Consumers have to weigh many options any time they make a purchase. So it pays for your brand and products to stand out against the competition.

But what does make your offerings stand out? And how can you be “the only choice” against your competitors? This is where a competitive analysis for your products comes in. It’s the best way to understand how to outpace your competitors, and where you may be falling behind.

All of the information you need is at your fingertips—you just need the right tools to access it. We’ll walk you through how to do a competitive product analysis today to inspire your offerings and brand positioning for tomorrow.

• What is a competitive product analysis?
• How does a product competitive analysis help businesses?
• How do you analyze competitor products?
• What to look for during a competitor product analysis

What is a competitive product analysis?

A competitive product analysis is the process of researching and analyzing your competitors’ products to determine how prolific they are in the market, gaps they leave and what threats they pose to your products.

This process enables you to:

• Determine what features competitor products have
• What your target market likes and dislikes about competitor products
• What products your competitors are not offering that you can offer

This process can be done for any type of product, including physical products (toys, games, tools, appliances, etc.), digital products (digital tools like Sprout Social or applications), experiences (museums, bars or restaurants) and services (cleaning services or moving services).

Conducting a product-focused competitive analysis should be done when you’re creating or considering new offerings, but also to optimize and improve upon what you already offer.

How does a product competitive analysis help businesses?

It’s competitive out there. And the process of a product competitive analysis helps businesses gather competitive intelligence to stay ahead of the competition and differentiate themselves in the market.

Here are a few actionable ways a product analysis of your competitors’ offerings is integral to your business.

Establish your unique selling propositions (USPs)

Establishing your USPs is a crucial piece of setting your offer apart from competitors’.

Conducting a competitive analysis will help you determine what differentiates your products, which will help you set them apart in marketing materials and beyond.

This could be as simple as differentiating your product by price point or feature. For example, AllBirds and Nike both offer sneakers. But what differentiates AllBirds is their core focus on extra comfort and sustainability, which is a big part of their message and brand.

While Nike differentiates their shoes and products by focusing on sports, activewear and performance—like this video highlighting how their product performs in cold, winter conditions.

Increase market share by filling gaps and solving pain points

Gaps left by your competitors provide space for you to fill with your product offerings. A competitive product analysis can tell you where your competitors are lacking and opportunity for you to step in.

Similarly, analyzing conversations customers are having about your competitors can surface pain points they face thanks with their offerings.

Gain market intelligence

Understanding how people feel about your brand and products vs. your competitors also helps you determine the biggest threats to your business. It reveals if you’re falling behind the competition, and what people prefer about other brands. The truth may hurt, but it’s vital information that you can use to improve your business.

It’s also helpful when your competitors launch new products. Examine how people react to their new products or services. Where are the shortcomings? What do people love that you can use to inspire your product development? 

Add new features

Product analysis isn’t just about looking at what products and features your competitors do have—it’s also identifying what they lack.

Analyzing gaps left by your competitors’ products gives you a major advantage. It helps you identify where there are gaps to fill, and opportunities you can take advantage of by offering a new or updated product that solves pain points your competitors’ customers face.

Inform marketing campaigns

There’s much more of a through-line between product analysis and marketing than meets the eye.

Once you know where you have an advantage when it comes to products or product features, this is valuable information to highlight in marketing campaigns—whether you’re marketing the launch of a new product, updates to an old one or just creating new campaigns that highlight what sets you apart.

Learn from competitor mistakes

The digital space is a goldmine of product feedback—about you and your competitors. Just as you learn from negative feedback about your products or services, you can learn from negative feedback on your competitors’ too.

Negative feedback on your competitors’ social channels or reviews surfaces pain points your target audience finds with their products. And this presents opportunities for you to fix those pain points in your offerings to stay ahead.

Similarly, examining positive reviews of your products alongside the negative feedback against competitors can further inform what sets your products apart.

How do you analyze competitor products?

You can manually sift through individual competitor reviews and the comments section on their social media posts. But that’s an unrealistically time-consuming process.

An effective competitor analysis needs to balance out manual research with automated tools to help you remain agile. Here are a few competitor analysis tools and sources that will help you keep an eye on the competition frequently and efficiently.

Social media listening

To get an up-close look at what your target audience is saying about your competitors’ products (and yours), you need to be a fly on the digital wall—which social media listening enables you to do.

With social listening, you “listen” in the digital space to filter out mentions of your competitors’ products, brand name and keywords—even if your competitors, and you for that matter, aren’t tagged.

With Sprout, you can also use sentiment analysis to compare how people feel about your brand and products vs. your competitors’.

If you want to try social listening for product analysis, competitor analysis and deeper social media insights, reach out to us for a demo.

Schedule a Demo

Online reviews

Reviews written about your competitors are a valuable resource when it comes to competitive product analysis. You likely already have a system for managing online reviews for your business and product—add analyzing competitors’ review into the mix.

Dig into reviews, good and bad, about your competitors and their products—on their site, Google reviews, official review sites (TripAdvisor for experiences, Yelp for the food industry or G2 for tech products and software), Reddit and any other sources you can think of.

Digging into what people love, or dislike, about your competitors’ products and offerings can unearth opportunities and inspire new products or adjustments to existing ones.

Social media monitoring

Any social media pro knows that customer feedback and questions don’t just come in through reviews. They also show up in the social comments section every single day.

Use your social media monitoring tools to keep track of what people are saying about your products and your competitors’—it’s the perfect way to outpace them, and constantly be improving your offerings at the same time.

It’s best to formally track this type of feedback so you don’t have to dig through hundreds of comments to resurface feedback later. With a tool like Sprout’s Smart Inbox, you’re able to manage mentions of your brand—even when you’re not tagged—with keywords and incoming messages across all of your channels in one central hub.

And use Tags to keep track of product feedback by creating a special label like, “Product Feedback: Positive” and “Product Feedback: Negative” so you can easily surface these insights.

Try competitor products for yourself

This is one of the more hands-on methods. Trying a competitor’s products for yourself is one of the best ways to get an up-close understanding of their product—from functionality and areas of frustration you experience to design triumphs and shortcomings.

Pairing firsthand experience with feedback you see from customers is a powerful way to get a 360-degree assessment of the situation, and how yours might stack up against it.

Third-party research

Competitive research is certainly a large task, especially within industries with saturated markets. You can always employ third-party research to learn more about your competitors, their products and how people feel about them. For example, hiring an outside company to survey your target market. This is a great way to get in-depth, direct information about how your target market feels about your industry, competitors and what they love or hate in a product.

What to look for during a competitor product analysis

We’ve covered the “how” and “why” behind product competitive analysis methods. Now let’s get into what you actually want to track.

Think about some of the end goals we’ve mentioned for a competitive product analysis. For example, it helps you stay ahead of your competitors by identifying opportunities, finding gaps and weaknesses and unearthing differentiators for your products.

Here are some elements to look for as you conduct your analysis, and to inform competitive benchmarks.

1. Aesthetic or design of your products or services

This can refer to the physical or digital attributes of a product, or the experience of a more experiential-based product (think museums, theme parks, etc.)

How do the physical attributes or appearance of your competitors’ products or services stack up to yours? How do the two compare?

For example, let’s say you have a beauty brand. If you find that consumers love the packaging offered by your competitors’ products, it may be time for a packaging refresh.

Here are a few broad physical attributed to track and explore:

• What’s the packaging for your competitors’ products?
• What do consumers love, or hate, about the look of your competitors’ products?
• Are there certain colors or sizes your competitors don’t offer that you can?
• What are the physical attributes of your competitors’ products? How do they compare to yours?
• What effect does their design or choice of color have on the experience of using their product?

Pro tip: Social listening is a great way to surface keywords people often use to describe your competitors or their products and packaging. Sprout’s word cloud, for example, helps surface commonly-used keywords around these attributes to help you filter and prioritize feedback.

2. Pricing model

Sometimes the greatest differentiators aren’t so much about the products themselves, but rather their pricing.

How many times have consumers chosen your product, or your competitors’ products, because they were at a better price level or offered different price options?

During your competitive product analysis , consider these questions:

• How do your competitors’ prices compare to yours?
• For software or services, do they offer a free version?
• Do they offer flexible pricing, or pay-later plans?
• What do they claim their most popular pricing plans are?
• If they’re subscription-based, how often are people charged? What are the pricing tiers?

3. Utility

Look at the functionality of your competitors’ products, or try them out for yourself. This will help you understand how they outpace your offering, or how they fall behind.

Consider:

• What problems do your competitors’ products solve?
• What gaps do they leave?
• What customer pain points are your competitor’s products solving, or creating?

4. Product quality

A product is only as good as its quality. And your audience loyalty hinges on this, too.

A major way to pull ahead of the competition is by clearly offering a higher-quality product.

As you conduct your research, while you look through reviews or try your competition’s products for yourself, pay attention to:

• How easy is the product to use and learn? Is it intuitive?
• How high quality is it? Does it easily break?
• Is it durable?
• Does it scratch easily?
• For software, is it vulnerable to crashing or slow processing?

 5. Customer service

The quality of the customer service you provide has the power to set you apart from your competitors—or send you falling behind them.

It doesn’t matter how great a product is—if customers can’t get the help they need from a customer service team, the experience with the product and brand is soured.

During you competitive product analysis, evaluate the quality of customer service your competitors offer. Consider:

• Are there common customer complaints? What are the themes?
• What do people love about your competitors’ customer service?
• Are their customer care responses personalized? Or impersonal and sloppy?
• What is the tone of their customer service voice?
• How helpful are their agents? How often do they appear to miss messages?
• Is their engagement proactive? That is, do they engage with and celebrate positive comments, as well as questions or complaints?

Through this process, you’ll have a better idea of where they stand out against you, or where they fall behind.

Leverage social media and AI to conduct an in-depth competitive product analysis

Gone are the days where product analysis always required a lengthy process, customer interviews or focus groups.

Everything you need to know about your competitors’ products and yours is at your disposal—you just need to know how to mine it.

Leverage the billions of conversations across social media to gain a better understanding of how people feel about your competitors’ products. And use that information to inspire your own, and understand how to outpace other brands.

With the power of social media platforms and AI tools, unearthing these insights is automatic, immediate and a breeze. Try Sprout Social free for 30 days, or request a personalized demo of our social listening solution.

