5 Steps for Implementing Social Listening that Gets Your Brand Ahead of the Digital Marketing Curve
Instagram is a buzzing hub for news, product discovery, as well as a rich source of real-time customer feedback. The biggest question we often get from clients is how you can actually tap into this gold mine of customer insights. The right social media listening strategy can help you uncover those valuable insights. With these insights, you can improve your social strategy, turn content into conversions, and outperform your competitors.
What is Social Listening on Instagram and How Do You Do It?
Social listening on Instagram involves tracking conversations and competitor activity on the platform to help you uncover real-time insights.
You are probably wondering just how you can track these. Here are the metrics we recommend monitoring:
- Mentions
- Hashtags
- Keywords
But remember, this goes beyond monitoring. Monitoring (tracking mentions, comments, hashtags, etc.) is a crucial part of listening, but listening is about capturing unfiltered feedback and turning those sentiments into insights and then meaningful action in your marketing campaigns.
These three metrics allow you to understand how users perceive your brand and your industry. It can also help you to understand the industry shifts and online trends they are engaging with. When you track competitor activity on top of that, you gain a deeper understanding of their strategies and how their audiences engage with them.
Here’s a list of all the insights you can surface with social listening on Instagram:
- Industry buzz, hot topics, and emerging trends
- Customer sentiment of what people love, hate, and want more of
- Competitor insights that allow you to see who’s gaining traction and why
- Content performance signals across different types of content, including user-generated content (UGC)
- Campaign feedback
- Influencer mentions that drive conversations
- Demographic insights that reveal what different audience segments care about the most
- Product development and customer service improvement opportunities through real-time feedback
The bottom line is that effective social listening on any platform provides a holistic view of customer sentiment, plus emerging trends and behaviors that can allow you to react quickly and with agility.
Why Social Listening Matters
Look, we all want to meet or exceed our return on investment (ROI) goals, and social listening can certainly help you do that. But there is much more benefit to social listening. Here are a few other benefits you can get from implementing a social listening strategy:
- You get to know your audience on a more personal level. This helps you create more authentic and personal content that gets noticed.
- Paying attention to customer sentiment means you can get ahead of the curve. You can be ready for industry shifts and respond faster in a crisis management situation.
- It can help you discover meaningful user-generated content (UGC). UGC is social proof; think of it as a review from a trusted friend. People listen to these. So resharing UGC on your own channels with permission from the original poster is a great way to prove you’ve got what people want and need.
How Does Social Listening on Instagram Work?
While Instagram’s search has improved, social listening does take some digging and work. So let’s dig into how you do this.
1 | Keyword Search
Instagram’s keyword search can help you find hashtags and key phrases that uncover content relevant to your brand. When you type in a key word or phrase, Instagram offers up related search terms and relevant accounts. This can help you understand what people are searching or even get ideas for other keywords you should be using to expand your reach.
2 | Analyze Competitors
Check out those relevant accounts and your known competitors. Make note of the type of content they are posting and how it’s being received by their audiences. This is a great opportunity to learn what works and what doesn’t.
3 | Analyze Sentiment
Do a deep dive on the comments on your posts and any UGC related to your brand. What are people saying? Is it positive, negative, or neutral? Compare this to the sentiment on competitor’s posts. This will help you understand what exactly it is that people are looking for from your brand and your competitors. It can also help you identify gaps in consumer needs that aren’t being fulfilled, giving you an opportunity to bring something to the table that your competitors don’t have to offer.
4 | Post Performance
As with any campaign, it’s important to monitor the performance of your posts. What type of content is working? What hashtags are bringing the most engagement? What posts are garnering the most comments? This will help you better understand what people are looking for from brands online and help you understand what is and isn’t working for you.
5 | Refine Your Strategy and Take Action
Once you’ve gathered information and insights, you can use it to start addressing gaps in your strategy and identify shifting trends. You can also begin to benchmark your brand’s performance against your competitors to find areas to improve.
Key Takeaways
Social listening is more than just understanding the likes and number of saves a post gets. It’s about understanding the real sentiment consumers have about your brand, your competitors, and your industry. Digging in and doing research to understand how people are feeling, what they are looking for, and what they don’t want to see can help identify shifts plus help to refine your marketing strategy in a way that gets you ahead of the curve.
Need help implementing an effective social listening strategy? Tintero Creative is here to help your brand break through the digital noise and get noticed! We offer bespoke content marketing and social media strategies as unique as your brand, helping you tell your brand’s story in a way that works with your industry, digital trends, and marketing best practices.
Reach out to us today to learn how we can help you better understand online sentiment about your brand.