Unlocking Consumer Insights: Mastering the Art of Social Listening

Posted 1 year ago by Mark Xavier Quadros

Did you know that 88% of consumers not only trust but also purchase from brands that actively engage with them on social media? Customers trust brands that have an active online presence, promptly respond to their queries, and stay updated with the latest trends. Embracing the incredible power of social listening in today’s digital world can truly transform your business.

Social media and public platforms provide valuable insights into truly understanding your customers’ demands and needs. With this, you can create content that grabs attention and is relatable. Keep reading to discover how social listening proves helpful in unlocking consumer insights.

What Is Social Listening?

Social listening involves analyzing online conversations across various social media channels and acting on them. It’s a valuable practice that helps you gain insights into what people are saying about products, brands, and industries.

In the ecommerce industry, social listening is highly relevant and can provide you with valuable information for your business moving forward.

Source: Brand24

By analyzing social media conversations, you can discover consumer insights, emerging trends, and preferences. This will allow you to tailor your product offerings and marketing strategies to meet current demands, ultimately leading to more sales.

You’re probably already on social media, so why not leverage it to your business advantage?

In addition, having customer avatars or buyer personas is a great way to gain a deeper understanding of your target audience and enhance your messaging and product positioning. They provide a clear representation of your ideal customer and their unique characteristics.

Luckily, social media enables businesses to directly connect with end users and consumers, providing valuable feedback and insightful perspectives, such as:

The goals of your target audiences
Likes and dislikes of your customers
How they spend most of their time
Why your product is the best fit to solve their problems.

To clarify, here is a brief comparison between social listening, analytics, and intelligence.

	Social Listening	Social Analytics	Social Intelligence
Focus	Capture and understand online conversations, trends, and sentiments.	Quantify and measure social media data to drive statistical insights and metrics.	Encompasses both listening and analytics with a deeper focus on strategic decision-making.
Data Source	Social media platforms, blogs, and forums.	Collect data from social media platforms through APIs and focus on demographics, reach, and engagement rates.	It uses social listening and analytics data to provide actionable insights for long-term planning and strategy.
Purpose	Aims to assess and track public sentiment, gather customer feedback, and identify emerging issues or trends.	Aims to provide quantitative data on social media performance. As a result, businesses can track their SMM efforts.	Aims to provide a holistic understanding of consumer behavior, market trends, and competitive landscapes to guide strategic business decisions.
Example	Monitor Twitter (X) for brand mentions to gauge customer reactions and opinions.	Calculate a Facebook ad campaign’s CTR (click-through rate) to assess its effectiveness.	Use social listening and analytics data to inform product development, customer experience enhancement, and competitive positioning.

The Importance of Understanding Your Audience

In ecommerce, it is difficult to succeed without fully understanding your audience. Here’s why:

Personalization

Convincing your customers to buy from you is a challenge, especially given the fierce competition out there. There is an abundance of ads and content fighting for their attention, so you have to stand out from the crowd.

By actively listening and gaining a deep understanding of your audience, you can tailor your products, services, and content to create stronger customer engagement and boost conversion rates.

Efficient Marketing

Identify your target audience to allocate your marketing budget effectively. It may lead to a higher return on investment (ROI).

Customer Satisfaction

Having consumer insights handy makes it easy for you to meet expectations and address the pain points of your target audience. It will foster loyalty and increase the chances of repeat purchases and word-of-mouth referrals.

Competitive Advantage

Social listening is a powerful tool for customer sentiment analysis and trend identification. After understanding your customers, you will clearly understand their problems and needs. Ultimately, you can create a unique value proposition to differentiate your brand and really connect with your audience.

Benefits of Social Listening for Ecommerce

For marketers and sales professionals, social media is a blessing and a handy tool available to get valuable insights. It is a powerful tactic to connect with customers and monitor and analyze conversations.

Source: BusinessWire

Here are the main benefits of social listening in ecommerce:

Customer Engagement

With social listening, you can promptly respond to comments, concerns, and questions. This can help enhance the overall customer experience, encouraging open conversations with your customers.

Product Development

Social listening empowers retailers to stay ahead of emerging trends and changing consumer preferences. By closely monitoring social media conversations, you gain valuable insights to inform your product development strategies. As a result, your business will stay ahead of the curve.

Social listening also simplifies the process of identifying common challenges and pain points experienced by consumers. This feedback is precious for retailers to refine existing products and develop new solutions to address these issues.

Enhancing Marketing Efforts

To create valuable content that captures customer interests, explore themes and topics that truly resonate with your target audience. Additionally, consider leveraging social media feedback and reactions as valuable insights to measure the effectiveness of your marketing campaigns.

With the help of social listening, you can also identify the right influencers in online retail for marketing collaborations. It ensures the alignment of your target audience and your brand values.

Brand Reputation Management

Social listening equips you with the ability to detect negative sentiments and potential crises early on. This proactive approach enables you to address issues promptly while managing your reputation. If you are available to respond to customer inquiries, it is proven to be effective in building or regaining trust and credibility. Negative reviews can happen to anyone, how you solve them is what matters.

