• Social media monitoring = Caring for your customers simply by monitoring social media for messages straight related to your brand and addressing those messages appropriately.
• Social media listening = Understanding your audience plus improving campaign strategy by being able to access the full spectrum of conversation about your industry, brand, and any kind of topics relevant to your brand.

In essence, monitoring lets you know what , hearing tells you why .

Monitoring tackles the symptoms, and listening reveals the main cause.

Social media monitoring definition

Social media could be the #1 channel for brands who would like to connect with their audience.

Social monitoring is the first stage towards powering these connections, assisting brands in finding conversations they can become a part of.

That’s why social media monitoring is so essential.

On social, you are able to monitor…

• Your brand name and common misspellings.
• Your product names and common misspellings.
• Mentions of your main competitor.
• People searching products in the area your serve.

Example:

Let’s say your brand is Best Yoga Pants on the Planet Inc. You want to know what people are saying about your brand, not just if they tag you on social, but when they mention you in any capacity

Social media monitoring tracks the key terms and phrases important to your company and surfaces them for you to respond to.

This can also include that brand new Cool Yoga Tank that your brand name released.

And it can range from an upcoming event you’re likely to attend, running or just attending. Like the Greatest Yoga Conference in the World.

By failing to monitor social media mentions — equivalent to ignoring the phone line— many brands leave behind important business intelligence that could inform more strategic decision-making.

Monitoring therefore is important to your brand’s communications pipeline. Your social media managers and customer service agents should own most of this interaction, essentially playing air traffic control to what’s being released across your social networks.

To ensure your social team is on the road to success, consider a two-pronged approach. First, centralize your social profiles into one platform that enables message monitoring with scale. Then create alerts to help keep your agents apprised of situations where your brand is being discussed (either directly or indirectly). The brand’s handle and broader mentions. Also, account for common misspellings, nicknames, flagship products, and industry-adjacent terms.

By getting these alerts, your social media department will be better able to block and tackle on your brand’ s behalf, answering FAQs while routing various other critical messages to different departments in your organization, from HR to product sales.

To get even more advanced, your community managers can also determine potential entry points to guide purchasing decisions. But be careful: This tactic is really as much an art as it is a technology.

Social media listening description

Description:

Social media listening refers to analyzing the discussions and trends happening not just about your brand, but around your industry as a whole, and using that information to make better marketing decisions.

Social media listening helps you discover why, where and how these conversations are happening, and what people think— not only when they’re tagging or mentioning your brand.

This helps you form future promotions, improve content strategy and messaging, outpace your competition, construct an effective changer program and even build more impactful brand partnerships.

Monitoring is the entry point. Listening is the graduate degree. While brand names can certainly hunt and peck to interact in the most basic monitoring on nativ platforms, a comprehensive social listening technique absolutely requires a third-party tool to assess large volumes of data. Said another way: While you can look at trees and shrubs one by one at the ground level, you need a helicopter to scan the whole forest.

Executing a social hearing strategy may seem more difficult than daily monitoring, but it doesn’t need to be. Start with turn-key solutions, then move on to more intricate techniques. Effective, automated listening tools that require minimum setup can deliver just as significant actionable data as customizable types.

For example , analyzing your brand’s @mentions on Twitter within a given timeframe and appearing frequently mentioned hashtags, keywords, plus associated terms can help you gauge sentiment and understand what people say regarding your brand, products, and strategies. All this is possible without fine-tuning complicated search queries or relying on algorithmic sentiment triggers. Just simply hearing what is being said alongside your own brand mentions is enough.

On the more advanced side, listening options that not only return aggregate quantity but also aid pattern recognition, reveal trends, and calculate share associated with voice among groups of keywords or even queries can provide tremendous value.

However you approach it, the goal is to reach clearly defined final results within your brand’s larger interpersonal strategy. If monitoring tactics lead to enhanced engagement and listening attempts to inform more strategic decision-making, you’re well on your way to achieving unquestionable success.

This article was initially published on SproutSocial.com. Go and check out their Listening Solutions as well as Social Management, Social Marketing, Customer Care, Employee Advocacy, and Data and Intelligence

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When you pair both monitoring plus listening tools, you find trends which you might not have noticed before. Each system is different, though, so your listening technique should be customized per network.

What is Facebook Listening?

Facebook listening is basically the process of digesting all of the information you’re given on Facebook, likes, remarks, recommendations and private messages, and identifying trends in the activity.  It’s an active analysis of your passively gathered data. Listening gives you a clearer viewpoint of how customers feel about you (brand perception), to help shape your next or existing advertising campaign.

You rule out anomalies, which may be absurd comments, trolls, and near-do-well diatribes, and find the underlying message in the greater balance of the overall engagement that you can work with.

