Increase Customer Advocacy: The Role of Social Media Listening

Do you ever notice how top brands use celebrities in their ads? The celebrity will talk about or even use the product throughout the ad. Don't be fooled, though. This celebrity being present isn't a coincidence. Marketers and business owners understand the power of a familiar and trusted face in digital marketing.

According to research, 92% of people and consumers will always trust recommendations from family and friends. People feel better about buying a product or using a service if a friend or family member recommends it. Social media listening is the first step to turning your Facebook and Twitter traffic into customer advocacy.

The truth is- people look up to celebrities and trust what they say. That’s why influencers are so popular in marketing these days. As the term suggests, "influencers" have earned a large group’s trust. With this trust, they can affect customers' decisions, including what products or services they use.

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People don't only listen to influencers, though. Did you know that over 85% of consumers seek product reviews online from people they don't know? While it’s great to have celebrities and influencers promoting your brand, you still need to consider everyone else's opinions.

So with at least 85% of consumers willing to trust what total strangers think, ensure that your customers only have positive things to say about your brand. How do you do this? It’s simple! You need to increase your customer advocacy efforts. Existing customers love to be heard and given attention. This will help you understand their pain points and needs and increase brand awareness. We will implore you to prioritize your customers' needs before anything else if you wish to have good social engagement.

You only need to listen to the opinions of your existing customers to improve their experience with the brand. Now, based on what they say, you can gain insights into improving your process or product. It’s great to see positive reviews. We all love that because positive reviews tell us what we’re doing right. Bear in mind, though, that we can’t neglect the criticism. The negative reviews show us what we can improve in the best way.

What can you do to make your customers happier? The best way to find out is through social media listening. How can this improve your customer advocacy? Keep reading to nerd out how!

What Is Social Media Listening?

Social media is a powerful source of information that businesses cannot ignore. Often, businesses gain more negative than positive feedback in real-time on various social media platforms. This negative feedback indicates that more work needs to be done to make the brand more appealing to online communities.

Social media listening can help you better understand what appeals more to your customers. This will help you better serve your customers and increase customer advocacy. Social Media listening is also key in expanding your company's reach and engagement.  It is the first step to turning your social media platforms, Facebook and Twitter traffic, into customer advocacy. Fortunately, you can use social listening to expand your customer advocacy, allowing you to actively track customers' needs online.

The importance of social listening to your company's growth.

Social media listening tracks and analyzes people's conversations about your business. You track this information because you're curious about what people say about you so you can act on it. You then use the data gathered to ensure your business works better for everyone.

You will appreciate this, as will your customers. Think about it. It’s a win-win situation. Customers will appreciate their complaints being addressed, and you'll appreciate it when they give you positive feedback. But that's not all. The best part is- you'll even get a bonus. They now believe in your brand, and you can sell them nearly anything. As a result, you immensely expand your social network and target market.

Here are some of the benefits of customer advocacy:

• You can expand your customer base
• You can expand your product offerings even from your social media posts
• You can use a marketing strategy to save advertising and marketing costs
• You can multiply your profit long-term since customers would stick to a product they trust
• You can become the next big thing in the entire industry, thereby holding a large market share

… and the list goes on.

Hold on a second; I know what you’re thinking. This sounds just like social media monitoring. Right? You’re probably already doing that, but it's not the same thing. There’s a subtle but invaluable difference between social media listening and social media monitoring. You can dominate your niche if you find out what it is.

Social Media Listening vs. Social Media Monitoring: What’s the Difference?

Let's look at social media monitoring first. Social media monitoring checks different platforms and channels for general information about your business. Social monitoring is an easy way to learn and enhance your networking capabilities. By monitoring your competitors and your niche, you can gain valuable information to help you become a social influencer.

Social media monitoring gives you a good idea of user-generated data points to enhance your organization's competitive edge. Just like with any aspect of business, it's important to stay aware of what's going on in the market, and social monitoring is the easiest way to do this. You’re looking for relevant hashtags, mentions of your brand, or your competition. You’ll also keep an eye out for any developments, conversations, and trends related to your industry.

So you’re focusing on the impact of any marketing or engagement strategies you put out there. You’d focus on reach, engagement, and the growth rate of your target audience and customer experience to improve your customer service if needed.