The post How to conduct a competitive product analysis, and why you should appeared first on Sprout Social.

But when it comes to social media, data collection is complex. Teams who struggle to share meaningful insights usually don’t a) have enough data, b) have a way to turn a massive volume of raw data into actionable business intelligence (BI) or c) understand how their efforts fit into the big picture.

Can you visualize a time when you received a social team report that only contained one-off metrics (like follower count and impressions) with no throughline to business goals? Or when a report included so many numbers it was impossible to decipher, leaving your head spinning as you tried to process all the metrics and what they mean?

Data-driven marketing is about more than asking every team to submit regular dashboards or spreadsheets with KPI updates. It’s about empowering your team to mine impactful performance and audience insights. This will require investing in training, the right tools and refining your data collection process. But by harnessing the wealth of social data available, you will tap into an insights goldmine for every part of your organization.

At Sprout, we believe in the power of social data to transform every part of an organization—whether that’s using insights to change customer care processes, revamp your hiring plan or create new product lines.

Alicia Johnston

Senior Director of Content and Campaigns, Sprout Social

In this article, we explain how you can find and use social data that enables you to outpace the competition, improve your content strategy, iterate on new product development and build more impactful, long-term campaigns. We also examine common data-driven social media marketing challenges and how you can overcome them.

What is data-driven marketing?

Data-driven marketing is when you inform your business strategy with marketing BI (examples: social content performance data, social listening insights, website analytics, email marketing metrics and more). The strategy can apply to functions within and outside of marketing, including customer care, product development and growth.

Social media intelligence is a critical input for building an effective data-driven marketing strategy. With it, you can predict future audience behavior, gain unfiltered insight into the success of your campaigns and product launches, drive revenue gains and make your team the linchpin for making key business decisions.

The advantages of data-driven marketing

According to The Sprout Social Index™, many marketers already connect the value of social to business goals. Over half of brands (60%) quantify the value of engagement on social in terms of revenue impact, 57% use it to track conversions and sales directly resulting from social efforts and 51% use it to optimize their product development or marketing strategy.

Likewise, The 2023 State of Social Report found that virtually all business leaders believe social media data and insights have a profound positive impact on top business priorities—including building brand reputation and loyalty, improving competitive positioning and gaining more customer knowledge.

Here are ways you can use social media to fuel your data-driven marketing strategy, with expert recommendations from Sprout leaders and other brands.

A clearer view of your audience

To build comprehensive buyer personas, you need to understand your audiences’ pain points and challenges. Your target audience is talking about your brand (or at least your industry) on social right now.  By tapping into social media listening tools, you can understand what rising trends they care about, products they love, why a competitor is performing well or poorly, why a campaign is resonating and how an audience is responding to a conference or event.

Listening also tracks touchpoints on your customers’ digital customer journey, so you can better understand how consumers interact with you online. For example, many social teams underestimate how much of the social chatter surrounding their brand is pre-purchase (acquisition) and post-purchase (retention).

One company guessed their acquisition and retention conversations made up 0-5% of their social buzz. However, when their agency started using tags to categorize their social activity, they found acquisition alone made up at least 5%—but sometimes 70% in one month. By investigating this data, your team can develop creative ways to remove roadblocks and incentivize purchases, and align social with your sales funnel.

More targeted, relevant content

Trend cycles have never moved faster, making it difficult to tell what will resonate with audiences and what will flop. For example, Team Sprout uses our AI-powered Listening solution to vet topics before we develop content—both for one-off posts and long-term campaigns.

According to Johnston, “Social listening data helps us validate whether trends we’re seeing on our feeds and from customers are resonating with a wider audience, and uncover additional conversation themes and subtopics to dig into. This means we can create more relevant, high-performing content. It helps us respond promptly to trends.”

Social insights also help us create more compelling evergreen content. From our social profiles to our blog, we enrich our content with Listening data that supports our thought leadership, empowers our sales team and helps us relate to our audience more effectively.

To pressure test our insights, we use the Post Performance Report to analyze content down to the individual post level. The report provides a unified view of post performance across networks, so we can see which messages performed the best and on which platforms. This analysis reinforces us to test our strategy and pivot effectively if needed. Listening and analytics data work in tandem to help us iterate on our content.

Better competitive intelligence

Listening also makes it easy for Sprout to access all conversations about/around our brand and the social media industry as a whole. We use listening data to answer questions like:

• How does our brand image compare to our competitors?
• What are our competitors’ sentiment trends?
• How much social volume does our PR efforts and thought leadership content generate? What about our competitors?

Our Competitive Analysis Topic Tempate aggregates and presents this data so we can see how our engagements, sentiment and overall volume compare. With that intel, we orient our strategy to fill industry white space and find our unique footing in the market.

Proactive crisis management

A single negative customer experience can turn into a full-blown crisis if not addressed appropriately. Social listening data enables our social team to keep a constant pulse on our brand health and sentiment. We track data trends related to our share of voice, conversation volume and positive sentiment ratio. This allows us to swiftly respond to customer care inquiries and manage would-be crises with grace.

Refined product development

At Sprout, we’re always making updates to our platform based on customer feedback. For example, we expedited the launch of Dark Mode after the social team noticed a lot of social conversations and inbound questions about it in our comments and messages. They were able to use Listening and qualitative data to inform the need for the new product feature.

Remember: When people talk about your brand, your product or their pain points, they usually don’t tag you. Listening helps us stay vigilant and tuned into all the conversations that can help us improve our offerings.

More efficient spending

By taking a data-driven approach to social media strategy development, brands are able to invest where it counts—both in their organic and paid initiatives. As many marketing leaders are expected to do more with less budget, the pressure is on to deliver results.

With social media data, you can demonstrate how key metrics like brand awareness, engagements and traffic correlated with an increase in sales. For example, when Figo Pet Insurance began investing in their social video strategy, they used real-time data to refine their approach and determine which videos to amplify with paid budget. Their efforts resulted in audience growth, multiple viral videos and revenue-driving ads.

The challenges of data-driven marketing

Many brands don’t have a clear roadmap to developing a data-driven approach to social media—or marketing in general. If your team is still struggling to translate metrics to meaningful decisions and strategic plans, here are some of the things that could be holding you back.

Collecting data

Marketing data collection has a reputation for not providing CEOs and other leaders with enough concrete information that matters to overall business goals (like revenue and customer acquisition). With Google finally phasing out of cookies and third-party data, marketing teams are under even greater pressure to find new ways of capturing critical insights. Manually collecting this data is time-consuming, tedious and ineffective, restricting teams’ ability to measure their impact.

Fragmented tech stacks

When data is siloed across multiple systems, this leads to data quality and integrity issues. Having team members switch between many different platforms for functions like social media management, customer care, content performance and sales data is not only inefficient, it also disrupts the customer journey and makes it difficult to have a cross-channel view of your audience.

Analysis

If the tools you use for data collection and analysis are cumbersome or complex, you might become over-reliant on an analytics team or person to pull relevant intel. When data isn’t accessible across teams, the result is opportunity cost. What creative work could your teams do if they had more time back? How could teams across the company use that data to iterate on customer outreach, product development, customer care and more?

5 tips to develop a more data-driven marketing organization

Here are five actionable ways you can overcome those challenges and build a data-driven marketing organization that fully harnesses the potential of social insights.

Identify and clarify the data you want to track

The first step toward creating a data-driven culture is to define which metrics matter to you, your department and the rest of the organization. While these metrics will vary company to company, revisit your business’ goals, learn to speak the language of your CFO, and find the balance between brand and performance marketing to effectively outline them. Share the metrics you’re measuring with your team and across leadership.

Invest in team development

Once you know which metrics matter most, invest in training and resources to ensure everyone across your team is data literate, understands how to do basic analysis and prioritizes data collection with the highest impact. According to The State of the Social Media Industry report, 93% of brands say that social data is expected to become a major source of business intelligence for their company in the next three years. All teams—but especially social teams—need to be ready to analyze and contextualize data to extract meaningful insights. 

Look for opportunities to centralize data in your tech stack

Nix point solutions in favor of platforms that integrate with your most critical systems, like your CRM, BI tools, marketing automation platforms and social media management solution. Find ways you can consolidate data, making it easier to measure key performance results and improve the customer experience.

For example, with Sprout’s Tableau integration, you can visualize data from multiple marketing channels in one place, giving you a more complete view of your customers and how they interact with your brand across the buyer’s journey.

Automate analysis wherever you can

To overcome the time-consuming nature of data analysis, automate wherever you can. Use AI to surface social data across your entire organization faster and make it easier for your teams to identify trends or potential crises before they crest. This is a chance to wipe the slate clean and radically rewire data collection processes or tasks that aren’t serving your employees.

Queries by AI Assist uses Sprout Social’s integration with OpenAI to generate keyword suggestions for Listening queries, expediting your social listening efforts. This helps your team fine tune Listening results, and deliver more insightful outputs—while making time for more creative work.

Establish reporting rituals

Create a regular cadence and format for sharing data across marketing, with other departments and with leadership. Data is only valuable when it’s consumed.

By using a social media management platform like Sprout, your team can view and share presentation-ready reports in our analytics suite. Reports like the Paid vs. Organic report visualize performance on individual platforms and reveal ways to improve future strategy and tactics.

Use social media insights to become a data-driven marketing leader

When you have a data-driven strategy, you’ll never have to ask your team to “show you the data” again. Data-driven marketing is the key to future-proofing your business and helping it grow.

Social media data is the missing link to understanding your audience and competitors, refining your content strategy and product development, and making better investments. But first you need powerful tools to capture it.

The right social media management platform drives revenue, boosts team efficiency and enables a data-driven focus that helps you outperform the competition. Use our social media management buyer’s guide to choose the right platform for maximum impact.

The post Data-driven marketing: What it is and strategies for using it appeared first on Sprout Social.

Social listening serves as a powerful competitive analysis tool, extracting targeted brand insights from widespread online conversations across social networks. You get real-time insights into consumer behavior, emerging trends and competitors’ activities, which you can use to promptly pivot strategies and stay ahead of the game.

Let’s dive deeper into how social listening gives you an edge when used for market research.

