Why your brand needs real-time social listening

Today, the digital market landscape is driven by in-the-moment, real-time information. Social media dominates the consumer pulse across the globe. Amidst a constantly evolving market, it has now become imperative for brands to be prompt and proactive. Utilizing social media monitoring tools for real-time social insights enables brands to stay relevant, and generate topical, effective, and trending content. 

Brand positioning is amplified today by the speed of their processes from campaign creation to customer communication. Where can you get data that enables timely action in times of crisis? How best can you engage with your customers amidst behavioral shifts? Here’s where real-time social listening plays an important role.

Effective crisis management

Real-time social listening helps keep your marketing and product development efforts on track; letting you respond to situations that potentially harm your reputation. Natural disasters, marketing failures, and data breaches pose serious threats to your brand’s reputation. Immediate and appropriate responses are required to protect your firm’s reputation and bolster confidence both within the organization and among customers and clients. As consumers express their dissatisfaction on social media and viral trends spread in seconds, brands need to be increasingly aware of the general and political tone of each tweet and post. Teams must be armed to immediately address and manage damage control to avert potential PR disasters. 

For instance, when Southwest Airlines’ flight 345 made a hard nose-first landing at LaGuardia, the airlines promptly handled the situation with quick social media response time. Through honest, timely, and transparent communication on Facebook and Twitter, it was able to maintain its brand trust. 

In another instance, tech giant Google’s bot mistakenly attributed an offensive slogan to UK bakery Greggs’. What could potentially have been a social media brand disaster for both firms, was turned around into a monumental win by Greggs’ digital brand manager Neil Knowles. Their back-and-forth Twitter banter went on to garner tremendous publicity for the bakery and was lauded across the platform by consumers and media houses alike. 

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Real-time marketing insights

Over 53% of the global population uses social media. That’s over 4.2 billion users constantly updating feedback and opinions on a public forum. Real-time social listening opens the window to a host of marketing insights that can help your brand interject corporate messaging into consumer conversations. Quickly reacting to local, national, or even global events that begin to trend offers topical and in-the-moment marketing strategies that propel brand relevance. 

For instance, the raging ‘Ronaldo-Coca-Cola’ controversy began when renowned footballer Cristiano Ronaldo removed the Coca-Cola bottles placed in front of him at a press conference and endorsed water instead. The subsequent barrage of memes resulted in the brand’s market capitalization plummeting by $4 billion in the US. While the brand scrambled to manage the crisis, this disaster paved the way for diverse labels to seize the opportunity and indulge in ‘moment marketing’. Firms ranging from the World Health Organization and Ikea to brands like Fevicol, Zomato, and Amul, came up with some witty social media campaigns to keep the conversation going. 

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Retaining your customers

As brands grapple with shifting post-COVID-19 behaviors and loyalties, enhancing social CX (customer experience) is crucial to retain customers. Forrester’s latest CX Index consumer survey indicates that consumers are 2.4 times more likely to stay when companies resolve customer problems quickly.  A Gartner study found that companies that do not respond to social media messages face up to a 15% increase in customer churn. 

Real-time social listening plays a vital role in helping you retain your customers. With attention spans as low as 8 seconds, brands need to think on their feet and promptly engage with their users or risk losing them. Using social media monitoring tools makes it possible to respond quickly to customer inquiries and address their emerging concerns. Social listening gives you opportunities to engage with your customers about your brand. 

Constant consumer engagement on social platforms generates goodwill with your followers and a positive consumer response. The timely resolution of consumer complaints and negative feedback further encourages customers to provide positive feedback. Brand recall and loyalty are only furthered with honest, transparent, and prompt communication efforts which helps retain customers. Adapting to your customers’ social journey to increase personalization along their customer experience journey further strengthens customer loyalty.

For instance, a bank’s reputation was at significant risk due to its customer queries going unnoticed. The company was able to reduce its response time to less than 20 minutes by leveraging Netscribes’ social listening and ORM capabilities. In addition, it was able to answer 95% of customer queries at the first level of engagement, which significantly enhanced its brand reputation and customer retention. 

Read our case study: Improving customer retention through social media intelligence

Campaign monitoring and management

Real-time social listening allows you to measure how audiences respond to your campaigns to improvise if necessary. With inventive creatives, topical campaigns that utilize in-the-moment insights can increase consumer engagement. Increasingly, brands are turning to innovative and strategic ways to leverage real-time campaign management tactics to boost audience engagement and propel brand awareness. Newsjacking is a dominant trend today. The practice of using trending news stories to create marketing campaigns that increase consumer engagement is fast catching on among brands. 

Many brands even have a center of excellence unit that identify opportunities for innovation and monitor customer response to both online and offline campaigns. Consistently monitoring existing campaigns helps identify gaps and fix elements that are not working. Using data gathered over time helps identify opportunities for improving campaigns and addressing issues before they explode. 

Timely conversations with your audience

Engaging your audience in social conversations at the right time is crucial. Keeping track of brand response and what your audience is saying about your brand is essential, as is engaging with your audience regularly. 

A personalized relationship with your audience, whether through tweet chats or emails, can make them feel heard and trusted. Over time, it builds customer loyalty. 

With brands using social listening tools to understand the social sentiment and take action, acting on real-time social listening data has emerged as the need of the hour. Gartner indicates more than half of major new business systems will incorporate continuous intelligence that uses real-time context data to improve decisions by 2022. Real-time responses allow for quick response to issues as they arise or to catch them even before they happen. 

Netscribes’ social media intelligence services allow companies to get an edge over their peers by helping them meet these objectives. The companies that utilize our social listening and ORM capabilities see an increase in customer retention of up to 73% and are considered some of the most trustworthy in the industry. Contact us to know more.