How Social Media Listening Increases Your Return on Investment By Olwen van Dijk-Hildebrand

Social media listening does more than look at what’s happening on your social networks and pull insights from your social data. It also plays a pivotal role in increasing your return on investment (ROI).

Don’t know how this process does the trick? Carry on reading. We’ve listed three ways social listening maximises your investment returns.

First, What Exactly Is Social Media Listening?

Social media listening involves monitoring and analysis of the social media channels for trends and direct mentions of your brand, products, services, and even competitors.

Unlike social media monitoring, the social listening process doesn’t stop on the monitoring part. It analyses social interactions and conversations to identify general sentiment around your brand, discover opportunities, and take efficient actions. 

3 Ways Social Listening Maximise Your Investment Return

1. Find & Generate New Leads

Did you know that social media sentiment exists? Yes, this attitude, thought, or emotion people have towards a situation, event, online post, or company exists in the social space.

Let’s put it into perspective. Imagine your business launched a new marketing campaign, and it unexpectedly took the Internet by storm. Everyone is talking about it on social media, giving your brand an advantage against your competitors.

Here’s the thing, is the chatter positive or negative? This is where social media sentiment comes to use. It adds context to all the mentions, comments, shares, and reactions around your business.

Sentiment analysis not only tells you how much people are talking about your brand, but it also helps you understand how they feel about your brand, posts, and campaigns. As a result, finding new leads becomes an easy job. You could easily find relevant conversations, identify a group of potential customers that may be interested in your products or services, and build personal relationships with your social fans.

2. Improve Social Media Strategy

Sentiments are indeed an integral part of the social media listening equation. Data doesn’t mean much without context, and relying on numbers alone couldn’t guarantee you to receive a return on investment.

You should look beyond the number of shares and likes and dig deeper into what they’re feeling or thinking. Monitor social sentiment to better understand how your messaging influences your followers.

For instance, your video campaign highlights only the essential features of your product and leaves out the less important ones. To your surprise, some consumers talk about the product features that you didn’t mention and ask further questions about them.

Situations like these illustrate the importance of social listening. Analysing social conversations allows you to gather feedback on your products and services, optimise your campaigns, and improve your social media marketing initiatives.

3. Increase Customer Engagement

Delivering seamless digital customer experiences across social media channels is a critical factor in improving engagement, driving loyalty, and most importantly—increasing business revenue.

If you’re not convinced about how customer experiences can influence revenue growth, let these statistics do the talking:

• Customer-centric companies are 60% more profitable than companies that don’t focus on customers. – Deloitte and Touche
• Brands with superior customer experience bring in 5.7 times more revenue than competitors that lag in customer experience. – Forrester
• 84% of companies that work to improve their customer experience report an increase in their revenue. – Dimension Data

The good news is that social listening can help you create positive digital customer experiences. By analysing your brand mentions and total engagements, you can find better ways to connect with and entice your followers. You could develop fruitful relationships with your social fans, engage with your critics effectively, and produce content that will satisfy your online customer base.

The Takeaway

You can’t improve what you can’t measure and analyse. So to increase your social ROI, you should step up your social media listening efforts.

Social listening takes social media monitoring a step further and assists in lead generation, campaigns optimisation, and customer engagement, among other things.