The competitive advantage of using social listening for marketing research

Social listening empowers you with real-world insights extracted from raw, unfiltered brand-related online chatter for a birds’ eye-view of the competitive landscape. These insights help you refine marketing strategies to optimize your return on investment (ROI). They also help you uncover whitespace opportunities to innovate and expand on product, pricing and geographic expansion strategies.

Competitive research also gives you insight into macro consumer trends such as the influence of elevated consumer prices on overall spending habits and brand preferences. Or, how to better target Gen Z, a demographic known for its high purchasing power and unique consumer behavior.

Competitive intelligence is especially critical in social media marketing because of the nature of social. As new platforms, features and trends emerge, social teams must keep competitive market research on their radar to prep for 2024.

Competitive listening gives social teams swift, comprehensive insights simultaneously from across social platforms, review sites and customer forums—at a fraction of the cost and time traditional research methods take. You’re able to overcome flux in platform algorithms and face continuously evolving consumer behavior. You also understand how your competitors are navigating these shifts and adapting their strategies to meet them.

Analyze sentiment in thousands of brand conversations to address customer needs more productively and ensure the competition doesn’t affect your market share.

Pairing cross-departmental knowledge with social listening for deeper insights

Social listening data gives you a deep understanding of your business environment not just for marketing but also other key areas such as product enhancement, finding growth opportunities and informing customer care.

Per The State of Social Media Report, 95% of business executives agree companies must rely more heavily on social media data to inform business decisions outside of marketing.

There is a reason behind this. As the latest Sprout Social Index ™ revealed, 68% of customers follow brands on social to stay informed about new products or services. They ask questions, talk to each other and discuss product and service alternatives. This is a wealth of customer-driven information waiting to be harnessed.

That’s why pairing cross-departmental knowledge with social listening insights is a win-win.

Social competitor analysis tools enable you to combine internal knowledge and social media intelligence to bridge disparities between how you think your audience perceives your brand and their actual sentiment. These insights, paired with data from your own CRM, product research and sales data, give you an even clearer picture of how to grow market share.

Building materials pioneer, James Hardie®, uses social listening for competitive research to do just this. They engage in audience and trend analysis, research product sentiment, identify industry influencers and conduct competitor comparisons to build holistic brand strategies beyond marketing.

“Not only is it good from a brand health and marketing angle, it’s also important information we can pass on to our sales teams and product teams. We can find trends and common themes that come up in conversations. We can identify not only our own brand advocates but brand advocates for our competition,” says Bridget Kulla, Senior Digital Marketing Manager at James Hardie.

Here’s a quick look at how you can combine insights from various departments with social listening.

Identify patterns and correlations

Look for patterns and overlaps between your internal knowledge and what social listening data reveals. This exercise will help you identify competitors that weren’t even on your radar before, enabling a more in-depth understanding of your market.

Integrate social listening workflows

Work with department leaders across the organization to educate all team members on the power of what social listening can do and where social insights can plug into their workflows.

Track listening data by topics

Marketing, sales and product teams each focus on different aspects of your brand experience. By narrowing your social media listening focus on data that is truly relevant to your goals, you can get insights from thousands of social conversations without getting overwhelmed.

Sprout’s Listening solution enables this kind of detailed competitive research analysis to facilitate cross-departmental collaboration. Our competitive listening capabilities help you identify keywords and hashtags in competitor-related conversations, revealing common topics in your industry.

Users can create Groups to analyze multiple competitors in one view and create separate Competitive Analysis Listening Templates to analyze data by product names. This is especially useful for large brands with multiple product lines.

Our integrated, AI-driven Query Builder provides customization options for your listening allowing you to include or exclude keywords. Here’s a quick video of the tool in action cutting through the noise in social listening.

How to champion your social listening findings across your organization

A key part of social media competitive analysis is ensuring you can build a collective narrative from all your research. This is necessary to champion your social listening research as a resource for decision-making to drive your business forward.

To get cross-organizational buy-in for listening insights, you also need to break down data silos and make sure your findings are digestible and actionable, especially for exec audiences.

Sprout Listening’s competitive analysis templates and reports with pre-designed topic templates help you achieve this. These templates give your teams access to unfiltered data from millions of social conversions to build winning brand strategies. And, they consolidate all your competitive research data into a unified source to facilitate swift collaboration across departments.

The template provides a comprehensive side-by-side comparison of key metrics, including total engagement, potential impressions, brand sentiment and share of voice. This allows for a straightforward analysis of your brand’s performance in comparison to competitors. These metrics also offer an in-depth understanding of which brand is leading the conversation and how your target audience perceives you versus the competition.

Use the templates to:

Find insights by network

Gain valuable insights into your content performance on different platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, and X (formerly known as Twitter) through network-specific performance and engagement reports. These reports give you a comparative view of which networks your competitors are heavily investing in, which in turn can inform your platform strategy or highlight a content gap you can fill for your audience.

Also use Sprout’s Custom Reports to share relevant insights across departments. These reports help your teams combine cross-network competitor engagement and listening data for a holistic view.

Spot top industry and competitor trends

Discover prominent trends and topics within your industry and extract insights on a number of factors such as competitors, content types, message styles and audience sentiment. Utilize keyword filters to refine your search and choose a date range to examine both long-term and short-term competitive trends.

For example, listening data can reveal an upward trend in consumer demand for products that are ethically sourced and environmentally friendly, which can influence your overall brand strategy and differentiate you from the crowd.

Assess detailed content performance and engagement data across Facebook, X and Instagram based on the uniqueness of each social network. For instance, content that excels on Instagram may not perform as well on Facebook due to differences in format and user behavior.

Identify areas of growth

Analyze feedback about your product and service to proactively address customer concerns and identify areas for improvement and growth. Also analyze competitor feedback and use those findings to refine your own ad messaging and develop more targeted selling propositions. This approach enables you to differentiate your brand while staying vigilant on competitor performance.

Integrate findings across your tech stack

Further strengthen the value of your competitive analysis by integrating your competitive research across your company’s tech stack. With Sprout’s Tableau Business Intelligence (BI) Connector, you can aggregate insights from multiple systems into rich data visualizations of key metrics throughout your customer journey. Track social engagements, average response rates for social customer care initiatives and your competitive share of voice.

You can also customize visuals and gain an immersive view by mapping social engagements and conversion rates to sales data.

Put your competitive marketing research to use for a better 2024

Use social listening to conduct a thorough SWOT (strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, threats) analysis for yourself and your key competitors. This approach to competitive market research will provide you with actionable insights to navigate successfully through 2024 and beyond.

From analyzing your competitors’ pricing strategies and value props to assessing gaps in your content strategy, use Sprout’s listening templates and reports to identify opportunities and differentiate your brand from competitors.

Request a demo to deep dive into insights that matter.

The post Why competitive research will become more important for social teams in 2024 appeared first on Sprout Social.

However, there still needs to be a human element to your Instagram strategy. Instagram automation can alleviate some of the repetitive tasks while allowing your social mean more time to develop creative campaigns. To help you find the right balance, we’ve put together a guide discussing what Instagram automation is, what can be automated and several tools to help you get started.

Let’s dig in.

What is Instagram automation?

Instagram automation refers to the use of third-party software to manage your account, carry out tasks and/or interact with users without a human present.

Simply put, Instagram automation tools can be put into two buckets:

1. Services that effectively “take control” of your front-facing interactions with users such as likes and comments
2. Tools that automate Instagram behind the scenes, taking care of tasks such as publishing, reporting and analytics

But does Instagram automation make your business look lazy? We say no—but only if you do it right. As with any other tool or strategy, there are pros and cons to weigh in how your team will implement automation.

Here are some pros and cons to help you decide if you want to start automating certain tasks on Instagram.

Pros:

• Save time on smaller, tedious tasks. Growing an Instagram presence organically definitely requires a combination of time and strategizing. Instagram automation tools can pick up some of the slack trimming, down time spent on tedious tasks.
• Grow your follower count faster. Automation undoubtedly helps you boost your follower count. Simply spending time on the platform and interacting with accounts in any way, shape or form will set you up for more engagement by default.
• Uncover important insights about your audience. There’s no doubt that automation tools help you learn more about your target audience. From breaking down what hashtags people use to suggesting accounts to follow, bots encourage you to take a deeper dive into your audience’s preferences.

Cons:

• Instagram isn’t a fan of automation “hacks.” Instagram has a history of taking action against  tools that they consider spammy. The platform wants its users to engage authentically and organically, so Instagram put together limits and penalties for tactics they see as potentially gaming their algorithm. More on this in the next section.
• Poor automation looks spammy. People can spot a bot at a glance. Automating likes and comments is a recipe for a potential social media crisis. Brand accounts should emphasize human interactions and avoid anything that looks spammy.
• Potentially miss out on important customer interactions. The more you automate on Instagram, the fewer opportunities you have to interact with followers and customers. You can’t provide personalized service with purely automated interactions. Instead, only automate aspects of your Instagram account that encourage you to spend more time with your followers.

Is Instagram automation allowed?

As we’ve discussed, there are pros and cons, but those are subjective. Let’s talk about legalities—or at least, what abides by Instagram’s Community Guidelines—so your account doesn’t get penalized.

The short answer is yes, Instagram automation is allowed. The long answer is that certain types of automation cheapen the experience and make your business look bad online. And some types of automation can even get your account banned.

First, let’s talk about the good kinds of automation—the kinds of automation that can assist your social team and improve your strategy.

What can be automated on Instagram?

If you’re interested in using automation to your advantage, here are a few tasks on Instagram that you can get some robot help with.

• Likes: Set up a bot with a group of hashtags so the bot can like posts you say are relevant to your brand.
• Comments: Similarly, a bot can also leave social media comments—on your posts and others. Sprout Social’s Saved Replies and Asset Library are a perfect example of this.
• Follows and unfollows: Follow and unfollow relevant and irrelevant accounts, respectively. This can help you grow your own follower count.
• Direct messages: Send and respond to DMs with the help of a bot. You can even set bots up to send messages to people who comment on your posts with a trigger word.
• Scheduling and publishing: Scheduling Instagram posts is a form of automation—an essential form that every social media team needs.
• Reporting: Automation tools can also help you monitor your Instagram analytics with insights and reports showcasing your performance.

