Social media listening helps track mentions and conversations around specific topics, keywords, phrases, brands, or industries. It helps leverage the insights gained to discover opportunities or create content for your audience.
When customers become advocates, their authentic, enthusiastic endorsements can resonate far more compellingly than traditional advertising. By employing social media listening, brands can tap into these discussions, deciphering their customers' desires, concerns, and experiences.
This article will explore how social media listening can enhance customer advocacy, fostering a more personalized and responsive approach to customer engagement.
You can identify and reach your customer advocates with Prowlyβs Social Listening. Track whoβs most active, connect with them and build a strong bond. You can also easily note any negative comments or mentions. Thus, you can quickly address them and nip a potential crisis in the bud.
What is social media listening?
How is customer advocacy connected to social media listening? First, let's take a step back and break down social media listening.
Conducting social media listening means you keep your fingers on the pulse of what's new around social media platforms concerning your brand and analyze the news as it comes. It involves collecting information from online conversations to help outline your strategy.
Social media listening can benefit your PR because it helps you gain and maintain a positive brand reputation. Moreover, you can easily improve communication with your customer base and stakeholders as well.
π‘ Weβve prepared a few articles about social media listening, strategy and the best social media listening tools for PR, hope they can help:
- The Complete Social Media Listening Guide for Public Relations
- Top 15+ Social Listening Tools for PR Pros β a 2024 List
- Whatβs the Difference Between Social Listening and Social Monitoring in PR?
- How to Create a Powerful Social Listening Strategy for PR? (with Tips and Examples)
What is customer advocacy?
Now let's imagine you have a clothing brand, your customers share their OOTDs across social media, tag you, and create whole posts about your items.
The number of your brand mentions increases, as well as pieces of user-generated content.
These "fans" are your customer advocates and by sharing their recommendations on your clothing, they create a buzz around your brand. And encourage others to do so. This is a snowball effect which your brand benefits from. You can build loyalty and trust and, therefore, gain loyal customers. These are customer advocacy essentials.
Customer advocacy reflects an act of voluntary and unpaid promotion and recommendation of a brand, services, or products to others.
Why itβs important to increase customer advocacy
The advocacy of your customers is one of the most effective PR strategies. A base of content and reliable customers is the best ad you can get.
Why should customer advocacy be important for your brand?
- Both positive and negative feedback is crucial. The first one gives you free advertisement, the second allows you to address any issues and manage any potential crises.
- Positive word-of-mouth from satisfied customers builds trust and credibility for your brand. This can attract new customers and encourage existing customers to stay loyal.
- A positive can increase CLV by fostering long-term relationships. Loyal customers are more likely to repeatedly purchase your products or services. In other words, they provide you with higher income and revenue.
- Unfortunately, we are living in the age of fake news. The more advocates your brand has, the easier it will be to undermine any untruthful info that may appear across the web. Trust is built over time. So focusing on long-term relationships with your loyal customers and encouraging your fans to speak publicly should be your priority.
So does media listening increase customer advocacy? Yes, it does. To learn how, keep reading.
How is social listening connected to customer advocacy?
Social media is the primary place to share your thoughts nowadays. So use it in your favor! Social listening tools allow you to eavesdrop on this news and react to it. Following social media conversations and brand mentions may help you gain a bigger picture of your company and products.
Customer advocacy & social media listening
By monitoring social media conversations, you can quickly identify and address customer concerns. A prompt and effective response to customer feedback demonstrates both responsiveness and a care for customer satisfaction. This can turn dissatisfied customers into advocates for the brand.
Social media listening tools can help businesses monitor social media trends and conversations to identify emerging customer needs, as well as track competitor activities, and industry trends. This information can help you adapt your portfolio to stay ahead of the curve.
When it comes to social listening tools, they are useful for measuring the impact of advocacy. Media listening provides tracking metrics such as brand mentions, positive sentiment, and social media engagement.
Such data can be used to assess the effectiveness of customer advocacy efforts and make adjustments as needed.
Social listening 101 β how to do it
It's high time to practice. Since social media listening can increase customer advocacy, you can start by choosing the best social listening tool.
Step #1: Set up your social media listening tools
A good tool is essential for maximizing the effectiveness of your social media listening efforts. Once you've chosen the right tool, it's time to set it up. Here is how:
- To increase advocacy, you should get to know your future brand champions first. Learn their preferences, behaviors and sentiments. Follow their online conversations and hot topics.
- Focus on keywords. Depending on the industry you are in, you may want to expand your search or exclude some keywords and focus on a narrow niche.
- Take a closer look at your competitors across various platforms. Comprehensive social media listening means a 360-degree overview - from your angle, your customers, and your competitors. With Prowly, you can do it with just a few clicks.
Step #2: Check your mentions daily
We have all been there. You wake up one day and the internet is crushed by some hot news about a brand or celebrity. Wherever you click, headlines shout at you with the same info. This only means that checking social media daily (or even more than once a day) is a smart move.
With Prowly it's the easiest thing in the world! Monitor several online channels and choose from dozens of filters to get the results youβre most interested in.
Step #3: Follow trends
Usually, such tools allow you to follow real-time data. Prowly gathers it in comprehensive and easy-to-read dashboards.
To spot trends in social listening, itβs crucial to assess all sources of data. Find the information you need thanks to useful filters. They are also very helpful in case of a crisis. Follow sentiment analysis to track how your PR is going.
π‘If you are looking for more handy tips on setting up your own social media monitoring tool, feel free to check our Complete Social Media Listening Guide.
7 Ways to increase customer advocacy through social media listening
Now it's high time for some valuable tips on how to make social media listening increase your customer advocacy.
#1 Respond to your followers
Keeping in touch with your followers is the best thing you can do when it comes to building loyalty and trust. Answer comments, address questions, and react to any interaction users request from you. Create a bond that will put your brand at the top of your customers' minds.
#2 Stay in the loop with mentions on social media
Track and analyze conversations about you. Who is talking and how? By monitoring these conversations, you can identify positive mentions, address negative feedback, and identify potential issues. And most of all react to all of the above.
#3 Develop your business based on social media listening
Social media platforms may be a great dose of inspiration. All you have to do is listen. By understanding what customers are saying online, you can spot areas for improvement and develop new products/services tailored to their needs even better. This would allow you to stay ahead of the competition and build a loyal customer base.
#4 Address feedback
Social media listening is about the voices of your customers, so focus on them. Their feedback needs to be addressed, no matter how positive or negative it is. This way you can demonstrate your commitment to customer satisfaction. On the other hand, you can also anticipate a crisis and even turn dissatisfied customers into advocates.
#5 Reach out to the most influential customers
Influencers can be valuable allies in promoting your brand and reaching a wider audience. Reach out to them and build your credibility even more! However, remember to choose your influencers wisely, keeping in line with your brand mission and vision. Otherwise, the effect may be the opposite.
#6 Use social media as a research tool
If you are working on your marketing strategy, or searching for ways to expand your brands. Social media is a great place to collect your data. Check the latest trends, understand customer pain points, and learn about potential markets. Now you are ready to conquer them.
#7 Monitor competitors
Keeping an eye on the competition is essential for any business. This lets you spot their strengths and weaknesses and develop strategies to differentiate your brand. With such a proactive approach, you can gain a competitive advantage.
To sum up
Building credibility and loyalty across your customer base is crucial to your brand's success. To get it done, brand champions should be your focus.
With Prowly's social media monitoring feature, you can keep your brand champions in the spotlight and keep up to date with what's new around various social media platforms.