Facebook monitoring compared to listening

Facebook monitoring is similar to typical social monitoring but with less flexibility. Due to privacy issues and API limitations, Facebook limits the types of data it provides to third-party apps. On Twitter, you can conduct and save search criteria. But on Facebook, it’s more difficult. A myriad of private and closed groups, private messages and billions of posts a day makes it impossible to compile all of the search results.

So what should you monitor? As a brand, you should review your own Messenger activity, public posts, comments and interactions in related industry Groups. If there are regular or periodic press releases, you can check on how well they perform with a service like Buzzsumo and it’s Content Analyzer.

Understanding your goals and how they play into your Facebook monitoring is essential. If Facebook is used as a default customer service platform then you should focus your monitoring activities around customer comments, service issues and complaints.  If your customer base isn’t aware that Facebook isn’t their customer service portal, make sure to monitor other assets online to cover your base.

An example of using another asset is using Facebook’s recommendations feature to collect reviews. After you release a new product that for the sake of our conversation is a “reliable”, reviews are sure to follow. Monitoring would be reading the reviews and possibly responding to each review and thanking them. Listening would be noticing complimentary language using the description “reliable,” and then taking action to incorporate the products reliability into the marketing assets.

While Facebook monitoring is a more reactive process, Facebook listening is proactive whereby the intel gleaned is inserted into the marketing.

Implementing a Facebook listening strategy

Starting a Facebook listening strategy includes the same first steps as any network. You begin with setting up your tools and understanding your goals. Why are you using a listening strategy and what do you hope to learn? If you’re brand new to this, we recommend setting up monitoring as a first step and then seeing what kind of information you gather.

SproutSocial.com has a listening solution that definitely needs some looking at.

Native search in Facebook offers you the top posts for your terms and should be one of several listening posts (so-to-speak) in your listening arsenal. For example, searching for your brand, industry related terms and competitors is a good use of the search function. You can narrow these results down to those that you follow, any Group, any location and any date.

Finally, to set up a monitoring strategy on Facebook to track your competitors, navigate to Insights, Overview and then to Pages to Watch. Here, you track Pages in your industry or of your competition to see how their weekly posts are performing. Watching these trends could help you think of new ways to reach your own customers.

After you set up your monitoring, schedule time in your calendar to review all of the data. It can be done at your monthly or quarterly reports review. Unless you’re analyzing a short campaign, a daily or even weekly review may not provide enough information to analyze.

Examples of Facebook social listening

Let’s take a look at how other companies are using social listening for Facebook. With the below examples, you’ll hopefully take away some actionable ideas for your own company. Each brand uses social listening differently. Some may use it to inform a product feature while others might also use it for customer sentiment. Social listening isn’t an either/or scenario.

Samsung

In the retail sector, Samsung looks at their competitors to see what their most common complaints are. In its launch of the new Galaxy S9, the company posted a series of videos highlighting the differences between the Galaxy and the Apple iPhone X. The videos are sarcastic and funny, with each one focusing on one feature that Apple customers often complain about. The style is much like a comedy skit and short for maximum impact. In this example, Samsung used listening on their competitors to inform their campaign strategy by tracking down commonly voiced complaints about the competitor product.

Burt’s Bees

Noticing trends in your own industry and developing products to go with them is a natural part of a company’s growth model. Burt’s Bees saw face masks on the rise and developed their own version that fits their brand. Product research was conducted through social listening of competitors and internal analyses of what customers wanted out of them. The result was a set of new face masks responding to the problem areas that customers most wanted to fix.

Kraft

Cool Whip and Jell-O are both owned by Kraft. But they serve slightly different audiences. While campaigns for both are targeted to adults or those with buying power, Jell-O is more fun for kids. Kraft used social listening to understand what each of these brand’s customers want and target their products accordingly. Even the content for each is different. In the first example, Jell-O’s all about playing with the food and giving parents play ideas. In the second example, Cool Whip is oriented to those who host parties and need an easy recipe to execute.

Conclusion

Using Facebook listening as part of your social listening strategy gives you a leg up against competitors. Not only does it improve your own marketing strategy but it also helps develop your other departments. On Facebook, customers aren’t afraid to tell you what they like or don’t like about your products. And when a competitor is failing in one area, social listening will help you step in and fill the gap faster.

Remember, Facebook is just one piece of the puzzle for social listening. While the network does have the most widespread audience, your other social channels need to also be incorporated. One customer may be more vocal on Twitter than on Facebook. Ignoring the other channels will only limit your view of the data that you need.

This article was initially published on SproutSocial.com. Go and check out their Listening Solutions as well as Social Management, Social Marketing, Customer Care, Employee Advocacy, and Data and Intelligence

The post The complete guide to Facebook listening appeared first on DealershipNews.com.