Things you need to be wary of are engaging too much too quickly—faster than a human typically could—or Instagram could put a limit on your account. Buying likes and followers is also frowned upon. And you’ll want to avoid working with bots and tools that don’t have access to Instagram’s API as they’re not considered legitimate Instagram partners.

9 Instagram automation tools to streamline your work

Want to get started with basic—and allowed—Instagram automation? These nine tools can help give you a head start.

1. Sprout Social

Sprout Social is an all-in-one social media management tool that helps with a number of automation aspects and making Instagram management as seamless as possible for your team. Sprout can assist with a number of tasks, like publishing, response management, productivity tools and analytics. Through automation and other Sprout features, your team can effectively plan, post and manage your Instagram campaigns.

Instagram automations available:

• Scheduling and publishing
• Auto-responders and suggested replies in DMs
• Hashtag discovery
• Sourcing UGC

2. SocialPilot

SocialPilot is an Instagram automation and analytics tool that helps brands streamline their Instagram strategies. Access features that help you publish content, engage with your audience, view analytics and more. This software allows you to schedule up to 500 posts at once, whether on Instagram or another platform. And the option to save evergreen content and responses for frequent reuse helps social teams respond faster.

Instagram automations available:

• Scheduling and publishing
• AI caption generation
• Reporting
• Watermarking

3. Kicksta

Kicksta is an AI-based tool dedicated to helping Instagram users grow their followers. Its AI tool focuses on leaving authentic comments and engagement on other Instagram accounts in order to help you grow your following—without buying followers. You provide the guidelines for who to engage with based on a list of competitors, brands and influencers with similar audiences, then Kicksta does the hard work.

Instagram automations available:

• Comments
• Likes

4. Nitreo

Nitreo is another Instagram automation tool focused on helping brands get more followers on Instagram. Nitreo’s tool also engages with real accounts, helping you to keep up Instagram engagement and remain an authentic online presence without ending up with thousands of bot (or bought) followers.

Instagram automations available:

• Comments
• Likes
• Story views
• Profile visits

5. Tailwind

Tailwind is an Instagram automation tool that focuses more on scheduling and publishing—but takes a unique approach. This tool is only available for Instagram and Pinterest, ensuring its services are catered to specific needs in the market.

Instagram automations available:

• Post idea generation
• Copy generation
• Graphic and design generation
• Hashtag discovery
• Publishing and scheduling

6. NapoleonCat

NapoleonCat is a social media management tool focused on helping brands engage with and support their online customers. Get this tool’s help with moderating and responding to comments and messages, scheduling out your content in advance and generating useful analytics reports.

Instagram automations available:

• Scheduling and publishing
• Comment moderation
• Auto-responses for both comments and DMs
• Reporting

7. Inflact

Inflact provides an entire suite of tools that can be used for Instagram automation. From interacting with other accounts to publishing content, Inflact offers an intuitive dashboard for accessing all of its useful features.

Instagram automations available:

• Send bulk DMs
• Follow and unfollow
• Likes
• Hashtag discovery
• Scheduling and publishing

8. Iconosquare

Iconosquare is another option for social media managers looking for a range of features dedicated to Instagram automation. Use this tool for scheduling, monitoring analytics, social listening and more.

Instagram automations available:

• Scheduling and publishing
• Reporting
• Unread comment/mention discovery

9. OnlySocial

OnlySocial is another useful option for Instagram automation and management. One of its top features in regards to automations is the ability to create Instagram messenger chatbots so that followers can message you and easily get helped by a customer service or sales chatbot.

Instagram automations available:

• Scheduling and publishing
• RSS feed auto-publishing
• Instagram messaging chatbot
• Reporting

Are you using Instagram automation the right way?

There’s plenty to automate on Instagram, granted you let a human take the reins.

If you’re looking to speed up your Instagram growth via automation, your head is in the right place. After all, marketers should always look to add tools to their toolbox in order to engage with more customers.

To learn more about how Sprout Social can help with your Instagram automation journey, request a free demo.

The post Instagram automation: Strategy and tools to do it right appeared first on Sprout Social.

Social media has democratized access to medical information and empowered patients to take charge of their health. But it also has negative consequences. Like increasing the spread of misinformation and excluding healthcare workers from vital conversations with their patients. It has pushed some hospital systems, professional societies and pharmaceutical companies into an unflattering limelight, as patient and provider criticisms go viral. Risks like this have caused healthcare organizations to recoil, and grow cautious of being present on social channels.

The reality is that the future of the healthcare industry will be a hybrid of online and offline experiences. People will use social media networks to look up health information, find care providers, search for employment and receive updates from their healthcare team and hospital systems. They expect you to show up on social—and social data can provide value for your company, too.

By using social listening tools, you can keep an eye on trending conversations in your community, stay ahead of crises and receive real-time patient feedback that helps you improve your care. Keep reading for examples of social listening for healthcare in action.

The benefits of social listening in healthcare

The sheer volume of social content published hourly makes it tough for healthcare companies to find their patients, providers and community members. Social listening enables you to cut through the noise, hone in on relevant conversations and share valuable timely insights with your leadership team.

Here are specific ways teams can use listening to monitor and analyze audience conversations in an efficient, centralized manner, featuring advice from Sprout Social experts.

Proactive crisis management

The best things a social team can do when it comes to responding to an impending crisis are: already have a crisis plan in place and catch minor crises before they spiral out of control. According to Jill Florence, Director of Enterprise Sales at Sprout Social, “Unfortunately, PR crises are common for healthcare systems and other healthcare organizations. Many have gone through a challenging event themselves, or have seen it happen to other companies and they’re afraid of it happening to them. Whether it’s a patient who had a negative experience, a violent threat or mishandling patient data, leaders want to know about it in real-time.”

Of course, crises can be external, too. Katherine Van Allen, a Senior Solutions Engineer at Sprout, adds, “Healthcare organizations can also use listening to pay attention to government decisions, relevant current events and specific bills and or lobbying conversations that will impact care units beyond the marketing team.”

By including Sprout Social tools like Listening Spike Alerts in your crisis plan, you will be alerted to shifts in conversations around topics like your hospitals, facilities or supply chain, plus trending news. These alerts will help your team stay on top of current events, and be the first to know if a crisis is about to unfold. As Florence explains, “You don’t want to be in a situation where the CEO is the one informing you about a situation, and you’re just reacting. Getting listening alerts right away is critical to proactively managing crises, and leading the charge at your organization.”

Real-time patient and clinician feedback

While receiving feedback from patients and clinicians on social might seem daunting, it’s the best way to source unfiltered intel. By intercepting this feedback, the social team accesses voice of customer knowledge that can help improve multiple aspects of your organization.

With social listening insights on hand, it’s possible to understand the needs, opinions and feelings of patients, physicians and community members. And understanding them translates to better content, care, and recruitment and retention strategies. As Van Allen puts it, “The [healthcare organizations] who use social listening make more informed decisions about their content strategy.”

By making brand health a part of your listening strategy, you can consistently monitor audience sentiment on social. A platform like Sprout enables you to visualize overall sentiment trends and zero-in on key audience pain points. With this presentation-ready business intelligence, you’re empowered to share audience feedback—like how patients feel about your current wait times and the care they receive, to how physicians would describe your culture—with the rest of your organization.

“Comparative” intelligence

In the healthcare industry, it’s common to consider other healthcare systems and companies “comparators” rather than competitors. While you might not consider other organizations your direct competition, you can still use them as a barometer to measure your performance—from patient care and satisfaction to talent recruitment and culture.

Van Allen describes, “Use listening to understand your share of voice and how people are talking about comparators. Ask yourself: What kinds of specialties, hiring conversations and patient feedback are they getting? How does that compare to us?”

This is especially helpful amid an industry-wide staffing shortage and quickly evolving patient expectations. “The hiring landscape is so competitive that customers need to understand why other companies are being chosen over them,” says Florence. Social listening delivers key learnings that can help you reach (and exceed) care benchmarks on social and beyond, and rethink how your company approaches hiring and workplace culture overall.

Sprout’s Competitive Analysis report aggregates social data from your comparators, including impressions, engagements, sentiment and overall share of voice. You can dig deeper into specific audience feedback in the Conversation and Messages tabs.

5 examples of social listening for healthcare in action

We researched examples of ways real healthcare companies use social listening to increase patient satisfaction and engagement, while balancing growing needs around hiring and patient care standards. Here’s what we found:

1. Guide expansion

As hospital systems and other healthcare organizations expand, real-time audience feedback gleaned from social listening empowers marketing teams to provide a strategic vision.

Florence cites a specific example of a hospital system she worked with that used customer feedback from social listening to guide expansion. “They were completely maxed out. They didn’t have large enough facilities or enough clinicians to accommodate their community, and they felt the backlash on social. Customers complained about long wait times, poor physician care and overall bad experiences. As their company increased capacity, the social team was on the front lines. They managed customer pain points and kept decision makers abreast, while using that feedback to influence expansion in a way that maintained positive brand reputation long-term.”

2. Provide audiences with relevant content

Social listening insights give you a window into issues that matter to your patients, community members and physicians, and enable you to craft an audience-centric content strategy.

Van Allen describes how organizations can use listening to adapt their messaging to meet the needs of their audience. “We see healthcare organizations use social listening to research trending conversations and industry topics, and use that intel to inform their content strategy. For example, a hospital system could create a Listening topic about going “back to school” and surface that parents within their community want more tips to prepare for cold, flu and RSV season.”

3. Route audience intel to the right department

At some healthcare organizations, multiple social marketing teams work together—each representing a different department (e.g., cardiology, dermatology, oncology, etc.). Using a robust and intuitive platform like Sprout makes it possible for these teams to share social listening insights with one another, and facilitate stronger communication and cross-team collaboration.

Florence adds, “Using Sprout’s custom Listening reports lets healthcare marketers generate and share insights with other functions.” By creating department-specific Listening topics, social marketers at healthcare organizations—like hospital systems—can find the specific insights they need to reach their unique goals, like increasing cardiology patient satisfaction. Sprout’s centralized platform houses all of this data in one place, making it possible for marketing teams to work in harmony.

4. Track awareness campaigns

Healthcare organizations can use social listening to gauge how effective promotional campaigns for emerging research and timely initiatives are.

