Why businesses need enterprise social listening platforms in 2023

Why businesses need enterprise social listening platforms in 2023

As we enter 2023, the importance of social media for businesses cannot be understated. In order to thrive in this competitive business landscape, it is essential for companies of all sizes and industries to ensure they are engaging with their customers and keeping track of what is being said about their brand on social media. Simply having a social media presence is no longer enough; brands need to actively monitor and participate in conversations on social media to maintain a positive brand reputation and build a loyal customer base.

This is where enterprise social listening platforms come in. Incorporating enterprise social listening tools into a company's core business strategy is essential for staying competitive in today's social media-driven business environment.

Social media pages for your brand are hotbeds of audience interactions, such as likes, comments, mentions and shares. These interactions can help you understand what people say about your business and marketing campaigns. Using enterprise social media listening, you can gain insight into online conversations about your brand. This allows you to proactively address customer issues and respond quickly and efficiently.

Incorporating social listening tools into your core business strategy can help you excel in the following four areas:

After every marketing campaign, marketers determine what worked and what didn't. This is why marketers need to be familiar with social listening tools. For instance, if your brand's product launch generates many mentions (positive or negative) on social media, enterprise social listening platforms can help you analyze those mentions and your engagement rate. With that report, you can fine-tune your future marketing campaigns and maintain your brand reputation simultaneously. Not only that, but data collected from social listening can also be useful when finalizing your marketing budget, ensuring you have the necessary funds to invest in the right strategy.

Social media is all about being in the moment and responding to posts in real time. Enterprise social listening tools allow you to be in lockstep with your customers, providing you with a detailed picture of

what they are saying (both tagged and untagged mentions) on social media so you can respond immediately. For instance, if someone has something positive to say about your brand, your team can follow up with a quick "thank you." These small interactions can have a lasting impact and build loyalty. Similarly, you can collate insights on other areas of the business using social listening. For example, product development teams can analyze posts or comments about your products, identify pain points and address any gaps. Similarly, your marketing team can benchmark all the mentions for a specific product and gauge demand in a new region.

In our increasingly digital world, if you need to improve your engagement rate, an influencer partnership program is the best and easiest way to reach your audience quickly. Influencers can be strong brand advocates. Enterprise social listening platforms offer the ability to monitor and identify tweets, bios and mentions across social media, enabling you to identify and partner with valuable influencers. Similarly, you can start building a robust social media influencer network and strategy by identifying the best bloggers and YouTubers in your social sphere.

A social media crisis stems from online activity that has the ability to tarnish a brand's image and reputation. From offensive posts and inappropriate content sharing to hateful content distribution, a social media crisis can blow up in no time. As a brand, it is crucial to minimize the impact of negative reviews or mentions on social media. Social listening tools can help you listen to conversations directed towards your brand in real time and notify you about potentially damaging messages for early crisis mitigation.

Before investing in a social listening tool or platform, it's important to define your goals and determine what you want to achieve through social listening. Here are some tips and best practices to help you get started:

Here are a few real-life examples of how social listening is implemented in enterprise social media. All of the brands below use social listening effectively.

Fitbit uses social listening for product development, such as their "Reminders to Move" feature. This feature reminds users to stand up and move if they have been sitting for long periods. At Fitbit, social listening is used to identify and understand customer issues by gathering information from customers experiencing a particular problem. The company also collects ideas from their communities, and the best ideas are shared with the product development teams.

Taco Bell uses social listening to improve customer service and their social media marketing efforts. By listening to social mentions in real time, Taco Bell has gained millions of loyal followers, increased the success rate of their engagement and created more conversations with their social media campaigns. Every campaign they put out on social media is based on research and input from various customer groups. Taco Bell even responds to customers' complaints in real time with the help of social media listening.

L'Oreal uses social listening to identify industry trends and understand what consumers want in their products. By implementing social listening, the brand can keep an eye on customer ratings and reviews, both good and bad. L'Oreal believes that the way consumers purchase their products has changed with time, and it's crucial to be a part of online conversations across different forums, channels and communities. This helps the brand improve its product strategy and offer products that match its customers' changing needs.

When researching and comparing social listening tools, it's vital to understand your business goals and map out the necessary features for each team. This might include knowing what data sets you want to dig into and which channels you want to monitor, or determining how many team members will operate the tool.

Here are some must-have features to look for in an enterprise social listening tool:

For brands to truly understand their customers, they need insight into online discussions, company mentions, product or service ratings and reviews. However, piecing together this disparate customer information from different point solutions can be tedious. Additionally, many social listening providers have a common issue of lengthy turnaround times for statistics, with some monitoring tools taking up to 24 hours to populate analytics dashboards with real-time conversations.

With Sprinklr, brands can monitor dozens of social media and messaging channels on one platform, providing a complete enterprise social listening experience in a short amount of time. Social media teams can extract data and gain insights into how trends have developed over time, enabling them to adjust their marketing plans to focus on actions that have historically produced the best results.

With Sprinklr Social Listening, your teams can listen proactively across 30+ modern channels, including social media, messaging, chat, review sites and more. These tools enable your teams to:

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