Keep in mind that a positive online reputation proves helpful in attracting new customers and retaining current ones.

Real-World Examples of Brands Using Social Listening

Now let’s take a look at some real-world examples of companies that use social listening to their advantage:

Taco Bell

Taco Bell is crushing its social listening game, especially on Twitter (X). Their posts are entertaining and totally on-trend, and they are very engaged with their customers. Whenever they post any concerns or demands, they respond and listen. Taco Bell has added many menu items or brought back menu items based on messages and posts that customers have sent to them online.

They even repost tweets from customers, further showing that they are listening. Taco Bell is incredibly engaged, and customers love having a chat with them because they are so open and friendly, which, as a result, leads them to get free feedback to create customized content.

Source: Taco Bell on X

Starbucks

Starbucks monitors social media to identify customer preferences and trends. As a result, they introduced different menu options when they noticed an increasing demand for plant-based milk alternatives. They introduced oat, almond, coconut, and soy milk for their vegan consumers. They also have some syrups and sauces that are vegan, so everyone has the option to enjoy popular Starbucks drinks.

Zappos

This online clothing and shoe retailer actively engages with customers on social media to address inquiries and concerns promptly. This demonstrates their commitment to customer service and fosters positive relationships.

Source: Twitter

Dell

As a multinational computer technology company, Dell actively engages in social listening. Their main objective is to improve product development and customer service. They track social media conversations and online forums. It helps them identify customer issues and concerns.

Source: Comparably

As a result, they are capable of addressing these concerns promptly. It will lead to increased customer satisfaction and loyalty. Dell reported a 22 net promoter score (NPS) with 20% passives, 29% detractors, and 51% promoters.

Airbnb

Airbnb is an online marketplace for lodging and travel experiences. The brand uses social listening to understand the sentiments and preferences of customers. They track conversations on social media to gather feedback.

Source: Comparably

It enables them to introduce a notable feature, Experiences, which allows hosts to offer unique activities to travelers. After this innovation, they generated a significant revenue stream.

A few months ago, Airbnb created millions of impressions in 24 hours with the help of social listening. A TikToker posted that she and her friends found themselves stranded in Italy after realizing their supposed villa from booking.com was non-existent. Airbnb swiftly came to the rescue, granting them access to a nearby free villa — which made the influencer, her friends, and her followers very happy.

Strategies for Effective Social Listening

Are you ready to listen to your customers? It means you are on your way to becoming unbeatable in your niche. For effective social listening, here are some strategies you can use today.

Keyword Monitoring

You need the right keywords and phrases for successful social listening. Here are some steps to select relevant keywords:

First, determine what you want to achieve with social listening. It can be product feedback, brand mentions, industry trends, or consumer sentiment. Clearly define your objectives to get the right keywords to monitor your success
Brainstorm the keywords and phrases related to your brand, industry, products, and target audience. The list should include synonyms and variations
Analyze your competitors and identify hashtags and keywords they use. This may give you customer insights and what is relevant in your industry
Use social listening tools to discover additional keywords. Categorize your keywords based on customer queries, industry terms, brand mentions, and more.

Remember, social listening is an ongoing process. So, you should regularly review and update your keyword lists to keep them relevant.

Sentiment Analysis

Sentiment analysis proves helpful in decision-making by gauging how your customers react to your brand engagement. Here are some easy steps to get started:

Use social listening tools with a sentiment analysis feature. It can automatically categorize mentions by sentiments
Along with automated sentiment analysis, you can’t ignore manual analysis. So, train your team to manually assess sentiment because context can influence sentiment
Dive deeper into the reasons behind positive and negative sentiment. Understand what aspects of your products or services are driving these emotions
Use sentiment analysis to identify areas for improvement. Respond to negative sentiments or concerns of customers to make necessary changes.

Track changes in each sentiment over time to evaluate the effectiveness of your efforts. Keep in mind that positive sentiments indicate improved customer satisfaction.

Source: MonkeyLearn

Trend Tracking

Social listening is crucial to identify emerging trends in your industry. To do it effectively:

Read industry publications and follow influencers to stay informed about your industry
Monitor trending keywords and hashtags in your niche
Analyze social media conversations to understand the strengths and weaknesses of your products
Participate in trend-related discussions to gain deeper insights and connect with potential customers.

Incorporate trends into your product development, marketing, and content strategies. It will make you agile in response to emerging opportunities.

Competitor Analysis

To get valuable customer insights, you should monitor and analyze competitor mentions. See the steps for competitor analysis:

Define your main competitors in your niche. Include both indirect and direct competitors
Use social listening tools to track mentions of your competitors on review sites, forums, and social media
Pay attention to what customers are saying about your competitors. Are there positive aspects you can leverage in your business?
Observe marketing campaigns, customer engagement tactics, and product launches of your competitors. It will help you analyze what works well.

Finally, compare your customer sentiment, social media engagement, and online reputation with your competitors. It will help you to find areas where you can outperform them and also improve.