For example, a medical society specializing in cardiology ran a major awareness campaign centered around American Heart Month. To measure the performance and impact of their work, they created a listening query around their organization name and the branded campaign hashtag. By analyzing this Listening data, they were able to identify key strengths and weaknesses of the campaign, resulting in valuable strategy refinements for upcoming initiatives.

You can also use listening data to find advocates who were vocal during a past campaign, and tap them for future partnerships.

5. Increase share of voice

Listening is a valuable tool for healthcare organizations who want to improve their credibility and rise up to the level of other comparators.

In one instance, a children’s hospital looking to raise its national ranking through strategic media opportunities created a competitive listening topic to track its share of voice against higher-ranking hospitals. While analyzing the Listening data, they identified opportunities for submission-based awards and event sponsorships that might help bolster their reputation. They also established new competitive benchmarks for engagements and impressions.

In healthcare, you hope that people never need certain services (especially emergency/urgent care). But you do want to be top of mind, in the moment, when they do.

Social listening shows your audience you care

Your audience expects healthcare brands like yours to be present on social media. Despite its reputational and compliance risks, social offers a wide variety of insights that enable you to manage crises effectively, gather real-time patient and provider feedback, and stay on par with your comparators.

Finding value in social as a healthcare organization requires tools that capture actionable insights and mine value from social to drive exceptional patient and provider experiences.

Want to start turning social data into elevated patient care? Request a demo of Sprout Social’s Listening solution today.

The post The power of social listening for healthcare organizations appeared first on Sprout Social.

• 60% of customers will switch to a competitor after a negative experience.
• 73% of customers want companies to recognize their unique needs and expectations.
• 52% of customers expect an answer within an hour of posting on a brand’s digital page.

As a business, you need to figure out how to deliver great customer experiences while keeping up with these changing demands.

Part of that equation is understanding how customers think and feel about your brand. That’s what sentiment analysis is all about.

In this post, you’ll learn what customer sentiment analysis is, why it matters and how to do it right. We’ve also included helpful tips and tools to get you started on the right foot.

Table of Contents

• What is customer sentiment analysis?
• Why do you need to analyze customer sentiment?
• How to measure customer sentiment
• Best tools for customer sentiment analysis
• How to improve customer sentiment

What is customer sentiment analysis?

Customer sentiment analysis is a facet of AI marketing that involves understanding how customers think and feel about your products, services or business.

When a customer leaves a review, comments on your posts or shares a photo with your product, they’re expressing an emotion—such as joy, frustration or disappointment.

As a brand, your job is to decipher that emotion, paint an accurate picture of the customer experience and then use that insight to improve future experiences.

Why do you need to analyze customer sentiment?

Sentiment analysis is an integral part of delivering an exceptional AI customer experience. It helps you understand the nuances of emotion that drive satisfaction, loyalty and advocacy.

Here are five ways analyzing customer sentiment can help your business:

Monitor overall customer satisfaction

Happy customers leave good reviews. Unhappy customers leave bad reviews.

Sounds easy, right? But it’s not that simple. Sometimes, you need to read between the lines.

For example, if your app’s review section is quiet after a new update, sentiment analysis might reveal users are unimpressed, not overjoyed.

By capturing the emotional undertones in customer feedback and conversations, businesses can gauge satisfaction levels with greater accuracy.

Improve customer experience

Sentiment analysis offers actionable insights that can help you craft experiences tailored to the emotional needs of your customers.

For example, you might identify that customers find your landing page confusing. Writing clearer copy and fixing the design can help you improve user experience on your website and generate more sign ups for your business.

Understanding customer sentiment also lets you create targeted campaigns around topics customers feel strongly about and respond to feedback more empathetically, which improves their overall experience with your brand.

Gain real-time consumer insights

Sentiment analysis can help you capture instant feedback during product launches and campaigns. This allows you to react promptly, preventing issues from snowballing.

For example, let’s say a video game company drops a new game and monitors social media and gaming forums for player reactions. Within hours, they detect a pattern of complaints about a difficult level, which is causing players to lose interest.

Acting on these real-time insights, the company releases a patch to adjust the difficulty settings and posts tips for navigating the challenging sections. By doing so, they prevent early negative reviews from damaging the game’s reputation.

Build brand loyalty

Understanding what makes your customers tick helps you turn moderately satisfied buyers into loyal advocates of your business. Here’s how.

By identifying emotional triggers, you can create targeted campaigns around topics they feel strongly about, respond more effectively to feedback and keep delighting customers at every step of the journey.

Not only will customers have a great experience with your brand, they’ll appreciate you going the extra mile to exceed their expectations and bring them joy. As a result, you’ll reduce churn and keep them coming back for more.

Identify product and service gaps

Monitoring customer sentiment can highlight areas of your product or service that may need improvement or innovation.

For example, you might notice complaints on social media about the poor battery life of your tech product. You could roll out an update to fix the issue and potentially avert a drop in sales. Better yet, you could focus on improving the battery of your future products.

How to measure customer sentiment

You know sentiment analysis is important, but how do you actually do it? How do you measure the general emotion surrounding your brand?

It might sound complicated, but it’s really not. You just need to gather the right data and organize it in a way that makes it easier to interpret and act upon.

Which factors contribute to customer sentiment?

Before we get to the steps, let’s find out what type of data you need to measure customer sentiment about your brand. Here are some factors that affect sentiment:

• Customer reviews: Online reviews of your company, products and services contain various emotions expressed via text and/or visuals. They can be positive, negative or neutral, and these nuances are often picked up by AI sentiment analysis tools. Managing these reviews with productive solutions can help your brand improve trust among customers and lower the negative impact of online criticism.

• Brand reputation: On social media, every like, comment or post shapes your brand’s public perception. A viral post can make you popular, while a critical tweet can spark backlash. It’s an up-to-date snapshot of how much people like or dislike your brand.
• News: Whether it’s an award, a product recall or a CEO’s statement, news can significantly impact how customers perceive a brand.
• Marketing initiatives: When your campaigns resonate, they lift positive sentiment; when they miss the mark, they can confuse or even alienate your audience.
• Cognitive dissonance: When customers’ experiences don’t align with their expectations, it creates discomfort known as cognitive dissonance. This psychological phenomenon can lead to negative sentiment if not addressed.
• Competitive landscape: Customers always compare, and so your standing in the market—your prices, quality, innovation—all contribute to how they feel about your brand in the context of your competition.

These drivers can all influence how customers feel about a brand, and it’s important to track them all in order to get a complete picture of customer sentiment.

3 steps to analyze customer sentiment

Now you know what to look for. But how do you go about analyzing this data? Follow the three steps below for a systematic and organized approach to conducting sentiment analysis:

Step 1: Gather the data

First, you need raw material to work with—that means collecting brand-related information from every corner where your customers might express their thoughts.

This could range from online reviews and social media posts to customer support tickets and survey responses. Gathering diverse data sources gives you a well-rounded view of customer sentiment, not just isolated snapshots.

Step 2: Process the data

Next, you’ll need to sift through the data and prepare it for analysis.

This is where sentiment analysis tools can help. AI-powered algorithms can sort positive from negative, and suss out those tricky neutral comments.

This step involves decoding the tone and intent behind words, which requires sophisticated technology, like natural language processing (NLP), to capture subtleties and context.

Step 3: Visualize the data

Finally, you’ve got to make sense of all this information. Data visualization tools can transform your findings into charts, graphs and heat maps that highlight sentiment trends.

This step is crucial because it translates complex data into a format that’s easy for teams to understand and use, turning insights into action points for improving customer experience.

Best tools for customer sentiment analysis

Measuring customer sentiment can be tricky as it’s not exactly a quantifiable metric.

Thankfully, there are some powerful sentiment analysis tools out there to help you navigate the complexities in gauging customer experience and extracting actionable insights.

Here are three sentiment analysis tools you can use:

Sprout Social

Sprout Social is an all-in-one social media management platform that offers sentiment analysis as part of its AI-powered social listening capabilities.

Refine your strategy by exploring customers’ feelings, thoughts and opinions on specific topics, competitors, products and more. Sprout gives you a visual score summarizing the average sentiment around your brand as well as a graph tracking sentiment trends over time.

Lexalytics

Lexalytics is a text analytics platform that helps you analyze sentiment by examining customer feedback across multiple channels. It evaluates the tone and emotion in the text to determine the sentiment behind customer opinions.

MeaningCloud

MeaningCloud offers sentiment analysis by processing multilingual content from various channels. It breaks down feedback into sentiments associated with specific topics or attributes of your products and services.

How to improve customer sentiment

Analyzing sentiment is just the beginning. You also need to know how to make customers fall in love with your brand.

Improving customer sentiment requires a strategic approach to evaluating customer experience and taking advantage of AI customer service tools. Here’s what to do:

Define the scope

Before you can improve sentiment, you need to know where to listen. Are your customers voicing their opinions on X (formerly Twitter), reviewing on Google or asking questions on live chat?

Pinpoint these channels and decide if there are specific regions or languages that need attention. For instance, if your product is hitting a new market, you’ll want to tune into that area’s local review sites and social platforms.

Defining the scope provides a targeted area for your efforts so you don’t cast too wide a net and dilute your impact.

Monitor the sentiment

Next, use sentiment analysis tools to continuously monitor these channels.

By tracking sentiment over time, you can spot trends and understand how customers are reacting to every little change.

For example, if sentiment dips every time you release a software update, there’s a clue to improve your change management process.

Identify the topics or themes

Leverage AI to dig into the feedback to find what’s really stirring up emotions. Is it your stellar customer service, or perhaps shipping delays are causing grief?

Identifying these topics helps you know where to double down and where to pivot. For example, if multiple customers express frustration over a specific product feature, that’s a clear signal you need to make improvements.

Create a strategy

Finally, develop a strategy based on these insights. Allocate your resources where they’ll make the biggest difference. Maybe it’s time to staff up your customer service team or invest in an AI chatbot to provide instant responses.

Also, determine the best channels for customer interaction—perhaps your audience engages more on Instagram than email—and tailor your approach accordingly.

Remember to train your team so they understand the importance of sentiment and how to nurture positive experiences at every touchpoint.

