Have you ever had someone give you feedback directly, only to find out later that they said something very different to someone else behind your back?
This happens for businesses as well. When we build the voice of customer programs and analyze the complete picture of feedback data, we consistently see that themes change depending on the channel (public vs. private, direct vs. indirect, etc.). We’ve even seen instances where the same customer says something on Twitter hours after giving very different feedback through a survey result.
So how do you tune into this “feedback behind your back?” Better yet, how can you use it to your advantage? Let’s explore how a complete social listening strategy – one that includes listening for what people say to you and about you – can uncover valuable insights like industry trends and brand sentiment to help you make informed decisions that drive business results.
In a world that functions on instant gratification and immediacy, businesses can’t wait for reviews and direct feedback from customers. Companies must evolve to stay on top of trends or risk losing opportunities and getting passed over in the rapidly moving news cycle. This makes it especially hard to stay up-to-date with what customers want, in order to improve or grow their business.
Today, companies are using social listening to tune into customer feedback, both on their owned platforms, like LinkedIn, TikTok, and Instagram, as well as non-owned sources, like news feeds, blogs, and video platforms. Social listening analyzes consumer sentiment across all these online sources and serves up data, like mentions, trending hashtags, and influencers to give brands insight into what their most loyal customers are doing, what their potential customers are thinking, and what customers are saying about their competition.
Let’s say you’re a Marketing Manager, running multiple campaigns across multiple channels for multiple locations. While you may want to spend the afternoon scrolling TikTok for the latest trends or anxiously waiting for comments on your posts, you don’t have that kind of time! You need to know how those campaigns are performing to determine if and where to make adjustments. And if you’re only monitoring your owned channels, you’re missing critical information and context.
With social listening, you can pull all those conversations into one location, quickly learn what’s important to your customers, then turn that feedback into more relevant, compelling messages, which lead to greater engagement.
And it doesn’t stop with marketing. Social listening insights can make an impact throughout the organization. Leadership teams can use brand and customer sentiment data to make informed decisions about product or service offerings, improve technical support processes and prepare crisis response teams before something goes viral.
Reputation’s social listening solution combs through millions of mentions to detect emotion, intent, influencer score, geo-location, and trends for smarter, real-time insights. When combined with the power of Reputation’s industry-leading reputation experience platform, companies can turn all their feedback into fuel that drives customer acquisition, brand loyalty…and revenue.
In today’s “moving-at-the-speed-of-social” environment, where brand sentiment can shift in a matter of seconds, it’s never been more important to join the online conversation.
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ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Phil Rapsiardo, Head of Product Marketing at Reputation
Phil currently runs Reputation’s Product Marketing team with the goal of connecting the vision of what Reputation does to real-world applications for the organization’s client partners. He helps architect and drives digital transformation and feedback management programs across multiple global brands.
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