Your Business Needs Social Listening: Here’s Why

Businesses around the world are catalyzing sales, amplifying brand awareness and differentiating from competition all through social listening.

Yet thousands dismiss social listening due to lack of knowledge or belief. This blog will explain why they are wrong:

What is social listening?

Technically social listening is defined as “software which archives online conversations providing brands with information and the means to track and analyze their online presence.”

However we like to take a simpler spin on it: “using technology to track and find what is being said online”.

How businesses are using social listening

The best way to explain social listening is by listing the things it can be used for. Here’s a run through of what some of the world’s largest brands are doing with their listening tools.

• Campaign Measurement: Record and compare how successful your campaigns are
• Community Management: Track and optimize the value of all of your social activity
• Competitive Benchmarking: Compare your performance to your competitor and examine what worked and what didn’t

Comparing mentions of Premier League competitors over the last 7 days.

• Customer Service: Allowing for proactive / intelligent prioritized social customer care
• Market Research: Gather information on customers, competitors or target markets
• Lead Generation: Finding new customers and prospects
• Influencer Marketing: Identifying individuals who can amplify your messaging in a relevant and impactful way

Comparing Ben & Jerry’s ice cream flavors over time.

• PR Tracking: Track news coverage of your brand and keep tabs on emerging trends
• Product Development: Find faults and suggestions as to how to improve your product
• Reputation and Crisis Management: Remain alert to potential crises and contain them at the first possible instance

Negative mentions of Apple increasing during the #bendgate crisis.

What is Brandwatch Analytics?

Brandwatch Analytics a social listening platform that makes sense of the chatter about your brand online.

Voted an industry leading 4.6 out of 5 stars on G2 Crowd, Brandwatch Analytics has consistently proven itself to be the best and most robust social listening platform in the market.

How social listening is revolutionizing businesses around the world

Over 1,000 brands around the world use Brandwatch within their business. The Brandwatch platform provides businesses with the tools to innovate in new ways. Here’s some of the success our clients have experienced since joining Brandwatch.

• Used social listening to fuel a campaign generating 35,000 tweets
• Drove incremental product sales via smarter campaign tactics
• Uncovered invaluable insights and personals tastes from its customer base

“Brandwatch makes us social media savvy with very little effort” Vicky Keeler, Digital Executive, Kellogg’s.

SKY TV, DDB and Game of Thrones:

• Recorded over 800,000 interactions with a bespoke social campaign
• Used Brandwatch to propel its campaign to the international stage, reaching 43 million people in 168 countries
• Analyzed the exposure, reach and impact the campaign had on a global scale

“Brandwatch was invaluable in working out the exposure the campaign received in global media” Michiel Cox, Digital Planner, DDB

LateRooms.com

• Delivered outstanding customer service from informed and reliable social listening researched
• Developed a pioneering hotel booking social initiative
• Generated an additional 30% sales from social media

“I’m a big fan of Brandwatch. Their excellent technical support is coupled with an extremely efficient product that gives you everything you could want” Richard Kemp, Social Media Manager, LateRooms.com

What makes Brandwatch different

Social listening platforms are growing in number and as the industry becomes increasingly croweded it can be difficult to stand out. Despite this, Brandwatch are considered outstanding in their field due to a number of features that differentiates them from the crowd:

• The amount of data on offer – Brandwatch has access to the full Twitter firehose meaning they collect every single tweet in real time.
• Unparalleled amount of sources they gather data from – Brandwatch tracks over 90 million sources from review sites, forums, blogs, news articles, social networks, video sites and much more. Keep in mind, Brandwatch count Twitter and Facebook as just two sources.
• Unique access to historic data – Brandwatch is one of the only tools offering Twitter data all the way back to 2006.
• Multilingual –  Brandwatch fully support 27 languages and can add new languages based on customer demand.

Brandwatch don’t just provide the best social data, they also deliver world leading tools that make finding invaluable insights easy:

• The ability to create bespoke dashboards to view your data in the manner most useful to you
• A helpful interface that feels intuitive to use and easy to learn
• Filters allowing you to dig deep into segments of your data
• Automated, bulk processing to analyze sets of data on a recurring basis with ease

Support is also fundamental when considering a social listening tool. Brandwatch has a 97% customer satisfaction rate, phone and email based help in multiple languages, dedicated account managers, and regular training webinars and videos.

“The personal touch of technical support is the difference. It is a USP” Ranjit Sidhu, SiD

Now you know 

Don’t disregard social listening due to a lack of understanding or belief in the tool – try one and find out for yourself. If you happen to be using a tool that you’re not happy with, don’t settle.

Put us to the test. Request a free demo of Brandwatch Analytics today. It could be the best business decision you ever make.