strategies. If businesses find social conversations to be positive, they should find out what customers like about it. When a company finds that customers are unhappy, it should investigate the problem and look for ways to change. This could mean a change in product description, price or functionality. Or it could mean using other marketing tactics to better explain their product, such as: B. Optimizing data-driven content creation.

Social listening tool

Atribus, and another social listening tool, can be used as stand-alone social listening tools. In some cases, they can be integrated with enterprise CRM systems. As part of a CRM platform, these tools allow companies to collect CX data from multiple channels and organize it in one place for analysis. Some provenance tools collect information from Facebook, Twitter, TripAdvisor, and Booking.com.

Some social tools allow users to create custom listening templates that track specific keywords and topics. You can also provide business intelligence dashboards. Another common feature is identifying and tracking influencers in related industries. Users can track key performance indicators and metrics about their key influencers, such as: B. The number of interactions with their posts and how often they post on a topic.

How to start listening with social media

Before purchasing a social listening tool, companies should know what they want to achieve with social listening. If a paid enterprise software product doesn’t seem like it, there are plenty of free social listening options out there.

Examples of free tools are TweetDeck and Google Alerts. Like paid options, these tools allow users to monitor social conversations for simple topics and keywords, and schedule automatic postings. These free tools have the following disadvantages:

• They will hear a lot of noise.
• They have limited or no analytical skills.
• You do data visualization

Businesses can also use sentiment analysis tools and APIs to help them with social listening.

Free tools like Tweet Deck and Google Alerts usually only work with one social platform. Businesses looking to develop tools for an omnichannel marketing strategy should consider paid tools with more data visualization and analytics capabilities. Some providers offer social listening services for specific industries.

Gathering social media data is an important part of creating a customer experience strategy. Learn how companies develop great customer experience strategies.

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