Social monitoring and Social listening are two terms often used synonymously by digital marketers. With the rising popularity of social media platforms and the influencer marketing ecosystem, companies are investing more in these strategies to analyze consumer behavior and monitor brand performance. 

As per Hubspot’s Social Marketing Strategy 2020 report, marketers reported social listening as their number one tactic for building social media strategy.

If this is enough influence for you to join the bandwagon of trending social media marketing strategies, you must pause! The question still remains: why are companies extensively using social media analysis? 

In this blog, we will explore the potential benefits of investing in social listening and monitoring to acquaint you with the best practices for each (on TikTok) and how to achieve these goals.

1. Improve Customer Service

2. Increase Brand Engagement

3. Measure Performance

4. Crisis Management

5. Online Reputation Management (ORM)

6. Boost Product Development

7. Increase Brand Awareness

8. Multiple User Generated Content (UGC)

9. Improve Customer Experience

10. Explore Competitive Advantage

Improve Customer Service

Social monitoring allows brands to keep track of customer feedback and quickly respond to inquiries and complaints on social media, improving customer satisfaction rates. 

A research infographic by Smart Insights shows, '80% of companies online are under the impression that they deliver exceptional social media customer service. However, only 8% of their customers say that they agree'.

The same research shares that a 'person is 30% more likely to recommend a brand that has responded to them on social media'. So, if your brand is convinced with its approach to social monitoring and strategies for social media customer service, it may be time to reconsider. 

If your brand is on TikTok, one way to monitor customer feedback is through Exolyt's Social Listening features. This feature lets you track all the mentions, comments your brand has received on TikTok and helps you prioritize which user opinion to escalate internally or respond to on social media. 

Source: Exolyt

Increase Brand Engagement

By monitoring and responding to social media conversations, brands can increase engagement with their audience and build stronger customer relationships.

Most brands these days want to be part of relevant conversations with pop-culture references or follow viral TikTok trends. It gives them visibility and opens up avenues for customer engagement.

For example, companies took notice when a TikTok user randomly asked brands to comment on his TikTok video. They started responding with creative yet original taglines representing their brand or service. Engaging in such conversations improves brand awareness and social media presence, which is highly appreciated by audiences today.

Source: Marketing Interactive

As per a study shared by Marketing Dive ‘61% of consumers said social engagement with the audience is the most important characteristic’.

This is mostly because engagement creates relevancy and builds authenticity and social monitoring helps you do just that - being relevant, authentic, and most importantly present at the right place at the right time!

Measure Performance

Social monitoring allows brands to track and measure their social media performance, including all activities, engagement, reach, and other metrics, which helps to optimize social media strategy. Such data creates room for improvement, allowing brands to make informed decisions. 

Exolyt TikTok Analytics and Social Intelligence tool is a holistic short-video insight, analytics, and trends platform that helps you monitor your TikTok performance with the most relevant stats.

Here is an example of how to use Exolyt’s social monitoring and listening features to measure brand performance on TikTok, as well as the related benefits you can achieve with it.

Crisis Management

Speaking of TikTok, we must address the issue of the constant threat brands pose these days because of the wide usage of social media platforms like TikTok. 

This is because the format of short videos makes it easy to point, shoot and post and then the video is live for the world to watch. Additionally, TikTok’s content-based algorithm can make any post go viral if it garners enough interest from the audience. One can also share the videos with a wider network with a click and contribute to the conversations easily. 

So, brand social monitoring on dynamic platforms like TikTok is also crucial because it helps to quickly identify and respond to potential crises or PR issues, minimizing the impact on their brand reputation.

Online Reputation Management (ORM)

Online reputation management (ORM) is crucial for brands to maintain a positive image in the digital space. However, successful online reputation management is highly dependent on controlling the brand narrative through online audience engagement.

While opinions on social media platforms and news publications may be beyond a brand’s control, social monitoring, and listening can help as an effective tool for a certain degree of reputation management. 

It is because social monitoring involves keeping track of online conversations and interactions. So, it helps brands to proactively manage their online reputation by quickly addressing negative comments and feedback before they escalate. Additionally, social listening helps to keep track of the perception of your brand over time and the sentiments associated with it.

For example, most companies from the travel industry have to consistently monitor what feedback people and guests are leaving about their services. The best way to mitigate this is to answer reviews promptly with appropriate responses, so the comments might not negatively influence other potential customers, because study shows 90% of consumers read online reviews before visiting a business.

Boost Product Development

Social monitoring and listening can be valuable tools for brands looking to boost their product development efforts. This is because by monitoring customer feedback on social media brands can gain insights into product features, improvement, and new product ideas that can better meet the needs of the target audience. 

Here are some ways that brands can use social monitoring and listening to boost product development:

1. Identify consumer pain points: By monitoring social media channels, brands can identify common complaints or issues that consumers are experiencing with products in their industry. This information can be used to develop new products that address these pain points.

2. Monitor competitor activity: Social listening can help brands keep an eye on what their competitors are doing in terms of product development. It gives them insights into what new products competitors are launching, as well as how consumers are responding to them.

3. Gather feedback on prototypes: Brands can use social monitoring to gather feedback on product prototypes. By sharing images or descriptions of prototypes on social media, brands can gauge consumer interest and gather valuable feedback for development. 

