The Role of Social Media Listening in Building Loyal Brand Communities

Marketing and promotion of your brand become effective only when other people say positive things about you. Accordingly, customers advocate for only those who are loyal to your brand and speak positively about your product offerings. 

Moreover, many surveys revealed that online reviews and testimonials influence more than 90% of consumers while making their buying decisions. Instagram, Facebook, YouTube, and TikTok are a few relevant platforms highlighting both the brands and their products or service offerings. 

The logic is simple, i.e., creating a strong customer base to promote any brand via word-of-mouth publicity online or offline may boost brand awareness and help the company get more loyal customers. 

Now, the question that comes to mind is how brands may leverage their loyal customers to drive customer advocacy on Facebook, Twitter, and other social media sites. For this reason, our blog post will discuss everything in detail, and the role of API to accomplish social media listening tasks to increase customer advocacy and engagement.   

What is Customer Advocacy

Customer advocacy involves every action that puts the customers at the top priority. It consists of creating positive experiences to excite people and promoting your brand. In other words, customer advocacy is placing customers at the center of its operations by considering their specific needs, feedback, and preferences. 

The main goal of customer advocacy is to set up long-term relationships and develop trust with customers. Whenever customers feel that a brand is fulfilling their interests genuinely, they stay loyal, make purchases repeatedly, and recommend the respective brand to other people as well.  

What is Social Media Listening

Social media listening refers to the identification, monitoring, and analysis of conversations across diverse social channels. These include going through competitor and brand mentions, collecting feedback from consumers, and identifying the latest industry trends. Hence, a robust strategy associated with social media listening will bring any brand to the optimal position for driving customer advocacy. 

How Social Listening Increases Customer Advocacy

Listening to the pain points and concerns of the customers is an essential part of strong and long-term customer relations. However, digital marketing has increased the number of online conversations. In this situation, we need an efficient tool to listen to our customers effectively at scale. Here, we have mentioned five effective ways in which social listening tools monitor and analyze diverse topics, trends, and conversations on different social media platforms-

To Identify and Engage the Brand Ambassadors

Identifying and engaging the brand ambassadors, i.e., enthusiastic customers loving your brand, is an excellent way to start gaining customer loyalty. For this, one should check for the ones who regularly like and comment on your social media posts and even post about your brand on different social media sites. 

Once you identify such people, share their content and engage with them, respond to their posts, or offer lucrative incentives to reward their loyalty. Such approaches may help you convert the existing customers into your loyal brand ambassadors. Accordingly, you may enhance your effectiveness, reach, and ROI related to the social-marketing efforts.   

Respond and Monitor to Real-time Feedback

Social media listening has the power to go in-depth, as compared to traditional marketing methods, tracking only brand mentions. It involves an analytical and proactive approach to let marketers delve deep into the sentiments, contexts, and themes for social media conversations and create real-time yet customized responses. Prompt responses to customers’ feedback help in building trust and prove to them that their feedback/opinions matter a lot.

Creating Relevant and Personalized Content

Creating relevant and personalized content for the audience also helps in creating and increasing customer advocacy. Social listening provides valuable insights into your customers’ interests, their discussions, and the topics they find engaging. Based on this information, brands may tailor their content better to fulfill the interests of their target audience and thereby set up long-lasting customer relations. 

Use User-Generated Content

User-generated content is an asset to create and boost brand advocacy. When you share content created by your followers or customers, you may develop a sense of community across your brand and value the opinions of your customers. Social media listening tools identify the relevant user-generated content that you may share across your social media channels. Sharing of user-generated content will even help brands to approach a wider audience via followers and influencers of the respective content creators.

Monitor Competitors, Customers, and Industry Trends

Keeping up with the latest industry trends, competitors, and customers is crucial to creating successful social media marketing campaigns. The use of social listening tools allows marketers to monitor competitors’ activity and find the current industry trends. Accordingly, brands will stay ahead and identify many new opportunities for customer engagement.   

