As a business you’re very active on Facebook. Regular postings, news updates, sharing behind the scenes and placing advertisements. But, how often do you go outside the day-to-day responses to posts and messages, take a step back and observe the big picture of your strategy.
By the end of 2021, almost 1.9 billion people will be using Facebook daily. With roughly 2.89 billion monthly active users, Facebook is the most popular social network worldwide. Since its inception, Facebook has also transformed itself into a business-friendly platform where organizations launch marketing campaigns and foster customer relations.
But what is the one thing you can do now on Facebook to take you that extra mile as a business?
It’s no longer a channel used for personal networking. You’re not the only business trying to tap into it either. There’s competition and there’s noise; and somewhere in between it all, there are insights for you to capture that will help you understand your target market better.
How?
Social listening on Facebook.
Listening on Facebook is what companies use to discern their customers better and recognize their sentiments. A listening strategy also tells you how many people mention your products/campaign, their experiences with your services, and how they perceive you as a brand.
All this information gathering from social listening on Facebook enables a company to prepare an effective growth strategy on the platform.
New to social listening? Read this complete guide to social listening.
What is Facebook listening?
Facebook listening refers to discovering trends from social media data like comments, recommendations, direct messages, and mentions. This data is obtained from user’s interactions with brands and through conversations amongst themselves on Facebook. With social listening, you get to know the customers’ mindset and how they perceive your brand, which in turn will help you construct a better marketing campaign backed by analysis of passively compiled data.
Facebook listening is having a bird’s eye view over the type of engagement that is taking place between the brand and its customers. Brands use social listening to observe the conversations that occur around their products and services and sense the general customer sentiment around them as well as their competitors. Once issues are recognized, brands can address these issues by directing them to various departments.
Why is Facebook listening important?
With the average user spending 34 minutes on Facebook every day, the social media platform has been a formidable player to other new social media apps. As per a study, every minute on Facebook: 510,000 comments are posted, 293,000 statuses are updated, and 136,000 photos are uploaded. These numbers imply how deeply integrated Facebook is in our daily lives. Imagine the amount of information one can gain if one could go through all that activity.
As a brand, you’ll be missing out on a hoard of valuable insights if you don’t use Facebook listening to observe what people are actively discussing. You want to know your brand’s perception and what people are saying about you. Facebook listening tells you what your customers want from your brand and gives you a chance to act on those insights before they even have to say it.
This allows you to:
1. Better engage with customers
Facebook listening gives you an opportunity to improve your customer engagement and convey your brand’s message effectively. For example, a customer may drop a comment on one of your Facebook product listings about how much they loved your product or they may reach out to you with a grievance on product delivery. Responding to these publicly builds your brand’s social media perception in a positive manner.
Skyscanner does an excellent job in keeping up their customer engagement on Facebook by promptly responding to conversations on their brand page
The result?
The hilarious response went viral and quickly garnered a huge user engagement, with more new users inspired to check out Skyscanner’s services
2. Track your competitor’s brand sentiment
Facebook social listening can be used for more than finding what people are saying about you. You can actually tune in to learn about what they have to say about your competitors as well. This insight can help you identify gaps in your offerings and where you fit in the marketplace.
Is your competitor launching new products, running marketing campaigns, or tackling disastrous PR? Tracking what your competitors are doing in real-time can allow you to find new opportunities and plan ahead, or maybe even strike when the sentiment around them is low.
3. Do damage control by addressing grievances
Engagement is great, but only if it’s occurring with a positive social sentiment. With Facebook listening, you can track that sentiment in real-time and observe which posts do well for the brand and which don’t.
Moreover, it helps you address PR disasters timely. If social sentiment is down, the brand can look for possible reasons and pull out a particular social post before things get out of hand.
4. Discover new leads
Customers love it when brands acknowledge their issues and solve their problems. Brands can use Facebook listening to reach out to potential customers who in turn they can nurture into leads through social selling.
The best way to do so is to connect by sharing helpful information in the first interaction rather than selling right away. This will make customers perceive your brand as the best resource when they want to make a purchase decision.