Meanwhile, TOMS continues to use their Instagram to respond to customer queries and comments. As Instagram continues to grow, its position as a customer service portal will compete against the likes of Twitter and Facebook. TOMS treats with great import what their customers feel about their products and takes measures to sew those concerns and ideas into the fabric of their company and marketing strategy.

TOMS also has hundreds of thousands of users self-generating content on Instagram. In addition to activism and customer service, they’re likely keeping a close eye on product popularity.  Instagram helps them gauge what works and what doesn’t as they develop products to match the needs of their customers.

Remember: Instagram listening is about more than mentions, comments and #hashtags

Now that we know what Instagram listening is, we should know what Instagram listening isn’t.

 

Instagram listening and Instagram monitoring are different.

 

Social media monitoring is the act of tracking mentions, comments and hashtags. In a nutshell, monitoring is data collection, and listening is acting on that data.

But while these interactions are important, they aren’t the only important  conversations happening on social media surrounding your brand. Not every mention of your brand is hashtagged. In fact, most are probably not.

 

More precise monitoring through social media tools such as Sprout, among others may help you uncover more conversations that impact on your brand.

Similarly, think of all the other conversations and hashtags in your industry that you might miss if you’re just looking for mentions of your brand name or campaign keywords and phrases. With hashtag analytics, brands can see which tags get people engaging and which tags can help them expand their overall reach.

 

Through Instagram social listening, brands actually take the feedback from the aforementioned conversations and data points on Instagram and translate them into action.

How does Instagram listening work?

 

Instagram listening involves creating queries based on your business, location, hashtags and keywords relevant to your business. Sprout’s social media listening features help do the legwork by aggregating those specific conversations.

 

In addition, brands can create their own listening queries for Instagram using boolean syntax and rules logic.

 

Non-technical translation; listening is easier when automated.

 

Social listening is a form of sentiment analysis. In other words, how are folks reacting to your brand on Instagram? Sentiment analysis can directly inform you what you need to do to better to curry favor with your Instagram followers.

Conduct competitive analysis

Perhaps one of the best uses of social listening is competitive analysis.

Consider ultra-competitive verticals such as the beauty industry where new products appear day by day. Listening to tags and popular posts from other businesses in your industry can help you better position yourself in the competitive mix.

Product Improvement

If you want to know how to improve your own products and services, who better to ask than your own customers?

 

Just remember that not all feedback from your followers is going to be direct. Look at likes, comments and shares as abbreviated reviews of your products or services and treat them with a certain degree of importance because much of the data you gather may very well be in this form.

Identifying potential customers

Social listening is also about attracting new customers.

 

Industry and community-specific hashtags are valuable for finding people who might be interested in your product, influencers and taste-makers abound and can impact businesses of every shape and size. This alerts people who don’t know about you yet or may be looking for a business like yours.

 

Let’s say you’re a local restaurant in search of potential customers in your locality. Instagram is a gold mine of exposure and insight regarding what potential customers desire.

Discover industry trends

Social listening is invaluable for tracking industry trends. In addition to knowing the tags your audience follows, it’s smart to understand how they’re responding to such trends to influence your own marketing campaigns.

Inform your content strategy

On a related note, Instagram listening can keep you from copycatting your competition.

 

For example, brands need to differentiate their tone, content calendar and captions if they want to realistically stand out on Instagram. Effective listening can help you uncover tags and trends that your competitors might be missing out on and how you can fill the void.

 

 

Monitor your customer sentiment

Let’s say you’ve launched a new product or campaign.

 

Naturally, you want to know if it’s generating a buzz.

 

You may not always get those answers from direct mentions, but chances are there are users out there who can provide an answer to your question. Here’s a great example from the #beersnob tag:

What Instagram listening tools are available?

Let’s say you want to go all-in on Instagram listening.

 

While basic brand listening is possible through native searches on Instagram, manual searches take far too long.

 

After all, brands need to be able to track multiple tags and competitors in addition to their own mentions. Given the sheer amount of content posted to Instagram daily, sifting through it all is no small feat.

 

With the help of an actual Instagram listening tool, however, digging into industry conversations on Instagram is a cinch.

 

And with that, we wrap up our guide!

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Value of social hearing on Twitter

Tweets is a prime platform for interpersonal listening. Its users are active, socially aware and aren’ t scared to speak up when they’ re unhappy with a company or even product.

 

In the 2018 Sprout Social Index, we found that 57% of customers who reach out to brands have a question and 45% have an issue with the product/service.

 

But what about those who don’t mention the brands at all or are merely discussing general trends in the industry? Social listening picks up on these trends and informs your company’s next steps.