Ways to Action Social Media Listening to Boost Customer Advocacy

Digital marketers associated with diverse online brands will adopt the following ways to action social media listening for boosting customer advocacy-

Focus on Platforms with Active Customers

A few audiences often stay active on Instagram and Facebook, while others engage highly on LinkedIn, Twitter, and other industry-specific forums. In this situation, focus on the platforms where you get more active customers to listen to the right conversations. 

Pay Attention to Trending Topics and Keywords

Customers often share their feedback via comments, hashtags, and reviews. Make sure to pay attention to the trending topics and specific keywords to understand their likes, preferences, pain points, and expectations from your brand. Monitoring of the respective conversations allows brands to be aware of the changing customers’ sentiment and respond on time.  

Collect Real-time Data and Insights

Digital marketers must use social media listening techniques and tools efficiently by collecting data in real time. Real-time data provides valuable insights into the customer sentiment, engagement trends, and demographics of the target audience to let the brands respond strategically.  

Build Lasting Relations with Customers 

Businesses and online marketers must take steps to identify the loyal customers, who may promote their brand naturally. Also, marketers must use social listening to find the right influencers for spreading their brand messages and compare their products’ performance with that of fellow sellers. Social listening also provides information on customer complaints and gives businesses a chance to address such complaints quickly to boost their satisfaction levels. 

How Our Phyllo’s Social Media Listening API Boosts Customer Advocacy

We have already understood the concept of customer advocacy, social media listening, and its significance for online marketers and brands. Also, we have learnt various ways to action social media listening for customer advocacy. However, with multiple social media sites and online portals, social listening for finding ambassadors or analyzing trends becomes a challenging task. 

Here, the key is to get an innovative social media listening API to get the work done easily and in no time. Luckily, the social media listening API tool powered by Phyllo follows a four-step process to convert a few simple online conversations into actionable insights for your brand. The steps include the following-

Step 1-Input the Items to Track

Here, you need to add certain creator handles, primary keywords, secondary keywords, hashtags, and others that you want to track.  

Step 2-Search for Real-time Data

Based on the information you provide, Phyllo social listening API looks for conversations of your existing customers, prospects, or target audience on diverse social media platforms. 

Step 3-Analysis 

Phyllo's social listening tool possesses its built-in AI to collect the customers’ engagement, their sentiments, and trend scores automatically.

Step 4-Visualization for the Next Campaign

In the last step, Phyllo social listening tool shares the analyzed data to your system’s dashboard or lets you download it directly as a PDF. According to the relevant data, marketers may launch their next social media campaign.  

Conclusion 

Social media listening helps digital marketers and online brands by creating real and long-term relationships with customers. By responding meaningfully, paying attention to the customers’ sayings, and bringing thoughtful improvements, businesses/brands may convert their satisfied customers into long-term advocates. Therefore, listen with intent and always act to value and engage customers to increase your customer advocacy with social media listening.

Frequently Asked Questions

How do brands use social media listening to understand their customers’ requirements?

Social media listening tracks real feedback, conversations, and comments from your customers across social media sites/platforms. By analyzing the respective insights, brands will understand the expectations, likes, and concerns of their customers. 

Is social media listening effective to boost customer satisfaction?

Yes, social media listening helps brands to identify the concerns, complaints, or service-related issues in advance. Prompt and personalized responses to resolve problems publicly build trust among customers, which leads to higher customer satisfaction. 

What is the role of social media listening in identifying your brand advocates? 

Social media listening tools highlight the users who regularly tag, praise, or engage positively with a brand. When digital marketers identify the loyal supporters, companies may appreciate, reward, and involve the respective users in their upcoming advertising campaigns. Accordingly, social listening helps in identifying the brand advocates. 

How do social media listening strategies boost brand reputation and develop trust?

Social media listening alerts companies and brands to emerging trends, crisis signals, and public sentiments. By responding proactively and timely addressing the concerns, brands build customer credibility. When customers find their brand listening actively and improving its products/services as per feedback, brand reputation and trust will develop gradually.