Using sentiment analysis to improve customer experience

What your customers think about your business directly influences its growth and success. Instead of just reading reviews, you need to dive deeper and understand the nuances of emotion to accurately monitor sentiment around your brand.

With customer sentiment analysis, you can get inside your customers’ minds, leverage emotional triggers and craft experiences that delight them at every step.

Sprout Social’s listening lets you track customer sentiment, conversations, behavior and trends across multiple social media platforms with the power of AI and machine learning.

Interested in learning more? Schedule a personalized demo and learn how to drive real business growth with Sprout’s platform.

The post How to analyze customer sentiment to improve customer experience appeared first on Sprout Social.

And social listening can unearth these game-changing insights…if you know how to use it. Listening is like mining social data to get to the buried gold insights, so you can put social data into action.

While there’s no denying the value and power of social listening, a tool this impactful can make it feel intimidating to get started. In this article, we’ll take you through 6+ social media listening examples and the strategies real brands use to inspire you to get more from listening.

Request a personalized demo

6 social media listening examples and strategies to help you mine for insights

To start excavating deeper insights for your brand, you need to fill your toolbox with the right strategies and approaches. Check out these social media listening examples employed by other brands to start building your social listening strategy and playbook.

Find relevant and authentic influencers for partnerships

According to a Q3 Sprout Social Pulse Survey of 307 marketers, 81% of respondents say influencer marketing is an essential piece of their social strategy. And this trend is likely to continue.

Social listening can help you unearth relevant influencers to partner with. This was particularly helpful for software company Goally. Including stories of real parents and families using their products is a vital part of their social content strategy—especially on TikTok. By using Sprout’s Social Listening solution, Goally’s social team connected with relevant influencers who had a major impact on their growth.

As Goally’s Marketing Manager Kaelyn Brooks told Sprout, “During our first few influencer initiatives on TikTok, we saw the number of users on our website with intent to buy increase by about 4%.”

Listening even helped them find an influencer who connected them with an entire pool of other relevant influencers and creators.

Apply it: Half of marketers say they choose influencers who are already genuine fans of their product, according to the same Q3 2023 Sprout Pulse Survey. Social listening can help you uncover influencers who already love your products to create authentic partnerships.

Use the Messages tab in Sprout’s Social Listening interface to find relevant messages. Sort messages by the follower count of the publisher or engagements to easily find top influencers to partner and engage with.

Goally uses Sprout Social Listening to find smaller creators organically, and invites them to join their affiliate program. “It’s also helpful to make sure we’re engaging and commenting on the popular posts for brand awareness in general,” Kaelyn tells us.

Learn how people feel about your brand, products and content

To understand brand health, you must demystify how your audience feels about you and your products. This is especially important when your company makes big moves.

One computer software company uses Sprout Listening to measure sentiment around their brand and products ahead of rebranding. With Listening, they uncover keywords people use about their current brand, and the social conversation after the brand shift. This has empowered them to understand associations with their existing brand, and the impact post-rebrand in the social space.

Measuring sentiment can also help brands establish an overall baseline to answer the question, “how do people feel about us, and has that changed?” Without social listening, it’s tough to understand whether your brand sentiment has spiked or dipped. Another computer software company regularly uses listening to understand their overall brand sentiment. By doing so, they recognize when a dip or a spike in sentiment occurs, and they can dig into specific conversations to help them unpack the change.

Apply it: Be the first to know if sentiment around your brand is rising or falling. Start with a bird’s eye view—in Sprout, the Sentiment Summary presents a clear data visualization of your sentiment from conversational analytics for a chosen date range, including where dips or spikes occurred.

Then, dig in further. Get an idea of what caused spikes or dips on specific days with the sentiment summary message explorer. Click into dips or spikes on the Sentiment Trends chart to surface messages that contributed to changes in sentiment over time.

And to get granular down to the keyword level, Sprout’s Word Cloud feature visualizes the common keywords used in the conversation around the topic or topics you’re listening for. Click into any of these words to further filter them, or to explore messages that use them and their sentiment.

Find new ways to improve engagement, awareness and content

Engagement metrics on your owned content tell you what you’re getting right. But listening can inspire and inform new content that resonates.

This is especially important for brands with multiple events or locations. You won’t see every post, activation or article about the many branches of your org with basic monitoring. But social listening zooms out to surface stories and news you may have missed.

For example, a fundraising organization was struggling to source stories from the many fundraising groups, locations and events under their umbrella. They were missing opportunities to share the wider impact of their organization.

Sprout’s Listening solution provided a way for them to sort and track stories and mentions across locations and fundraising groups. They could follow specific topics and keywords and measure how much of the conversation those topics took up, engagements they drove and more.

But engagement is about more than just content: it’s about connecting with your target audience in conversations that matter most to them. Doing so can build community and brand awareness.

Listening also enables you to surface relevant conversations beyond those you’re tagged in. This can help you grow brand awareness by jumping into relevant conversations. One company in the health insurance industry makes their name known by doing exactly that—whether or not they’re mentioned. They use social listening to keep tabs on conversations surrounding health and wellness topics. This saves them time scouring the social space to source those conversations.

The result? They were able to grow their thought leadership presence and community by joining more conversations that mattered to their target audience.

Apply it: Customers often get stuck when building their listening queries. But crafting smarter queries is key to ensuring you’re getting the most impactful listening experience and unearthing conversations and stories that matter.

Here are a few tips to craft a query that sets your listener up for success:

When adding inclusions…

• Start with the basics, including the main keywords you want to listen for (think brand name, products, etc.), hashtags and X (formerly known as Twitter) handles that are important to you.
• Add alternate spellings, grammatical errors and misspellings of your brand and product names.
• Think about other social handles and hashtags to include that people may mention next to your own.
• Add your website links.

When adding exclusions…

• Use the Topic Preview—this will show you any unwanted content and noise in the conversation and can guide exclusions to filter your results.
• Find and exclude any social handles that are adding to the noise.
• Lean on pre-built noise exclusion options.

Identify potential crises and track sentiment for negative spikes

Detecting potential brand crises early is one of the primary use cases for social listening. By monitoring negative chatter, sentiment shifts and spikes in specific topics, teams can detect conversation shifts early and prepare a response more proactively.

This is especially important for highly regulated industries. For example, one company uses listening as part of their financial services risk mitigation strategy after they experienced a data incident. While the incident was not recent, executives wanted to monitor conversations around it. So the team set up their listening solution to track conversations around relevant keywords—think: “breach” and “litigation.” This way, they keep their finger on the pulse of the conversation, and they’re the first to know if the story picks up traction again.

While one company uses listening to stay proactive, another used listening to keep tabs on an ongoing industry crisis for their clients. An agency in the building and manufacturing industry had a client that was impacted by COVID-caused product delays. They used listening to follow the digital conversation around the supply chain crisis, to understand how consumers were reacting and to inform how they should navigate the chatter.

Conversations like these could easily go undetected if teams relied only on mentions. With listening, they can keep their finger on the pulse of the conversation, guide their response and detect crucial shifts.

Apply it: Use some of the methods we’ve talked about in these social media listening examples so far to listen for keywords and monitor sentiment and conversations that keep you ahead of brand crises.

Get intel to stay ahead of the competition

As the revised old saying goes: keep your friends close, and your competitors closer. To stay ahead, you need to keep one eye on what you’re doing and another on what competitors are doing—which social listening does within seconds.

One agency uses social listening to create smarter pitches against competitors. Using social listening, they’ll look into new services their competitors offer, and new clients they boast. As a result, they head into pitches more informed and can find the best ways to differentiate their offerings.

Using Sprout’s Competitive Listening topic can inform your content strategy through competitor content. One company in the gaming industry uses Listening to monitor top competitor content and digital chatter. Doing this inspires fresh content that resonates with relevant audiences and empowers them to keep an eye on competitor performance compared to theirs.

Apply it: Use social listening to get a high-level grasp on your competitors’ engagement metrics and your share of voice next to theirs. Then, zoom into their social content to help inform your own.

And pro tip: Don’t sleep on the Sprout Listening Themes feature–it will help you during competitor analysis and beyond. They’re like a Listening topic nested within your larger topic to help you organize your query by specific categories. You can even compare themes against each other.

This is helpful if you’re asked for specific product feedback or event reactions. For example, let’s say you’re a coffee company and you’re using the Brand Health Listening template in Sprout. You notice a lot of your incoming messages focus on drink types, and you want to see how your audience talks about, say, your seasonal drinks vs. your mainstays.

You don’t have to create a whole new listening topic—you just need to add Topic Themes to compare these message types. Go to your Listening Query, scroll down, select Add Themes (Optional) and build your theme much like you built your initial Listening query.

This can also help you understand the conversation around a theme across your brand and competitors. Here’s how Themes might look for a University comparing notes in a Competitor Analysis template.

Finally, listening also enables you to find engagement spikes on competitor channels. With the Competitor Engagements graph, click into specific engagement spikes to see what drove the conversation. What did they post about? Is it a trend you should join in on? A new offering, product or announcement you should be aware of?

Perform market research to inform teams beyond marketing

Sharing insights from your social media data collection beyond the marketing team is becoming a more common, and needed, practice. Today, 76% of marketers agree their team’s social insights inform other departments, according to The 2023 Sprout Social Index™.

From competitive intelligence to product learnings, social listening insights are often bigger than social. And the brands using social insights to enrich business decisions beyond the social team are working and growing smarter.

For example, one agency in the building and manufacturing industry uses listening to keep their product team one step ahead. They set up five different listening topics about new products they had plans to eventually develop and offer. Keeping tabs on these product types in the conversation helped them uncover gaps in the industry, learn how people feel about the different product types and see what their competition looked like.

This product knowledge isn’t always the most impactful for social or content. But it’s invaluable for product planning and the decision-making that goes into it.

Apply it: Using some of the tactical listening tips we’ve discussed, mirror this brand. Set up Listening topics in Sprout around specific products. Analyzing the conversation and sentiment around these products enables you to understand how people feel about them, gaps you can fill, pain points and what makes competitor products stand out.

Use these social media listening examples to unearth social insight gold

With these social media listening examples in the back of your mind, what gems will you discover that can change your strategy and entire business?