4. Test new product concepts: Social monitoring can also be used to test new product concepts. Brands can share mockups or concepts on social media to see how consumers respond and use this feedback to refine their product development efforts.

Everyone is familiar with what Fitbit is and how it works, but did you know that Fitbit’s ‘Reminder to Move’ feature was a community-inspired feature development? It was something consumers had actively been discussing in Fitbit’s community forums before the alert was even developed. The brand took notice, deployed the development, and delivered.

Increase Brand Awareness

Social monitoring can help brands to increase their visibility by identifying opportunities to engage with followers, whether it's by responding to mentions, feedback, or sharing user-generated content. By fostering a sense of community and engaging with followers, companies can increase their brand awareness and build loyalty.

Additionally, it can help companies to identify key influencers in their industry or niche. This is highly crucial in today’s digital marketing ecosystem. As per a report, 37% of consumers trust social media influencers over brands.

Companies can then work with these influencers to promote their brand, create user-generated/influencer videos, reach new audiences, and increase brand awareness.

The American fast-food brand Chipotle won this strategy through its monitoring activities. The business simply commented on a TikTok from popular creators The Cheeky Boys, challenging them to send a burrito into space. With this, they reached a new young audience segment who appreciate the authenticity and uniqueness of new ideas. When the TikTok’ers responded, Chipotle reshared the video as user-generated content. 

Source: TikTok

Multiply User Generated Content

Speaking of influencers, we must address the increasing popularity of user-generated content. A Grand View Research finding projected that the globally User Generated Content Platform Market will grow by 29.4% CAGR by 2030. Therefore, high-time companies should explore the best social monitoring and listening solutions to generate more UGC and get valuable social proof. 

Especially for platforms like TikTok, whose UGC performed ‘22% better than TikTok brand videos, 32% higher than Facebook ads, and 46% higher than conventional ads’, as per a survey report.

Unsurprisingly, TikTok’s algorithm fuels interest and discovery-based content for an audience that values authentic and mission-driven brands. 

With social monitoring and listening, brands can identify influencers and advocates who can promote their products and services, increase awareness to help companies connect with users, and gain trust.

With Exolyt influencer monitoring and campaign tracking features, you can find influencers and keep track of the campaigns under one platform.

1. No need to run after influencers for campaign statistics

2. Save time by tracking all influencer campaigns at the same time

3. Get relevant analytics to make informed decisions about ROAS. 

Find out more about the potential of TikTok as an influencer marketing channel here. 

Improve Customer Experience

While social monitoring helps improve customer service and optimize business strategy, it's with social listening that you can provide higher-level value-added features and improve customer experience.

Social listening considers customer sentiment, behavior, and preferences, providing deeper insights to understand the needs and pain points and improve customer experience with better product and service offerings. 

It can be achieved by proactively monitoring industry trends, following conversations, and actively seeking and analyzing customer feedback and opinions.

Take Wendy's, for example - the brand completely redesigned their classic fries with a 41-year history simply by engaging in social listening. Through extensive consumer research and listening exercises, Wendy's discovered positive sentiments about how consumers talk about sea salt. The latter was associated with a trendy gourmet ingredient compared to sodium or regular salt. So, Wendy's made use of the long tail keyword — sea salt — and used it as a growth opportunity.

Read our blog to know how Netflix used social listening to add new features to its app. 

Explore Competitive Advantage

Social listening can help brands gain a competitive advantage because it helps identify emerging industry trends and opportunities.

1. It allows you to act quickly and be one of the first to capitalize on new developments, differentiate through innovation, and make compelling offers

2. It helps to anticipate changes in the market and adjust business strategy accordingly

3. It gives insights to tailor products and services based on changing customer needs and preferences, thus, giving you an edge over competitors.

Additionally, as mentioned before, social monitoring can be used to discover what competitors are doing well (or not so well) and benchmark them accordingly. 

While these might sound like super resource-intensive and time-consuming processes, it couldn't get easier with Exolyt Social Monitoring tools. 

As part of their social listening features, Exolyt also offers  Competitor Analysis for TikTok social media benchmarking. With the comparison tool, you can monitor your competitors' TikTok performance against yours. 

Source: Exolyt

Undoubtedly, all the above benefits can help gain a competitive advantage. So, here are a few steps you must consider before conducting social monitoring and listening:

1. Identify your goals and objectives: Determine what you want to achieve through social monitoring and listening. Do you want to improve customer satisfaction, identify new business opportunities, track your competitors, or something else?

2. List the social media channels or accounts to monitor: Identify the channels where your target audience is most active and where conversations relevant to your business take place. List all your potential competitors, content creators, and brands you want to monitor.

3. Choose the right tools: Many social monitoring and listening tools are available, ranging from free to paid options. Choose the tools that fit your budget, goals, and specific needs. 

4. Set up your monitoring and listening strategy: Set up your social monitoring and listening strategy by defining hashtags, accounts, keywords, and other terms that will help you track relevant conversations.

5. Collect and analyze data: Collect and analyze data from your social monitoring and listening activities and analyze it to gain insights into customer behavior, industry trends, and competitor activities.

You can also try Exolyt’s analytics and trend detection solutions to get some actionable insights directly, and use this data to make informed marketing decisions or improve your business strategy, as needed.