How Brands Identify Trends from Online Conversations

Photo by Mikael Blomkvist on Pexels

Introduction to social listening

Social listening refers to social media listening, where brands collect information by analysing online conversations. The conversations are those mentioning your brand or your industry, giving you more insights about your customers and audience. This means monitoring your social media accounts for all cases in which your audience mentions your company or shares thoughts about your brand.

Think of social listening as active listening of your clients, but on a much bigger scale. Besides that, businesses conduct sentiment analysis to help them make the best decisions concerning marketing.

The importance of identifying trends through online conversations

Customers discuss different aspects of your business in their social media posts, thus helping businesses understand emerging customer demands. These online conversations are very helpful because they show the latest trends in consumer behaviour. They help brands identify new customer demands long before trends appear on the market.

There are numerous benefits of trend identification:

• Helping you understand changing consumer demands.
• Allowing the development of products meeting customer expectations
• Providing customer experience insights
• Enabling the development of marketing campaigns based on customer needs
• Uncovering new market opportunities
• Letting you beat your competitors
• Protecting your brand reputation
• Increasing customer engagement.

Thus, ignoring social media conversations may lead to missing industry updates or important information about consumers' problems. However, businesses practising social listening get the advantage over those failing to follow their customers' activity on the web.

How brands identify trends from online conversations

Monitoring Social Media Discussions

Brands monitor social media conversations to identify popular trends and emerging conversations. Keywords, hashtags, and popular themes can inform about shifting demands among consumers.

If customers start discussing sustainability, eco-friendly packaging, nd sourcing, your business can identify the growing trend, so you will adapt your strategy accordingly.

Furthermore, conversations help businesses understand which products, features, and campaigns attract the most attention from customers.

Analysing Customer Sentiment

Sentiment analysis is conducted to understand how customers feel regarding certain products and brands. Artificial Intelligence and natural language processing help detect the overall mood behind conversations.

Some of the key insights that you receive through analysing customer sentiment include the following:

• Levels of satisfaction among customers
• Aspects requiring improvement from the perspective of your clients
• Reactions to your marketing campaigns and products
• Acceptance of the products you offer
• Issues are becoming popular among your audience.

Positively charged conversations show high customer approval rates and successful marketing campaigns. However, negative sentiment requires investigating and identifying product or service problems.

Tracking Industry Conversations

Besides tracking conversations about themselves, brands also monitor industry discussions.

Such information informs you about the following aspects of the industry:

• New market trends
• Technological changes
• Consumers' demands and preferences
• Government regulations
• Competitor's actions

How to build your social listening strategy

Now you are going to develop your social listening strategy according to the following step-by-step guide.

Step 1: Setting Social Listening Business Goals and KPIs

Start developing your strategy with a clear goal and set KPIs you need to measure to check your progress.

Examples of business goals include:

• Learning about your competitors and industry to make your brand unique and its products better.
• Avoiding a PR crisis or dealing with any negativity coming from your customers
• Generating fresh ideas for new content based on the most popular topics among your audience
• Discovering emerging niches for expanding your market presence.

Examples of Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) include:

• Sentiment: Is there positive or negative public sentiment?
• Influencers: whose accounts discuss your brand, and who their followers are?
• Popularity: what level of mentions do you have about your brand, its products, and some particular keywords?
• Engagement: what social media content receives the highest numbers of likes, comments, and shares?

Established KPIs will give you accurate measurement results.

Step 2: Choosing a Social Listening Tool

There are different social listening tools in the market, so you need to pick one that corresponds to your business goals. Consider what features you need to implement social listening and how much money you want to invest. Finally, look for the easiest-to-use tool to set up monitoring fast and without difficulties.

When choosing your tool, focus on such aspects as:

• Social media monitoring features
• Analytics possibilities
• Real-time notifications
• Sentiment analysis
• Reporting capabilities
• Integration options
• Usability
• Price.

Sign up for free trial versions to test different solutions to your problem. For example, Sprinklr Insights, Brandwatch, and Talkwalker are some of the best social listening tools.

Step 3: Investigating Your Audience Deeper

Compile useful insights about your customers and audience from their existing data.

Among the questions you need to answer here are:

• What kinds of questions do your customers most often raise?
• What do your customers love about your brand and products?
• Which issues are important for them?
• How do they share their ideas?

The deeper insight you gain about the audience, the better results you receive after social listening.

Step 4: Creating a List of What to Listen For

A list of keywords and phrases will help you gather the most interesting insights. Use the examples of categories below to generate the keyword list.

• Brand Name
• Social media handles
• Keywords and hashtags associated with your brand
• Target market interests
• Industry buzzwords
• Names of your products
• Category of your products
• Slogans
• Audience insights

A well-developed keyword strategy helps to receive better insights about online conversations.

Step 5: Identifying the Channels for Collecting Data

Remember that you can find valuable insights about your brand and products on any channel where consumers can share their views.

However, it is recommended to start from those social media channels your audience uses regularly and gradually add additional channels.

These include the following platforms and networks:

• Social media platforms
• Online forums
• Reviews sites
• Blogs
• News sites
• Community sites
• Video-sharing sites

Monitoring multiple channels helps you collect data from diverse sources.

Step 6: Filtering Data

To sort the data that your social listening tool collects, choose filters according to your keyword list, sentiments, types of interactions (likes, shares, comments), etc.

Proper filtering will help you to:

• Receive only relevant insights
• Exclude irrelevant mentions
• Identify priority issues.
• Analyse certain segments of customers
• Increase reporting accuracy

Conclusion

Social listening has become one of the most powerful ways to learn from the activity of your customers on various digital platforms. Brands receive plenty of valuable insights about customer behavior, market trends, competitors' actions, public sentiment, and so forth.

Businesses employ social listening to engage their audience, prevent PR crises, improve products, analyse competitors, find influencers, and brand advocates.