When you look at social media listening, though, it personalizes the whole experience. Now, you’re focusing on what your audience says about you and your competitors. Social listening helps you learn a lot from your competition! Find out what people are saying about them, too, so you can avoid their mistakes while tailoring what works to suit your business or organization.

With social media listening, you’re focused on discovering what people enjoy about your competitors and what doesn’t work for them, positive and negative comments. Find this out and take action. If someone leaves a negative review, find out why. Contact such persons and develop conversations to fetch you information and customer needs. After a bad impression of your brand is corrected by providing a top-notch customer experience, such people become loyal customers.

We can easily track conversations about our brands using social listening tools. Several brands use these tools to see what people say about them. Listening to the tone of a conversation, understanding social cues and gestures, and figuring out how to respond accordingly is an incredibly complex task. With the advent of social media, there is an explosion of data, and social listening tools are the tool to keep up. As with any new technology, knowing how to leverage social listening can be hard.

Social media listening outlines the next steps to develop and maintain a great brand reputation online and improve brand awareness. As a result, your target audience will grow and increase your revenue.

So how can you use social media listening to increase customer advocacy in real-time?  Let's find out.

Social Media Listening Techniques

Your regular customers become customer advocates to potential customers when they share positive experiences with others. So your job is to get them to do so. Here are a few proactive approaches you can take to create customer advocates through social media listening.

1. Focus on brand health

What does the public think of your brand? If you should do a random check of your reviews or online forums within your industry, does your business have a good reputation? Or are opinions about this mixed? Are there days when reviews are good and then days when they’re bad? Pay attention to the data on social media conversations. Do people share much positive content about you, or is it negative? Look at your competitors to find out what people are saying about them. How similar or different is your target audience from their audience?

Your social media presence and activities on other social media channels must be top-notch. If a customer has a bad experience with your brand, he or she might write negative social posts on social media. On such occasions, your response time and answers to this determine if you’ll lose customers and potential customers. This easily translates to the fact that there could be significant differences in your product sales.

These are some questions you should answer when focusing on your brand health. Use social media listening tools like ReviewTrackers or Hootsuite to track important keywords that can help you figure this out. Both the positive and the negative reviews are important to your next step. These powerful tools conduct sentiment analysis and discover the context of a discussion in online conversations. In addition, the free tools provide several relevant mentions to your goals. This can help you gain new clients while generating sales leads and positive reviews later.

You can use positive reviews to reach more people. If people respond better to a certain part of your business, include this more in advertising campaigns. Boost your brand awareness by putting this awesome part of your business out there for others to see. You’ll end up attracting more people that enjoy the same thing. You've created new customer advocates once they become customers and start spreading positive content about your business.

Google Analytics can also be used as a social listening tool. It can help you to know which of your social media sites gives you the most traffic, see what content works best for each platform, and so on. For example, video content on your Facebook post is a great way to drive your engagement metric.

So what about the negative comments about your Facebook page or brand on your online forums? The truth is they’re just as important, if not more, and have a high conversion rate of unsatisfied customers to loyal customers if sentiment is avoided and proper analytics are carried out on the complaints to give maximum customer experience. This is where you'll find your audience’s pain points. Look closely, and you’ll see that a pain point is just an opportunity for success. Think of a pain point as a road sign telling you which way to go next. It gives ideas on your shortfalls and how to generate insights, a proactive approach, and best practices toward future customer satisfaction.

There's a lot that affects brand health. For example, you notice a trend. Your customers keep complaining about the same thing. What do you do? Work to resolve the issue immediately. Solve this problem, and all those negative opinions will change into positive ones. To get started, you must first find out what triggered the complaints.

Now you're checking your data content, and it shows a lot of negative tweets on a specific day. It’s as simple as finding out the issues that day and fixing them based on your information. It's not always about the overall operation of the business. Sometimes it's very specific. It may have been a one-off faulty batch of products, unsatisfying customer service, or a system glitch on that day. In this case, you’ll need to have social conversations and make a public statement acknowledging it and apologizing. Then you can compensate for any inconvenience caused by customer support.