If you’re already a Sprout customer, don’t hesitate to reach out to us if you need more help. And if you don’t have Sprout’s Listening solution yet, reach out to us for a free demo to explore social listening for yourself.

Request a personalized demo

The post Social media listening examples that will help you unearth better insights appeared first on Sprout Social.

This article will unpack how social media insights are essential to understanding younger consumers and how brands are using that data to transform and reach new audiences.

What younger consumers want from brands

Depending on your company and industry, appealing to younger consumers doesn’t always mean marketing to Gen Z or Gen Alpha. Even legacy brands that once catered to older generations have to pivot and address the younger generations who will eventually age into their target audience. For example, a life insurance brand may want to appeal to both older and younger generations.

Every generation has a different relationship with social, but regardless of age, there are some common factors all ages are looking for from brands: responsiveness, authenticity and entertaining content.

Responsive customer engagement and care

The latest Sprout Social Index™ found consumers across all ages have similar outlooks on what brands can do to leave a lasting impression. More than half of consumers (51%) say responding to customers makes brands the most memorable on social media. Younger audiences, especially Gen Z, are not afraid to call out customer care issues on social media, so responsiveness is critical—whether the feedback is positive or negative.

Brand authenticity

It’s easy for brands to default to hopping on timely trends and challenges or creating a social-specific brand voice because it aligns with the zeitgeist. But at the end of the day, everyone is seeking brand authenticity. They want businesses to be true genuine and true to themselves.

Younger generations like Gen Z and Millennials seek transparency about business practices and values, along with social content that isn’t overly salesy. Authentic, non promotional posts were ranked as the top content type consumers don’t see enough of from brands on social, according to the Index.

Engaging, entertaining posts

The Index shows 68% of consumers follow brands to stay informed about new products or services, but nearly half (45%) follow brands on social because they post enjoyable, entertaining content. However, promotional and entertaining content don’t have to be mutually exclusive. Compelling content—whether it’s from external creators or your in-house social team—attracts new audiences. Balancing engaging content with posts that showcase your products or services in action guides consumers further along the buyer’s journey.

How to use social to reposition your brand for younger audiences

Social media data empowers businesses to identify how to reposition their brand to engage younger consumers. By monitoring social, brands can unlock insights to support the business and take the right course of action to connect with their target demographic.

Listen to what your target generation cares about

The 2023 State of Social Media report shows 91% of leaders say social data will have a positive impact on organizations’ ability to get a better understanding of customers. Through social media listening, you can get a better understanding of what your target generation(s) are talking about online and the trends that matter to them.

Understand your new competitors

The 2023 State of Social Media report also shows 92% of leaders say social data will have a positive impact on improving competitive positioning. Use competitive intelligence from your social channels to learn how indirect competitors currently target the consumers you’re trying to reach. Consider how to reverse engineer their content strategy or take advantage of gaps present within your industry or niche.

Identify relevant partners

Collaborating with content creators and influencers who have a trusting relationship with the people you’re trying to reach can have a halo effect for your brand. Leverage their expertise to create influencer marketing campaigns that will resonate with target audiences.

9 brands successfully adapting their strategies to reach younger consumers

Let’s delve into nine examples of brands that are adapting their strategies to connect with younger and older consumers alike:

1. Bobby Jack

Bobby Jack is taking advantage of their popularity during the early 2000s to connect with younger Millennials and Gen Z. The apparel brand offers a vintage Y2K collection and an affiliate program. They have a strong user-generated content strategy, encouraging their customers to tag them on social media. Their brand voice maintains the sassiness and humor Bobby Jack is known for, but still feels modern and doesn’t try too hard.

You can see popular colloquial terms and phrases like, “Bobby Jack, for baddies only,” across their website and social channels. They use social media to join in on relevant conversations, trending sounds and topics for both younger and older audiences.

For example, this TikTok below pokes fun at Bored Ape Yacht Club, an NFT-collection that features eclectic apes:

The caption, “We hate nfts. Bobby Jack forever,” achieves the brand’s sarcastic tone while referencing a niche topic relevant to both Gen Z and the OG Millennials who remember “the little bad monkey” who hated so many things in their youth. The brand taps into 2000s nostalgia frequently, like in the TikTok below that features one of their most iconic looks: a Bobby Jack tee, brown gauchos and a tiny backpack.

2. American Association of Retired Persons (AARP)

The American Association of Retired Persons (AARP) isn’t just focusing on consumers in their golden years. The nonprofit engages with 20-50+ year olds.

AARP’s TikTok account has a dedicated Gen X following. Along with collaborating with Gen X creators, the nonprofit’s posts are peppered with ‘80s and ‘90s cultural references and relatable content. For example, the viral video below shows what happens when you’re over 40 and the party goes past 10 pm:

Community management is also a large part of their strategy. You can find AARP  frequently connecting with people in the TikTok comments section.

3. Abercrombie & Fitch

Over the past several years, Abercrombie & Fitch has been working to reposition its brand to appeal to Millennials and Gen Z by revamping everything from their brick and mortar stores to their social strategy. The brand also offers more sizing options and wider model representation.

The clothing brand partners with IF7, a Gen Z consultancy, on their TikTok strategy. A case study revealed the brand transformation was powered by aspect-based insights from TikTok videos and comments. Along with using younger imagery, the turnaround campaign was centered around creators and influencers, offering promos and discount codes.

The campaign was a massive success, earning over 245 million views for the #Abercrombie hashtag and 45 million for #AbercrombieHaul. Many creator videos have earned thousands of views, such as the one below that encourages people to shop Fitch’s updated wardrobe:

4. Dyson

Founded in 1991, the British household appliance brand Dyson was best known for revolutionizing vacuum cleaners and hand dryers. The brand took the beauty world by storm after launching its first handheld hair dryer in 2016, the Dyson Supersonic, which received rave reviews across social. The Supersonic was followed by the Dyson Airwrap, which sold out almost immediately—over 130,000 people joined the waitlist for the device.

Today, Dyson is still known for their viral hair dryer and straightener product lines. The brand leans into a community-first strategy, with TikTok accounts dedicated to several regions including Germany, Singapore, Indonesia and the United Arab Emirates. Across their TikTok accounts, they share user-generated content that features product tutorials and reviews.

Although beauty content is a popular favorite, Dyson also features awareness stage content for their other non-beauty products.

5. The Home Depot

The Home Depot is often considered a Baby Boomer or Gen X homeowner favorite, but the home improvement retailer has adapted its social strategy to target Millennials and Gen Z as these generations gain more buying power. They also take advantage of nurturing niche communities online like gardeners and DIY aficionados.

The Home Depot leans heavily into influencer marketing, partnering with creators like @kourtnileigh (Kourtni Muñoz) to create bespoke DIY content. She created several videos sharing tips for preparing for hurricane season:

The Home Depot’s TikTok, X (formerly known as Twitter) and Instagram also feature engaging content that appeals to younger consumers and touches on relevant trends like this Barbie-inspired video that preps viewers for spooky season:

6. Dollar Tree

Similar to The Home Depot, Dollar Tree leans into the craft and DIY space to successfully connect with younger consumers. On their TikTok, Instagram, Facebook and X pages you’ll find branded craft tutorials, affordable shopping tips, user-generated content and creator posts. And of course, they’re active on the DIYer’s paradise, Pinterest.

Dollar Tree has strong community engagement: on Facebook, they have 2.8 million followers who they frequently interact with—whether it’s sharing craft ideas, highlighting name brand products or answering customer care questions.

The brand is also quick to interact in their TikTok comments section.

7. Dell

Dell serves as a standout example of a brand successfully collaborating with the right influencers. They partnered with creator @CorporateNatalie, who is known for her comedic corporate career content. Many of these videos touch on common generational experiences in the workplace, such as a Millennial manager explaining to a Gen Z team member how certain slang terms might be interpreted incorrectly by executives or clients. In the video below, she plays off the need to stay connected, even while on PTO:

To target younger consumers, Dell partnered with creators for back-to-school content on their Instagram. @EmmaRupard created several #StudyWithMe lo-fi videos to help promote the new XPS 13 Plus. With remote learning and work as the new norm, desk setup videos are very popular among Gen Z students.

8. Claire’s

Although many associate Claire’s with angsty teen trips to the mall, the legacy accessories brand has been on a journey to reposition their brand to target Gen Z and Alpha through their content strategy.

Along with a metaverse activation on Roblox, Claire’s runs a College Creators program to work with Gen Z to create TikTok videos. These video collaborations have been a catalyst for brand reach. For example, the TikTok video below features Claire’s intern Mary Clare Lacke, which earned over 1.3 million views:

They’re also connecting with younger consumers through their #DearClaire docuseries that centers the voices of young girls and shines perspectives into issues like self-love and mental health.

9. Polaroid

In a world filled by augmented reality filters, artificial intelligence (AI) imagery and hypercurated Instagram posts, Polaroid is betting on its analog roots by embracing imperfection and authenticity in its social content.

The camera and film brand is working with 15 rising and established photography influencers including Andre D. Wagner and Thalía Gochez to highlight the creative opportunities analog and digital products create. With this strategy, Polaroid exposes younger generations to the less predictable, yet beautiful nature of analog photography, but the brand also leverages nostalgia for older generations who may have memories of snapping their own photos years ago.

Position your brand to transcend generations with social data

Age is a just number, but life is a culmination of moments that define our personality, values and interests.  Marketers can bridge generational gaps and amplify their brands by harnessing the power of social data. To learn more insights about what consumers want and how to position your brand for the future, download The Sprout Social Index™.

The post How to reach younger consumers: 9 legacy brands adapting for new audiences appeared first on Sprout Social.

Within these tools, conversational analytics harnesses the power of customer conversations and discussions by identifying and tracking hidden brand insights. This market-driven, real-time intelligence empowers marketing teams to amplify brand reach in a targeted manner, spot emerging trends and gain competitive insights. Thus, enabling you to create a better customer experience that translates into repeat business and profitable revenue streams.

Continue reading to see how conversational analytics impacts your business by leaning into social data for rich insights and empowering business leaders to make strategic decisions.

What is conversational analytics?

Conversational analytics is actionable intelligence in the form of trends and reports derived from analyzing customer conversations using AI and machine learning.

