Social media listening should be at the top of your company’s 2016 To Do List. If it isn’t, here are 10 reasons to share with your team to ensure it gets the attention it deserves:
Customer-centric data. Mentions and likes provide quick reassurance that people have heard of you, but the data that deep social listening unearths is what takes you beyond superficial metrics to true connections. You need deep, personal insights to reach consumers – who want social interactions to be all about them (not your brand).
Sentiment data. While we’re talking about personal insights, it’s not just what social users are saying that matters. How they’re feeling is just as – if not more – important. Sentiment is what sets influencers apart from mild enthusiasts. It’s a key trait of a brand advocate, and you can never have enough of those. Get to know what they love – and talk to them about it – and your brand might end up at the top of that list.
New audiences to explore. Beyond anything consumers might say or feel about your brand is an entire world of information they are offering about themselves. These details reveal adjacencies and audience segments you’d have never thought of: people who watch “The Walking Dead” while eating pizza and using their smartphones; men who love fly fishing and playing Pie Face with their kids; women who love saving money at Target so they can spend more at Coach.
There are countless demographic-busting combinations out there – just waiting for you to create individualized messaging to prove you care about the person behind the consumer. And that’s how you gain loyalty.
Real-time insights. Brands can’t base decisions on outdated focus group data, or information contained in last quarter’s reports. Social consumers are sharing their thoughts every second, and that’s how quickly you need to be able to respond. There are one billion Facebook posts daily, along with 500 million tweets, and 86,000 hours of YouTube videos – and they’re in response to what’s in front of them, what’s happening in the news, etc. You need to be part of that “right now” (rn) cycle.
Big data streaming through APIs. The largest and most popular social platforms, Facebook and Twitter, offer data streams which allow clients to access all public social data in real-time. This means when your brand is mining for insights, you have access to far more information than you would working on your own. For the record, NetBase:
- Is a Twitter Official Partner (and the first launch partner for Twitter’s Audience API) Receives filtered raw content (like Disqus comments and more) via Gnip
- Has a firehose partnership with Tumblr
- Is one of a limited number of partners working with DataSift for access to PYLON for Facebook Topic Data
Predictive social media listening. Taking real-time to the next level is the ability to spot trends as they happen (or before they break), so you’re ready to make the most of them. Likewise, you can catch social customer service issues before they escalate past the point of salvaging the customer. That’s definitely important when you consider how quickly badly handled customer issues can go viral.
Global, human-to-human reach. Connecting to consumers means speaking their language – both literally and figuratively. Of course it’s important to understand the native languages of social users around the world (we can understand 42 of them), but it’s also crucial to understand “slanguage.” A worthwhile social media monitoring tool has to be fluent in sarcasm, slang/pop culture-created words, and emojis. Otherwise you can’t get a fully dimensional view of social users, and engaging authentically is next to impossible.
User-recognition – It’s fitting that in the Age of You, peer recognition would rank above all else as a key deciding factor for any consumer. If you’ll allow a slight humble brag, our clients put us at the top of two great lists this year by voting us a Top Rated platform on TrustRadius, in both the Social Media Management and Social Media Monitoring TrustMaps, and a “Leader” in the G2 Crowd Winter 2016 Grid Reports for Social Media Suites Software.
To view the reports, please visit the TrustRadius TrustMap™ for Social Media Management Tools and TrustMap for Social Media Monitoring Tools, and G2 Crowd Grids℠ for Social Media Suites Software.
Customer-driven. Technology is evolving rapidly, and your social media listening platform should be able to keep up. You want a platform that regularly updates its products – both to keep pace with the changes happening in the social space, and in response to customer feedback as well. After all, you’re the one using it. You know what you need.
Versatile and customizable. If real-time is the bar (and it is), then reports should be easy to use and customizable, so you can zero in on the data that matters most in the moment. And visualized data in real-time is important too – for those moments when decisive C-suite action is needed.
And it goes without saying that customer support you can count on should be part of any social listening suite. There are numerous platforms to choose from – and lots of criteria you could apply to deciding. Whatever your deal-breakers are, NetBase is ready to meet them. And your boss will be so impressed, you’ll probably get a raise.
Ready to let NetBase sell itself? Reach out to get started today!
Image from Bart Everson