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2. Always check on Industry Insights.

Traveling with a roadmap is always better than blindly stumbling along. It's easy to create a roadmap for yourself. Just pay attention to industry trends. Tracking industry trends gives you a roadmap to successfully navigating your niche. Analyze your data to know what's the next step for your industry. You’ll find insights into growing trends even before they fully become trends. Who doesn’t want to be ahead of the game? Social media marketing rewards you when you’re proactive.

Based on what your social data shows, is there anything that’s currently missing from your industry? Is there a pattern of customers complaining about a specific pain point? If that's the case, it's the perfect chance for you to create a solution before anyone else.

This is the power that comes with social media listening. Let’s say you come up with a solution. Now the people complaining about the issue to the extent that you took notice will become customer advocates for you. Their new message about the resolved issue may entice other social media users to try your product. With an improved customer service channel and response time, you will create a huge customer advocate database.

Keep an eye out for frequently asked questions in the industry. Add these questions to your FAQs and provide the solutions. That's another easy way to take advantage of industry trends.

3. Track Your Competition

Your competition shouldn’t scare you. They’re there to guide you. With social media listening, you can find out what your competition is doing and how it differs from your strategy. What gives them better results? Use what you see as a guide to improve your approach and results. Sometimes, you may find that their specific social media strategy hurts their business. Take note of this and figure out why it’s not working so you can avoid the mistake.

A competitive analysis reveals the market segment you control and why you aren't capturing the remaining customers. If you can solve this, you'll be in a position to rule your market. What prevents you from interacting with more people? Your competitive analytics has the solution.

Bear in mind the people who complain are prospective customer advocates. You only need to change their rhetoric. Transform their negative opinion about your competition into a positive opinion about you. That’s how you increase customer advocacy.

Is your competition offering new products? Find out how people feel about it. If feelings are mixed, this is another great opportunity to create a product that outperforms it. Your product shouldn’t have those faults so that people would gravitate to it more. Remember, these are the people who left negative reviews about your competition. They’ll now leave positive reviews about your superior product and boost your customer advocacy program.

4. Analyze Your Campaigns

Setting up your campaigns to run continuously is one thing. But using campaign data analysis to inform your next move is completely different. The initial strategy would be like blindfolding your company. It's the second one that opens your eyes to the kind of impact that you can have.

A campaign analysis helps you track the reach, impressions, and engagement rate throughout your campaign. This information lets you identify who is talking about your business and which demographic is reacting better. Use this data to determine the general mood surrounding your brand on an industry level.

Next, implement the modifications based on what you discovered. Naturally, you'll preserve what works and improve on everything that the target audiences don't like. Therefore, it's not only about starting a campaign. To determine whether the campaign is effective, you must monitor it.

Based on your data analysis, prepare to launch a new campaign that will outperform the last one. If the engagement were low on your last campaign, the data gathered would tell you why and how you can fix it. So you should see an increase in engagement on the following campaign. Continue to do this for all your campaigns to increase customer advocacy, brand reputation, and brand loyalty.

You're passing up a sizable piece of the success pie if you're not already employing social media listening to boost customer advocacy. You need to know what they say about you and the competition to get ahead of the game. You need to know what they’re saying about your entire industry. This gives you information to help you make better marketing decisions and gives you a good understanding of brand businesses, offering you significant opportunities to enhance your market share.

Conclusion

Social media listening is not just effective for established businesses. It’s the best way to get your feet wet if you’re starting in a new niche or keep you on track if your brand has been around for a while. Social media listening is a free tool that creates customer advocates. You’re listening to your target audience, having conversations, and acting on their provided information to your business's advantage.

Conclusively, social listening is one of the many effective business strategies that provide a positive experience for customers, reduce negative mentions, and portray good customer service. It enhances positive social posts and statuses about your brand and gives rise to great brand ambassadors.

Talk to one of our experts here at gardenpatch to get started on increasing customer advocacy in your business. We’ve made it our business to ensure that your social media listening techniques create customer advocates for you!

Follow us for a more effective social media strategy to boost your business growth. Also, tell us what steps or strategies you have applied to improve customer advocacy on your page. Drop a comment, and let's hear you out!

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