Leverage Social Listening Tools

For your ecommerce business, you need the right social listening tools. Here are some excellent options to unlock consumer insights:

Hootsuite offers comprehensive social listening capabilities
Brandwatch is a powerful tool to track mentions, analyze sentiments and identify emerging trends
Mention is a user-friendly tool to monitor mentions of your brand, competitors and industry keywords
SproutSocial is another social listening tool with amazing features
Talkwalker offers strong social listening and analytics capabilities
Google Alerts is a budget-friendly option to monitor mentions of keywords.

You can choose any tools that align with your budget, objectives, and the depth of analysis you require.

Source: SproutSocial

Social Listening Best Practices

Here are some best practices to focus your efforts for effective social listening.

Know What to Listen to

Here’s how to determine who or what to monitor:

Define objective: Outline your goals and objectives for social listening
Know your audience: Get a deep understanding of the pain points, behavior, and interests of your target audience
Categorize keywords: Categorize your keywords based on relevance. You need keywords according to your core objectives and niche
Use long-tail keywords: Your monitoring strategy is incomplete without long-tail keywords. These specific phrases can capture more focused and relevant conversations.

Know Where to Listen

To find the best channels to monitor and follow:

Identify primary channels: You need primary social media platforms and online communities where your target audience is active. This can be forums, blogs, social networks, etc. You can monitor multiple platforms to yield different insights
Stay relevant to your industry: Always choose channels and forums where discussions related to your niche take place. You need these platforms to get industry insights
Keep an eye on competitors: Monitor the social media profiles of your competitors. It is a good way to identify their strategies and weaknesses and maybe get some inspiration.

Use Narrow Searches

Narrow your search criteria to refine your social listening efforts. Here are some ideas to use for more precise and narrow searches:

Specific keywords: Use specific phrases and keywords relevant to your objectives. Avoid broad terms that may generate too much noise
Boolean operators: These are simple words (i.e., and, or, not, or and not). Use them to create precise search queries. For instance, use brand name AND product name to find discussions related to a specific product
Language filters for multilingual audience: You can narrow your search to a specific language with language filters. It will be helpful if your target audience is multilingual
Geo-targeting: Consider geo-targeting if your business operates in specific regions. This will help you focus on regional or local audiences.

Keep False Positives Under Check

Do you want to ensure the accuracy of your social listening efforts? You should reduce false positives. Here are some tips to keep them in check:

Refined keywords: Review and refine your list of monitored keywords. Make sure to remove generic or irrelevant terms that generate excessive false positives
Adjust alerts: Customize your social listening tools to send alerts for mentions that match specific criteria. It will reduce the likelihood of irrelevant notifications
Context matters: You can’t jump to conclusions based on keywords only. You can consider the context of the conversation to determine whether a mention is relevant
Human analysis: Incorporate human analysis into your process. You need trained staff to review and filter mentions to ensure accuracy.
Use filters: Take advantage of filters available with social listening tools to exclude specific phrases or keywords from your results.

All these best practices will help you enhance the relevance and accuracy of your social listening efforts.

Social Listening in Practice: Black Friday

Black Friday is one of the year’s biggest shopping events. Social listening during Black Friday can be a game-changer for your business and a great way to maximize your sales. You can get valuable consumer insights before Black Friday by analyzing online conversations.

Source: Convince and Convert

Here’s how you can apply social listening for insights as this grand shopping event approaches:

Identify Black Friday-related keywords and consumer conversations. To find relevant terms and hashtags, you can use social listening tools. For example, #Deals, #BlackFriday, etc.
Pay attention to what shoppers are excited about, like any specific product category (fashion, electronics, kitchen) or types of deals (early bird discounts, BOGO)
Identify Black Friday shopping trends with social listening tools. Keep an eye on influencers and industry leads to know more about Black Friday deals
Analyze the tone of conversations to gauge consumer sentiment. You should know if consumers are anxious, frustrated, or excited about Black Friday. Determine brands or products that are generating positive buzz
Monitor competitors’ Black Friday promotions and customer reactions. Pay attention to customer reactions to offers of your competitors
Observe how competitors are pricing their products for Black Friday. Check their bundles, limited-time offers, or discounts
Use consumer insights to tailor the holiday season’s product offerings, pricing, and marketing strategies. You can introduce limited-edition products or exclusive Black Friday offerings based on consumer demand.

Adjust your pricing strategies based on competitor insights and consumer expectations. To stand out, you can offer flash sales, early bird specials, or bundle deals.

Unleash the Power of Social Listening

Now that you understand the importance of social listening to elevate your business to new heights, it’s time to actively listen to consumer conversations on various platforms and unravel invaluable insights into consumer preferences, emerging trends, and sentiments.

These insights serve as a guiding light to craft personalized and meaningful engagement strategies.

And don’t forget, social listening goes beyond simply understanding. It involves timely problem-solving, building loyalty, and mastering popular shopping events like Black Friday.

Start your path to ecommerce excellence today by embracing the power of social listening. Your customers have a lot to share with you — so listen closely, learn from them, and watch your business thrive.

About The Author

Mark Quadros is a SaaS content marketer that helps brands create and distribute rad content. On a similar note, Mark loves content and contributes to several authoritative blogs like HubSpot, CoSchedule, Foundr, etc. Connect with him via LinkedIn or Twitter.