McDonald's that started modestly as a small barbecue restaurant has now turned into a staple of pop culture generations with close to 37,000 locations globally. These numbers might fascinate us, but with that many customers scattered across the world, there comes a challenge for this food chain -- providing the most convenient channels of communication.
With easy access to smartphones, the consumers are heading to social media to assert the matters about customer support, give praise to the brand or to voice their concerns. What more?
78% of people voicing their concerns online expect a response within an hour.
Therefore it becomes necessary for brands present online to find a way to follow their customers and solve their queries or concerns as soon as possible. Keep in mind,
Brand existence on social media is not a big hurdle. The real struggle is in maintaining and improving the brand presence.
The straight-away solution to dealing with this is social listening. It enables brand to respond whenever, wherever to whomever.
Online customer queries or complaints may not concern you now, but you may encounter it later. It is part and parcel of social media marketing strategy.
What is social media listening?
Your consumers or anyone in general around the globe can turn up to social media to contact or address your brand, and you may want to be available for them all the time. However, it just comes down to their preference, whether they want to point you directly by mentioning you or don’t '@' mention you at all.
Social listening is the process of monitoring digital conversations with both direct and indirect mentions to understand what people are saying about a brand and industry online.
A business or a brand can primarily use social listening for managing their community i.e, to identify customer pain points and providing direct response to consumer queries, complaints, and comments. Not only this, brands can also monitor online conversations to surface feedback that could help them form a unique brand, product, or service. Feedbacks can aid you to get a fair idea of what people are expecting out of your product or service.

Difference between social media listening and social media monitoring?
Finding the mentions is social media monitoring and deciding on what to act is social listening. They both are very much relatable, but social media listening is a much broader term as compared to social media monitoring. Only collecting data by monitoring will be of no help until you engage in the proper context.
Here is an example for a better understanding!

The presence of McDonalds' hashtag is fine here, but the context of the tweet is of no use to the company.
Similarly, a person can misspell a brand name (McD, McDonald, etc). So it is essential to find those words too in the process of social media listening.
Tip: Common word as a brand name may require more efforts in social listening
For instance, a 'box' is a square shaped container and it is also a name of a cloud storage application.
Assisting customers whenever and wherever is a difficult task to do, and it becomes more laborious when it is without any mentions or hashtags. Here, analyzing and uniting both monitoring and listening is an urgent requirement.
Let us see how Statusbrew can help you be on a winning streak of your brand, competition, and industry.
- Various conversations, one platform
- Manage brand reputation
- Build a better product
- Industry news and happenings at one glance
- Analyze competitor mentions
- Identify key influencers
- Easy campaign analysis
- Analyze your social media performance
How Statusbrew can help you manage your Social Media Presence?
1. Various conversations, one platform
Our engage feature provides you with a unified inbox which help you stay in full control of all your social media conversations in real-time.
Never miss any conversation and get instant updates of the following 11 incoming message types:
For Twitter:
- Twitter Mentions
- Twitter DMs
- Twitter Keywords
For Facebook:
- Facebook Comments
- Facebook Messages
- Facebook Mentions
- Facebook Rating
- Facebook Comments on Ads
- Facebook Visitor Posts
For Instagram:
- Instagram Comments
- Instagram Comments on Ads
For LinkedIn:
- LinkedIn Comments
For Google My Business:
- GMB Reviews
You can collaborate with your team to endeavor the social engagement without having to worry about sharing your credentials.
Not only this, you can also reduce the response time by assigning a conversation to a particular team member to work on tasks as soon as someone talks about you on social media. For instance, if there is a bug in the app, then you'll want to assign that ticket to one of your developer.
You can save standard replies to cut down your time while interacting with a frequent query. User has an option to look at the team engagement reports too. It will help you to keep a check on employee performances based on the social engagement they do for your brand.
2. Manage brand reputation
What if a consumer has a complaint about your company and you ignore it accidentally because of the indirect mention or label. Your brand reputation is at stake in this case. It is essential to discover it as soon as possible before it becomes a significant issue over the internet.
You can act on the direct mentions from the real-time sync 'Social Inbox'. For monitoring untagged mentions, you have to perform the custom search to find the brand-related keywords in the 'Manage Twitter Keywords.'
You can mark any ticket as priority or set it to snooze to monitor conversations around the clock and respond to them quickly. It will help you with a better customer service experience.
Tip: Always be polite to customers. Any misleading word can ignite the situation and make it worse in front of 4.39 billion internet users.
3. Build a better product
It is rightly said, "There's always room for improvement." Instead of appointing a team for research of product improvement, engage with your customer's feedback and problems, and find out the product development needs from them. Additionally, listening to your customers' product issues and effectively dealing with it in the form of product improvement brings trust in the customer relationship. 'Manage Twitter Keywords' and 'Social Inbox' is the perfect blend to implement this strategy without any extra cost and time.
Tip: Have a robust timeframe to resolve all issues within 10 hours. Continuous product improvements according to customers' need will help you never lose one.
4. Industry news and happenings at one glance
In any industry, the survival of the fittest is in being updated with the latest trends and happenings. Find some keywords related to your industry and perform the custom search on 'Manage Twitter Keywords.' You will find overall trends and happenings in the industry and can save it with 'Save Inbox' feature to eliminate the repetitive process of custom search.
Tip: Here, you can get the content ideas for your blog and social media too.
5. Analyze competitor mentions
Monitor your competitors' mentions to identify their strategy, type of content, and influencers who interact with them. It will give you an idea about how things should be taken further in terms of business objectives. Take advantage of their customer complaints and generate leads for your product. The amalgamation of the custom search and 'Save Inbox' will do wonders for you in this process.
6. Identify key influencers
You will daily come across a few people who regularly 'like', 'comment', applaud your product or service or may interact with you in DM. These people are already your fans and will help you out with your influencer marketing strategy. Look for these influencers with 'Manage Twitter Keywords' and evaluate them by seeing their post likes, followers, word-of-mouth impact, relationship with followers, etc.
7. Easy campaign analysis
If you run a social media marketing campaign, you must analyze it to know what works for you and what not. The common thing between all such campaigns is the use of hashtags. Statusbrew provides you powerful white-labelled hashtag insights to understand the qualitative performance of your campaigns by giving average of likes, clicks, impressions, reach, etc for each hashtag.
8. Analyze your social media performance
Use your social media listening analysis in social media strategy and comprehend the results with our reporting section. You can choose between aggregated report of all profiles and individual report for each profile or even custom reports, according to your requirements. You can also gather a few industry-related or competitors' keywords to find out how those keywords are performing on social and act upon your strategy. Sentiment analysis of those keywords will assist you to gather valuable insights for your overall brand strategy.
Conclusion
Keep a weekly check on the analyzed and incorporated data so that you are aware of what works well for you and then make assured moves in your strategies. It might all fall in place, or you may have to change a bit by experimenting with different plans. It requires great efforts and time, but a social media management tool can help you with that.
Start your 7 day free trial now and perform social monitoring and listening for your company with Statusbrew.
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