5. Identify problem areas in your product or service
Listening to conversations around your product or services can give you a ton of insight into what’s working and what isn’t for your customer. This can be a goldmine for your marketing and product team.
By learning about the frustrations with current products, teams can work on tweaking an existing product/ service offering or adding a new feature to resolve the issue. This can even pave the way for a new product idea.
How to implement a Facebook listening strategy
Creating an optimal facebook listening strategy is not an easy task. However, if you follow a set number of steps, it gets easier. It begins with identifying your listening goals, setting up a listening tool, and finally using the data obtained to derive results.
STEP 1: Identify your listening goals
Before implementing a Facebook listening strategy. identify the goals you aim to accomplish through social media listening. Once identified, you will realize whether your strategy aligns with the kind of social data you’re aiming to gather. Next, check the branding, marketing, sales, and customer service processes in your company and spot the gaps so that they can be resolved.
For example, if your goal is to increase the customer lifetime value (CLTV), you’ll need to listen to the consumers’ online conversations who are using your products or services.
STEP 2: Define what you are listening to
For good social listening, clearly define what you’re listening for. This means choosing the right (relevant) keywords for your brand.
Fix the keywords which you want to be notified about. Or mentions of your competitors to stay aware of the happenings in the market.
Some of the activities that you should be listening to:
- Your brand name and mentions of your social media handles
- Product and collection names
- Brand/products’ common misspellings
- Competitors’ brands/ products/ social handles
- Industry trends or popular words
- Current slogan and your marketing messages
- Competitors’ slogans
- Key stakeholders and their names
- Competitors’ key stakeholders and their names
- Campaign names and keywords related to them
- Branded hashtags
- Competitor’s branded hashtags
- Unbranded hashtags related to your industry and audience
STEP 3: Set up a Facebook listening tool
The manual way of listening to social media conversations is exhausting. Moreover, it is challenging to conduct a sentiment analysis of those conversations. You need a social media listening tool to make sure that you stay updated with the current conversations, trending hashtags on Facebook, and trending keywords.
This is where Radarr comes to the rescue. Radarr is a powerful social media listening tool that monitors and provides analysis for creating impactful strategies.
The Radarr facebook listening tool covers the following areas:
- Daily social media and news monitoring
- Daily brand health and KPI monitoring Campaign Monitoring
- Real-time on-screen alerts and notifications
- Crisis management and mitigation
- Competitor tracking and intelligence
- Influencer discovery and KOL tracking
- Powerful audience insights
- Real-time alerts and automated reports
- Trendspotting and predictive AI
- Sentiment analysis and segmentation
STEP 4: Use insights to achieve better results
Just listening to conversations will lead to zero benefits to the brand. Instead, brands must apply the insights gathered to achieve the desired results.
Create social listening reports daily/weekly/monthly and share them with other teams so that each team can assess their role in bringing a change. You can also set KPIs to gauge performance. This will help you know what is implemented and what is pending, along with monitoring the impact it has on the growth of your online business.
What do you get out of social listening on Facebook?
1. Keep track of conversations
Social listening allows you to interact with your customers. As a result, you will know what complaints the customers have with the product. For instance, if customers using a specific mobile brand express their disappointment over a bug issue, the brand can release a new software update to fix this issue. This is possible through social listening and will increase customer retention rates.
2. Sentiment analysis on conversation around your brand
Through social listening, you will be able to understand the customer’s emotions. It will help you craft responses that add substantial brand value. For example, if there is a service that delighted the customer, the sentiment behind his/her conversation will be pleasant.
3. Mitigate negative PR or comments around campaigns with better risk management
Social listening also helps mitigate PR disasters. If sentiment is low, assess the social feedback to prevent future mistakes. For example, if a post has caused tension, look for the cause and remove the post, or apologize for an insensitive Tweet.
4. Create emotionally stimulating campaigns
When you understand the pulse of customers, you will be able to launch campaigns that connect to them. Social listening enables a brand to devise an impactful campaign strategy that garners favorable responses from its customers.
5. Monitor and predict upcoming trends to plan campaigns
With the insights collected from social listening, the brands can leverage it to understand how much product is required based on the conversations around a new product launch. Even millennial trends can be figured out by listening to their conversations.
