Creating engaging campaigns is essential to the overall success of your marketing strategy.
Campaigns that connect with viewers and prompt them into action are almost certain to generate sales and lead to repeat purchases of your product or service.
However, creating a campaign that sticks can be tricky. To increase your chances of success, you need to go beyond pure data analysis and pair social listening with social analytics for more engaging campaigns.
Table of Contents
What is Social Listening?
Social listening is something of a buzzword in the business world. However, social listening has real value in your marketing campaigns and consumer analysis.
Simply put, social listening occurs when you dedicate time and effort to “hearing” what people say about your business on social media platforms.
Platforms like Facebook and Instagram are already well set up to help you find mentions of your brand and keywords that you choose to track.
At its best, social listening can give insights into consumer behaviors that pure data never could. This is important, as listening to customers can reduce churn, improve customer loyalty, increase retention, and help you identify opportunities to cross-sell and upsell.
There are different ways to collect social listening insights, but you should be prepared to complete some serious qualitative analysis.
Unlike pure analytics, where you deal with numbers and figures, social listening often involves a subjective analysis of your social mentions.
Pure Analytics Approach
A pure analytics approach to social campaigns can be an effective way to create new marketing strategies.
Using user behavior analytics (UAB) gives your company insights into who your target audience is, how they like to spend their money, and what their “normal” behavior is.
Identifying “normal” patterns of behavior can ensure that your campaigns connect with the broadest target audience possible — thus expanding the reach of your campaigns.
You can improve your use of data analytics by using data visualization. Effective data visualization is essential, as you’ll need to turn hard figures into meaningful insights.
You can usually do this using existing platforms like LinkedIn analytics or Facebook insights.
However, it’s worth noting that only using hard data will leave you with serious blind spots. In particular, you may find that your business is slow to adapt to new trends and consumer behaviors if you only use data analytics.
Emerging trends are usually seen as “anomalous” results and thus are ignored in favor of more consistent data.
Ethics of Collecting Insights
Social listening can help you identify new trends and blind spots quicker than competitors. However, before you start tapping into private conversations, it’s worth considering the ethics of social listening.
Fortunately, most people who use social media are aware that their posts, tweets, and images are freely available for anyone to see. So, consumers typically aren’t too worried when your business notices new trends using social media posts.
However, things get a little more tricky when you try to combine social listening and UAB.
Consumers are already weary of brands that track their data through social media and cookies. That said, there are ethical ways to track consumer behavior that are already popular amongst all marketers. They include:
- Keyword research
- Third-party databases
- Visitor Traffic
- E-commerce analysis
Sticking to these routes when collecting consumer behavior insights is typically seen as “fair game.” Most web users know that their data is collected through cookies and have to “accept” cookies and data collection first.
Running Your Next Campaign
Combining social listening and social analytics is a great way to find a new direction and create more engaging campaigns.
On the one hand, social listening gives you qualitative insights into consumer opinions, preferences, and interests. On the other hand, social analytics gives you a snapshot of actual consumer behavior.
Stitching these insights together is vital for your next campaign.
You can start using social listening in tandem with social analytics by getting active on your social media platforms and replying to customers directly.
For example, if a customer posts an image alongside your product, give them a shoutout in a tone that aligns with your overall brand strategy.
After a few weeks of engaging with consumers on your socials, look at your analytical data and identify which replies and retweets got the most attention. Using this data, modify your approach to land greater interest and engagement in the future.
Conclusion
Social listening can help you identify trends and spot blindspots quicker than your competitors. Likewise, social analytics can be a valuable tool to give you a snapshot of current consumer behavior.
Alone, neither approach can give you all of the qualitative or quantitative insights you need.
But, when used together, social listening and social analytics can help you craft engaging, relevant campaigns with great reach and user interaction. This is almost certain to bump up your bottom line and bring more consumers to your website.
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This is good stuff because it forces one to be efficient in social media, in listening terms. Observe what people engage with on social. Keep doing more of that and of course, keep the chats going. I for one feel burned out with social chats for the moment. Blog commenting to the rescue. Time to dive back into commenting with both feet, full time, to make things pop through this channels again.
Fabulous content here, as always.
Social listening is so important because it holds us accountable for how we use our time and definitely drives efficiency. It can help with burnout by making us use our time in more engaged and meaningful ways!
Thanks for all the great insight on my posts 🙂
Burnout is very real in marketing. Being engaged 100% of the time on social media is very challenging. That’s where listening can come into play by allowing you to engage directly in the right places with the right content rather than spinning your wheels and posting without any engagement.