There is so much data out there that sometimes you cannot make sense of it. Even more on social media – it has become more and more fragmented with more platforms and voices than you can possibly imagine.
Social listening can help try to make sense of it all. Or at least come up with some hypothesis on why things are the way they are and the digital marketing tests you can run to validate them.
This article is aimed at giving you an idea on:
what social listening is
social listening and the 2024 Super Bowl ads
how you can use it in your digital marketing teams
case studies: one on #edtech and one on SaaS because a picture and an example are worth a thousand words and a million articles
What is Social Listening?
Social listening is the process of monitoring and analyzing what customers are saying about a brand or industry online. It involves tracking online conversations, understanding customer opinions, and analyzing trends to make data-driven marketing decisions.
Unlike social media monitoring, which primarily focuses on the brand’s own social media channels, social listening goes beyond to analyze what’s being said about the brand/industry/trend across all public online mentions.
Social Listening inspired ads at the 2024 Super Bowl
CeraVe Skincare
CeraVe, a skincare brand, was being discussed on social media platforms like Reddit and Twitter. Consumers were suggesting that actor Michael Cera should become the face of the brand, with some even speculating that he is the genius behind the brand. The brand’s social media team quickly identified these conversations and engaged with the audience, clarifying the actor’s actual involvement with the brand. This proactive approach helped to maintain the brand’s credibility and dispel false rumors.
Skechers, a footwear brand, has been the subject of online conversations for a long time. Many consumers have misspelled the brand’s name for decades, often adding a ‘t’ instead of a ‘k’. Through social listening, the brand discovered these misspellings and realized they were a common occurrence. Skechers partnered with former football player Tony Romo and actor Mr. T in a campaign to educate consumers on the proper spelling of the brand name. This campaign, based on social listening insights, resulted in a significant increase in brand awareness and engagement.
How Can Social Listening Help Digital Marketers And Their Team
Social listening can provide valuable insights into the market and the competitive landscape. By understanding what your customers are saying, you can identify recurring issues or pain points, and address them in your marketing campaigns. It also allows you to track your brand’s reputation and the effectiveness of your marketing strategies.
The real-time nature of social media conversations means you can quickly identify and respond to both positive and negative feedback, improving customer satisfaction and loyalty. Social listening can also help you identify brand advocates and influencers, providing opportunities for collaboration and co-branded content that can reach a wider audience.
What Do You Need To Implement A Social Listening Program
To implement social listening effectively, you’ll basically need two main things: a social media listening tool + a social listening pro to interpret all insights/trends and identify relevant opportunities for your brand.
The social listening tools use algorithms to track and analyze online conversations about your brand, industry, and competitors. They can also help you identify and prioritize the most important conversations to engage with. They come in all sizes and shapes, and their prices vary from $100 per month to $100,000 – $200,000 per year depending on the bells and whistles you need. The most sophisticated tools can integrate with social care programs and Salesforce (and help your lead gen programs by turning social media users into prospective clients ), sync with publishing tools, send you alerts, or support customized reporting across owned and earned media.
Are you ready to test the power of social listening for your brand? Let’s strategize together. Contact me to dive deeper into how social listening can optimize your marketing approach.
My mornings start with a shrill drill. At least that’s how they did for the last 4 weeks. My improvised office in the living room turned into a dentist appointment for my eardrums. Anyone who knows me understands how bad is for me: I hate dentist drills from the bottom of my heart, there’s nothing else I hate more! (Okay, maybe spinach, but that’s a story for another day.)
I did try to work from other spaces. Yesterday I worked from GreenTea, a nice tea place 25 minutes away from my home. It was quiet, the internet connection worked just fine and I could stare at a green tree instead of a white wall. But it cost me money out of my own pocket. And it made me think: how much does work from home actually cost?
Don’t get me wrong. I love, love, love avoiding the 2 hour daily commute.
I appreciate the flexibility it gives me and, I’ll admit, working in my yoga pants is as comfortable as it gets.
I also enjoy being able to prepare my own meals to take better care of my diet, I lost almost 20 pounds in the last couple of months because of that.
And I like being in control of the environment I work in. If I’m working on a tedious report with lots of numbers and chunky spreadsheets I’d blare out my favorite rock songs to get some adrenaline in the system and focus on the work at hand.
What I don’t like are the costs associated with working from home. Yes, I’m talking about money here. But also about more insidious costs. Let’s break down some of them.
The thing I miss most about office life if the real life connection with other people. The morning coffees, the smiles, our squeaky voices when we sang Happy Birthday to a colleague who brought cookies and soda (and, man, were there some amazing cookies in our office!). I miss getting to know my new colleagues and exchanging thoughts. strategies, tips & tricks. And I don’t think it’s just me being sentimental. I think it’s the same for most people across companies.
It affects the organization culture and it affects how we, the employees, relate to each other and empathize. It puts a dent in the solidarity among people working for the same company. I can only imagine that unions would not exist if the entire world had worked remote/from home. Goodbye collective worker contracts, bid farewell to negotiating work conditions/benefits because people would have had no power to do so. Nowadays full WFH companies could easily water down their requirements/benefits package.
Who’s the cheapest of them all: will going full WFH hurt our paychecks?
If I were a big bad company looking to cut costs for the sake of shareholder value and I saw how much $$$ the company saved for not paying headquarter bills, the first question that would pop into my head: ok, where’s the place I can get the cheapest work? And I’d hire there. This is already a common practice, Romania and other Eastern European countries welcomed foreign companies.
I do hope that organizations going full remote due to COVID will democratize access to work and to better pay. But the pessimist in me worries that more and more companies going full remote will actually translate into them looking to buy cheaper and cheaper labor from anywhere they can source it.
Who foots the bill for the working space? Workers do.
Internet connection is mandatory in any work from home situation. But what happens if you lose it? It happened to me last week when my internet provider had to do repairs on the network. Around 12 streets had no connection. It was midday so I had to figure out a solution. So I took out my personal phone and connected my laptop to the hotspot. Not great, not terrible. But expensive.
If employees are to be entrepreneurial, we need to talk about expenses just the way a business does. Right now our employer is not paying rent. But we are. We are paying for all commodities needed in our home. Granted, we would be paying them even if we worked out of the headquarters, but the utilities bill would not be this high. And however bad that coffee in the office was, it was free. The office fruit, too. It might seem petty of me to think about the cost of coffee and fruit, but check this out:
The company cited a shift to work-from-home due to the coronavirus pandemic in its decision.
$89.5M! If they were willing to pay that much, just imagine how much they’re saving for restructuring their SF headquarters. I imagine it’s at least double that amount, Pinterest is saving at least $179M. How much did you save on rent & utilities during the pandemic?
The situation is unfolding as we speak. COVID is changing the way we work and that comes with costs. For now it seems that employees are to pay some of those, not quite sure how much this affects the companies, we’ll just have to wait and see.
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