6. Strategize your business positioning better to keep the perspective around your brand positive
Social listening has the power to influence content strategy, sales positioning, and more. It tells you what your customers want and why. Social media listening on Facebook can be an opportunity to build a better relationship with the customer. Through this, you will be in a position to control your brand’s image. If your brand positioning is done well, then you can turn followers into customers and customers into loyal supporters.
How major brands leverage Facebook social listening
It should come as no surprise that major league companies have adopted the use of social listening for Facebook to engage with their audience in meaningful ways. Every brand has carved out its own unique way of leveraging social listening.
While some brands use social listening to announce a product feature, others use it to study customer sentiment. The examples listed below will give you a brief idea as to how you should go about with social listening for Facebook:
1. Samsung
A name synonymous with innovation, Samsung uses social listening to figure out the customers’ rants made against their competitors. When Samsung launched the new Galaxy S9, they posted a series of videos emphasizing the superiority of the Galaxy over the Apple iPhone X.
The videos were given a sarcastic twist mocking the features that Apple users lament about. The listening strategy used by Samsung enabled them to one-up their competitors. By gathering or understanding the customers’ requirements, the brand was in a better position to push its campaign strategy in the right direction.
Include the link to this Video: Samsung mocks iPhone X’s notch and lack of fingerprint sensor during Galaxy S9 conference
2. Burt’s Bees
Personal care product company Burt’s Bees has been using social listening to develop new products. This move has always been in line with the company’s growth model.
When Burt’s Bees witnessed a rise in the demand for face masks, they created their own version of the product. To do this well a product research was planned by social listening of the competitors. Then the brand carried out internal inspections regarding the needs of the customers. The outcome was a set of new face masks that did not have any problem areas that consumers were facing when using their competitor’s products.
3. Kraft
Kraft foods have two popular products under their belt: Cool Whip and Jell-O. However, the target audience is different for each. While Jell-O is more kid-centric, Cool Whip caters to the adult market. To understand their customers better, Kraft chose to undertake social listening to connect with the right demographic. Further, Kraft even tailored the content for both brands. While Jell-O talks about the fun element for the kids, content around Cool Whip focuses on the adults who need to whip up something easy and quick to eat.
Other top brands like Dell used social listening to track the brand mentions, influencers, detractors, and competition. Coffee brand Nescafe uses social listening to prepare content strategies, while fast-food company Arbys regularly leverages it to create new advertisement strategies.
Facebook listening vs. Facebook Monitoring
Facebook monitoring typically tells you what is being spoken about online. But Facebook listening adds a layer of data on top of it, letting you dive deep into the sentiment behind those likes and comments.
While Facebook monitoring considers metrics like engagement rate, no. of mentions, and trending hashtags, and is great for tracking ROI or testing A/B campaigns, Facebook listening looks beyond numbers to consider the mood or the sentiment that drives these metrics.
Social media sentiment is key to Facebook listening and helps you understand how people feel about your brand as opposed to your competitors, thus making you evaluate your marketing and product development efforts on track
Before you consider social monitoring as a brand, you need to state its motive clearly. If you are using it to serve your customer better, then direct your monitoring efforts around customer comments, service issues, and complaints. While monitoring is often reactive, Facebook listening makes it easier for you to proactively use it to make your brand fare better than the competition.
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Should you go for Facebook listening?
The web world is growing competitive with time, and as a brand, you need to create content and campaigns that speak to your audience. You should be able to tap into customers’ emotions and understand what they care about so that you can build campaigns accordingly.
This is where Facebook listening comes into the picture. If done right, Facebook listening can fuel your business’s growth, help you align your marketing campaigns to customer sentiments, and help you build a meaningful relationship with your audience. When customers have a negative experience, they don’t hold themselves back, and a brand can seize this moment to step in.
Each business can define how they want to leverage Facebook listening, Instagram listening, Tiktok listening for itself. If you’re a brand looking to learn more about Facebook listening, its importance, and how your business can leverage it, reach out to us today!
Ready to get started with social listening? Book Radarr Demo today.
