Examples of Brand Social Listening Strategies to Copy

A well-crafted social media listening strategy can help brands stay informed about the millions of conversations taking place on social media. It can help you reduce noise and gain essential insights for your brand. ,

Through the power of social listening, you uncover a lot of details, such as:

• Who your competitors and customers are.
• What motivates your audience to engage with your brand?
• People’s thoughts about you.
• Places where your competitors and customers engage.

With this data, you can predict industry trends and identify financial crises before they occur. Thus, a good social listening strategy will help you stay ahead of the competition. 

Characteristics of a Good Social Listening Strategy

Social listening involves analyzing conversations on social media to gain insights into your brand, industry, and competition. It provides insights about your audience, helping you understand their needs, desires, and pain points. You can then use these insights to create a strategy that is best suited to their needs. A good social listening strategy encompasses the following key characteristics. These include:

• Based on a strategy. Social gatherings involve gathering proper insights to make significant future decisions. It is, therefore, an excellent tool for providing essential insights, preferably before a marketing campaign.
• Proactive. A good social listening trend should include social channel monitoring to identify trends and the issues affecting brands. You can use the problems to see trends that may impact your brand and take action before a crisis occurs.
• Social listening is a two-part process. You need to start by monitoring your brand mentions to understand why people are saying the things they are. Then, you need to interpret the conversations.
• Social listening can be intensive. You need to investigate discussions, conversations, and mentions thoroughly to gain a deeper understanding of trends, patterns, and sentiments related to your brand, competitors, and industry. This can be an essential step in future-proofing your brand.

Examples of Successful Brand Trends

If you're wondering where to start with your brand strategy, these brands can provide valuable insights to motivate you.

Yves Rocher

As a natural personal care and cosmetic brand, Yves Rocher focuses on offering high-quality products at an affordable price. The French beauty brand uses social listening with three aims:

• Understanding the behavior of beauty product consumers.
• Getting scientific community insights to help them improve their ingredients and packaging.
• Understanding the media coverage to get the public's opinions on topics related to cosmetics and beauty.

For instance, the brand leverages social listening to understand how people perceive certain ingredients, providing them with valuable insights into shifting perceptions. They then use the insights to change their formula or even create new products. Through social listening, the brands understand the latest raw materials necessary for eco-friendly packaging. 

One of the things that Yves Rocher has discovered through social listening is that consumers no longer use cosmetics to hide their flaws; they also consider cosmetics a key self-care product. They have also gained insights suggesting that everyone should look the same. 

Zoo Zurich 

Zoo Zurich boasts being the largest leisure attraction in Switzerland, resulting in a significant amount of social media content being posted about it. However, since most of the content isn't about the brand, the zoo is rarely tagged in the comments despite being a non-profit organization funded by donors. 

When tracking the social mentions of their brand on social media, Zoo Zurich realized that most of the online conversations mentioning their brand passed unnoticed since social media users didn't use branded hashtags or tags. The zoo focused more on gathering feedback from visitors and engaging with them as part of its social listening strategy. They then developed a UGC campaign using a hashtag.

Dubai TV

Many brands utilize social listening to inform their content creation process. For TV stations whose primary role is content creation, it can also help guide their content production process. One of the stations that has realized this is Dubai TV, which uses social listening to: 

• Measure their audience sentiments. This helps them understand whether their viewers are satisfied, and therefore, create more effective marketing campaigns.
• Give real-time feedback. The TV station uses the information it has gathered to inform its future content production process.

Through social listening, Dubai TV gathers valuable insights into how its target audience responds to its content. By collecting data from various social media platforms, they gain insight into their viewers' reactions to specific characters or plot lines.

ContentCal

ContentCal, a social media management and content marketing tool created in 2016, was acquired by Adobe for $100 million in five years. The brand's phenomenal growth was attributed to its social listening efforts in an industry dominated by major content scheduling giants. Therefore, the brand started tracking its brand mentions and share of voice. 

Since the share of voice showed them how often their brands were mentioned in relation to their competitors, the brand realized that brand awareness was the most critical metric to focus on. By examining what worked compared to their competitors, they were able to establish clear goals. 

They began creating organic content to increase their brand awareness by leveraging social listening tools. Thus, they were able to identify their social mentioners and partner with them in influencer marketing. This resulted in a higher level of audience trust, increased online awareness, and enhanced brand value.

IKEA

IKEA is one of the most popular furniture brands, with an extensive worldwide consumer base. By utilizing the top social listening tool, the brand discovered that its consumers mentioned the brand 8 to 12 times per minute.

However, the brand still wanted to track these mentions and determine how to utilize the insights. By leveraging social listening tools that incorporate AI technology, the brand was able to monitor its traditional and digital coverage. 

Final Thoughts

A good social listening strategy can help you track and analyze different online conversations to gain profound knowledge. This provides them with proper insights into competitor success, audience sentiment, industry trends, and much more.

However, if you are getting started with social listening, it can be hard to know what to track and how to go about it. The good thing is that you can learn from the above examples to develop an effective social listening strategy.