Why should your organization care about social listening? Liz Gross, PH.D., director of Campus Sonar, provided the answer at the August 2018 Social Media Breakfast presentation.

Liz’s presentation began with a compelling story of how a 2013 government shutdown impacted two organizations, one of which was Great Lakes Educational Loan Services, where she worked at the time.

Hackers impersonated Great Lakes by creating fake social media accounts on Instagram. The hackers falsely claimed that students didn’t have to pay back their federal loans if they gave them personal information.

Fortunately, Great Lakes had a social listening system in place and immediately discovered the scam. They got in touch with Instagram right away and the fake accounts were removed within 24 hours. It took a competitor one week to take down the phony accounts, while receiving negative media attention.

Identifying scams is one example of how organizations can benefit from strategic social listening. Check out Liz’s ten ways a monitoring process can impact your business decisions.

1. Customer Service: Meet or exceed response time expectations

Most companies fall short of customer expectations since only 32% of social media complainers are happy with the response time. Social media monitoring allows you to analyze contact center comments and identify process improvements.

2. Content Strategy: Identify trending topics with your key audience segments

You may find areas of confusion and ways to improve the customer experience. For example, through social listening Great Lakes discovered that they should congratulate their clients for paying off their student loans. Now, Great Lakes sends a celebratory message when clients submit their final payment.

3. Proactive PR: Receive alerts when key journalists post

Journalists may be researching story ideas that will impact your organization, and you can react quickly to their posts.

4. Competitive Intelligence: Track your competitors’ activity

You can gain a strategic advantage by tracking what’s going on with your key competitors. Are their new strategies working? Are their executives in the news?

5. Vendor Management: Mitigate your risks by knowing what’s going on with your vendors and business partners

Your competitors aren’t the only ones you should keep tabs on.  Could your vendors and business partners’ actions negatively impact your organization? Your C-Suite will want to know.

6. Product Development: Discover new product ideas from your customers

Through comments, organizations can learn about the likes and dislikes of current products and even find out off-label uses of existing products. These revelations could lead to selling products in new ways.

7. Crisis Communication: Quickly manage a situation

Do you have tools in place to manage a crisis? Monitoring allows you to quantify the size of an issue and get real data to set expectations. Know what people are saying about you or risk damaging your brand.

8. Legal: Protect your legal backside

Social listening is a form of discovery. Tweets, for example, could be used in court cases. It also provides a heads-up if there’s an effort to build a class of plaintiffs.

9. Brand Management: Measuring your brand

Use social listening to understand and quantify online conversations about your brand. Key metrics include owned conversation (put out by your organization) vs. earned conversation, which is shared by others. By measuring share of voice, you can discover how you compare to competitors in the marketplace. Analyze brand attribute conversations to see how your brand strategies are working.

10. Market Research: Get customers insights fast

As an academic researcher, Liz appreciates the speed and flexibility of social listening. It’s quantifiable and human.

How to Get Started in Social Listening

Want to stay on top of the consumer conversation? Try free social listening tools, such as Mention.com, Socialmention.com or Hootsuite. Paid tools include Brandwatch and Sysomos + Meltwater. Use Forrester or Gartner for an analysis of enterprise tools.

Download the complete SMBMAD presentation for a listing of more tools.

Download Liz’s strategic model for social listening in higher education and adopt it to your organization.

Liz emphasizes that you can successfully use social listening for marketing purposes and to impact the bottom line. Stay on top of consumer conversations. Be ready, like Great Lakes, to quickly deal with scammers or other crises.

See you next month when Josh Klemons and Shane Cicero present on Breakfast Pub Chat: Your Greatest Facebook Ads Questions Answered.

This post was written by Leslie Blaize on behalf of Winbound, a content marketing firm. Winbound provides an all-in-one content marketing and conversion optimization package specifically designed for small marketing departments.