 

Listening is not limited to only your brand. It includes everything from your competitors to major discussion points on Twitter. For example, your hotel might need to drive up interest in a certain city. By listening in on geographic micro-influencer conversations, you’ll glean tips on the best new restaurants and shops nearby. You’ll also be able to use listening to find new influencers.

 

In a 2017 survey, Clutch found that 25% of business use social listening to improve their products, 24% for attracting customers and 21% for providing better customer service.

 

One thing to keep in mind as you explore social listening is that each network is different and that social listening is only a slice of the overall listening pie. Other listening channel options include tracking press articles, forum discussions and review sites. As you begin listening, you’ll learn how your customers and competitors utilize each network. Twitter may be used more for customer service while Facebook is for recommendations.

 

But you won’t know anything if you don’t put get your social listening strategy in place.

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An extremely simple way a dealership can start to build trust, loyalty, and retention among service clients is for salespeople to introduce vehicle and truck buyers to the service department when the vehicle is in the process of being purchased. But a new survey of consumers shows that such handoffs occur less than half time.

In December, DealerRater polled for Set Ops Journal over 16, 000 consumers who purchased a new car from a dealership in the recent past.

Of those, 42 percent mentioned that the dealership introduced them to the service department upon making as purchase. One-fourth of the customers surveyed said there had been simply no such introduction, and another 25% stated they couldn’t remember whether they met service employees— an indication that no such introduction had occurred or had enough impact to be memorable. Luxury-brand dealerships were somewhat more efficient at conducting sales-to-service handoffs, producing introductions 46 percent of the time, compared to 41 percent for dealerships promoting less expensive mass-market brands, according to the survey.

M5 Management Providers, a dealership fixed operations contracting firm, says the handoff “should be an important focus point inside your sales process.” Customers, the firm says, “want to be familiar with the individuals and facility where they obtain service. “

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According to the latest research, car dealers are losing as much as $266 billion dollars a year in service revenue with a mind-boggling $15. 9 million per average new car dealership because customers either don’t trust them or it’s an exercise in inconvenience.

The latest findings from a  Cox Automotive’s Service Industry Study, released last month, concludes that 70% of customers who purchased or leased a vehicle from a franchised dealership did not return for support in the past year.  Facty is; they’d rather tale their chances elsewhere. Rates of satisfaction expressed by service customers with dealerships are about equal to indie repair shops, the research says.

Service visits to dealerships decline as vehicles age which quite frankly is contrary to what you’d expect, but, it’s the reality.  Dealerships continue to lead third-party rivals in their overall share of program visits, the study notes, but client satisfaction and loyalty are falling among all providers.  The study suggests that the solutions to this money-bleed include; allowing service customers to pay their bills online, schedule service appointments on mobile devices, have the dealership pick up and then deliver serviced vehicles to a customer’s home or even workplace, and repair cars and trucks outside the shop, the study says. Cox Automotive would like you to know that they provide dealerships with software brands such as Xtime, which processes service appointments and is designed to improve other aspects of fixed operations.

“Dealers have to figure out how to get your vehicle to the service, or your service to the vehicle,”  Jim Roche, vice president of marketing and managed services at Xtime, told Fixed Ops Journal. The Cox study suggests that most service clients are willing to pay more and drive further for a better service experience, Roche adds.

The study identifies 5 opportunities for franchised dealerships to develop their strengths and attract and maintain service customers:

1. Conquer a vehicle owners’ reluctance to return to the dealership for service by picking up vehicles for repair and maintenance, and then delivering the fixed vehicles back to the owners, as well as providing mobile service away from the dealership.
2. Giving customers a more specific idea of how the amount spent on service helps to maintain a vehicle’s value, and providing them the trade-in value of their car or truck when they bring it in for service.
3. Making service customers more aware of their capability to schedule appointments on the dealership’s site. About one in five car dealership service visits are scheduled on the web. Among customers who don’t book appointments online,  more than one-third don’t know that this is an option, the study says.
4. Providing price ranges for services, including those of competitors, on the website. The majority of consumers say they would choose a car dealership for service over a competitor if this gave cost estimates during on-line scheduling, the study says.
5. Enabling service customers to use the particular dealership website to monitor their vehicles’ service history and get recall notifications, service reminders and maintenance suggestions.

Roche states the way dealerships provide service may be “changing under our feet.”

Service clients, he says, “don’t want the lowest price — they want a fair price and a good service experience.” Younger customers are the most dissatisfied with dealership service and especially want to do service business online, he adds.

The Cox study cites Temecula Hyundai in California for an example of a dealership that provides a customer-centered service experience and disdains excessive upselling. Its director of operations, Steve Nicholson, describes his shop’s philosophy: “Rather than take a great deal from a few, we want to gain just a little from a lot. We want to see the client more than once.”

The study is based on surveys of three or more, 550 dealership service customers plus 404 dealership employees involved in set operations.

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