Sophisticated social listening tools, powered by ML and AI technologies like sentiment analysis and NLP, scan millions of data points in customer chatter to understand consumers’ needs, wants and brand experience. This provides crucial insight into your brand health, market trends and competitor performance, enabling you to grow your business strategically with data-driven insights.

Important sources for conversational analytics include social media listening, virtual agent and chatbot interactions, customer care emails, review forums, sales calls and other feedback channels.

What are the benefits of conversational analytics?

Social listening tools powered by conversational analytics discover relevant information from thousands of customer comments and conversations within seconds. Thus, enabling your teams to concentrate on strategy and business impact rather than manual data analysis.

Here is a closer look at the key benefits.

Enhance customer experience

According to research, brands focused on building positive customer experiences are 60% more profitable compared to those that aren’t.

Keeping a tab on social customer care conversations helps you uncover common themes and topics, revealing service or product issues that would otherwise go unnoticed. This helps you elevate your customer experience strategy to build loyalty and attract new customers. Plus, it supports cross-functional teams by providing customer-centric insights to propel their efforts forward and improve the overall brand experience.

Discover brand insights

Brand insights from conversational analytics enable you to grow your social presence and improve brand perception. They aid you in making key business decisions like choosing the right social media influencers for your brand or building successful co-branding partnerships like Spotify and Starbucks, where Starbucks customers can sign-up for a free Spotify premium subscription.

Gain competitive intelligence

According to The Sprout Social Index™ 2022, 90% of marketers agree social insights help differentiate their brands in the market for a competitive edge. With conversational analytics, glean countless customer discussions and conversations around competitors and your brand on networks like Reddit, Google My Business (GMB), Glassdoor, Facebook and Instagram to derive competitive intelligence.

AI tasks like entity chunking and machine learning effortlessly detect competitor brand names in customer comments on your social channels or on review platforms to give you a contextual understanding of those conversations. When combined with other areas like social engagement, these insights help you map out competitive benchmarks and track what your competitors are doing to inform your strategy.

Improve sales conversions

Conversational analytics tools help you gauge what aspects can jumpstart your sales conversions based on customer preferences and the latest developments in the market.

For example, automated filtering and categorization of topics in social listening data surface opportunities in real-time to enhance the customer journey and influence purchase decisions. This enables you to develop successful short-term strategies like relevant discounts and incentives to take advantage of what’s trending.

Track and manage brand health

Measure and manage your brand reputation by regularly monitoring and engaging with customer conversations on social and review sites. This is important because a timely response to feedback, negative or positive, is important to customers, as our 2022 Index revealed.

Social listening tools assist you in tracking brand sentiment, especially from networks that best capture your audiences like Yelp and Trustpilot for hospitality or GMB for local businesses. Plus, set alerts for spikes in brand mentions and use the insights to guide your online review management strategy.

With Sprout, you can also merge your review management system with CRMs like Zendesk, HubSpot, Salesforce and Microsoft Dynamics 365 to get a holistic view of customer feedback.

Build your employer brand

Conversational analytics through social listening on networks like Glassdoor gives you a comprehensive view of your employee experience and how they perceive your company culture. This is an important aspect of employee development because happy employees are essential for a profitable business.

They are also your best evangelizers and key to building your employer brand. Employee advocacy helps you grow your business by reaching a much larger new audience compared to traditional social media tactics. For example, Simpli.fi reached one million unique users just with their sales teams using employee advocacy.

Product innovation

Conversational analytics enables you to keep a pulse on rising industry trends by identifying common topics in customer conversations. These could be direct messages on your social channels or chatbots, or discussions on customer forums.

Insights from market indicators can predict customer needs, changing preferences and purchase motivators. This helps drive product innovation for an evergreen growth strategy that keeps evolving.

Create engaging content

Conversational analytics give you precise indicators into what content resonates with your audience. This is critical given that customer preferences can be vastly diverse as seen in our latest Index where 34% of customers preferred low-fi content from brands they follow, 51% preferred product-driven content and 39% loved real customer demos.

Track content performance and measure key performance indicators (KPIs) to check on audience growth, hashtag usage, post/content type, volume and frequency to improve brand amplification and social engagement.

It is useful to remember that other social media analytics can also support improving your business’s insight into some of these areas as well.

How does conversational analytics software work?

Conversational analytics is a key component of AI marketing because it allows you to dig into tons of customer feedback data for insights that truly matter to your business. Here is a look at how the technique works under the hood.

Identify objectives

The first step to getting relevant insights from social listening is zeroing in on your objectives. For example, ask yourself: Are you using data analysis to meet long-term goals like enhancing customer experience or short-term goals like click-through rates (CTRs) to encourage a trial or purchase? Having this perspective helps you narrow your focus into high-priority areas and results that will best support your goals.

Gather relevant data

The more relevant the data source, the more accurate your insights. For example, choose industry-specific channels like TripAdvisor if you’re in the hospitality industry, or Yelp and GMB if you’re a local business.

These sources, along with customer interactions with virtual agents and chatbots on your websites, social media DMs and consumer forums like Reddit, will give you the critical brand insights you need.

Process the data

Filtering noise from tons of customer conversations and social chatter to get the right insights is the next step. Conversational analytics tools use AI tasks like NLP and named entity recognition (NER) to identify important topics and themes that emerge from data analysis. NLP and NER are also essential for sentiment analysis, so you can dig into conversational data to measure customer experience and brand health.

In Sprout, our Query Builder helps you sieve through millions of audience conversations to capture the full extent of the social listening data based on keywords and hashtags you choose. Plus, it can filter out spam to provide only those messages most relevant to your preferences.

Watch this video from one of our research experts to learn more.

Our AI-powered Queries by AI Assist further shapes your listening data by giving you additional keyword recommendations (words and phrases) to cut through congested feeds and create robust queries for more precise topic results.

The actionable insights derived from this processing enable you to build a multi-layer strategy to enhance customer service and maintain positive brand sentiment to grow market share holistically.

Visualize insights

User-friendly, presentation-ready reports are as important as the accuracy of the insights you receive, especially when you’re collaborating with internal stakeholders. These reports help you contextualize the data so you’re able to make decisions on the best next moves for your brand strategy.

For example, in Sprout, get in-depth, presentation-ready reports on hashtag trends, paid and organic breakdowns and conversion ratios that demonstrate the impact of your findings to decision-makers.

Plus, choose insight visualizations as word clouds to get trending topics at a glance.

Harnessing the power of social with conversational analytics

Powerful social media listening tools unlock the potential of your customer experience data seamlessly so you have the insights you are looking for at your fingertips.

Indiana University tapped into this opportunity, using conversational analytics to gather insights from audience feedback and comments across their social channels. They wanted to understand how former and current students, and families felt about their brand and if there were any specific concerns that needed to be prioritized and addressed.

Using Sprout’s listening and analytics capabilities, they proactively identified and tracked issues as they arose. This enabled them to provide actionable insights to the institution’s leadership team and develop an effective social response strategy to manage brand health.

They were also able to have a unified brand strategy across departments to enhance community engagement and solidify relationships with partners.

Elevate your brand strategy with conversational analytics

AI tasks like conversational analytics enable you to mine social insights that give you a deeper understanding of your customers. These insights empower you to capitalize on innovative ways to market your brand and elevate growth.

Draw inspiration from this webinar to find tactical ways to use AI and automation to spot rising trends and become further strategy-driven. Also discover more real-life examples of brands already leveraging AI to shape their social strategy.

The post Conversational analytics: How to use social listening for brand insights appeared first on Sprout Social.

Coupled with the unpredictable nature of social media and the looming economic downturn, many weary financial services executives see social media as a threat. Add viral “meme stocks”—stocks that can become overvalued due to positive online sentiment—to the mix, and it became clear social media has real world implications and the potential to derail financial companies.

But refraining from social media altogether only creates more room for crises to snowball and brand health to plummet. More than ever, financial services brands must take steps to use social media as an essential part of their risk mitigation and brand safety strategy, instead of downplaying its impact or fearing it.

Stop a crisis in its tracks with social listening

Customer sentiment can change overnight. By employing brand safety tools like social listening, teams can jump into action at the first sign of trouble. Listening enables financial institutions to perform swift situation analysis and crisis management, which are crucial for successful crisis responses.

In a recent webinar, Sprout Social CFO Joe Del Preto explains how listening can help brands facing a crisis: “Identify the crisis before you have a bigger problem on you hands, and respond appropriately, ensuring your team is empowered with the correct information. It comes down to proactively managing reputational risks with consumers, employees and the market on social.”

Ryan Phillips, a Sprout Solutions Engineer with experience managing social in the finance industry, echoes the benefits of listening. “Risk mitigation goes beyond monitoring comments and engagements on the corporate page. It should encompass conversations across the internet. That’s why social listening is the most valuable way to mitigate risk. It stops ripples about your brand online from becoming a tidal wave.”

To see social listening at work, read Sprout Social’s analysis of GameStop, the meme stock at the center of an internet-prompted short squeeze. Our data illustrated how mentions of GameStop (GME) increased 2,805% in one week in early 2021, and perfectly correlated with the price fluctuations of the brand’s stock. Had hedge funds caught onto the buzz surrounding GME stock sooner, their financial consequences might not have been so severe.

Using a listening solution like Sprout Social enables you to automatically sift through billions of data points in seconds, detecting market trends before they go viral (or have material implications). These AI-powered tools capture pivotal data like the sentiment, volume, unique authors and growth over time of topics related to your brand.

Use social to uncover real-time voice of customer data

The benefits of social go far beyond monitoring volume and stopping an existing crisis from growing. Social listening offers valuable voice of customer (VoC) data that keeps you up to speed on the health of your business, the industry overall and fluctuations in consumer preferences.

Take Del Preto’s social listening ritual. “My head of investor relations has social listening queries running at all times that are tracking what our competitors are doing. Did they launch a new product? How does our sentiment compare to theirs? We make sure we stay ahead of anything that could bubble up to cause major problems, or present new opportunities,” he says.

For financial service brands, social listening queries can surface everything from stock market trends to negative discourse surrounding their company or products. Del Preto explains, “I know dozens of financial services firms using listening…They use it for risk mitigation, competitive analysis, trend spotting and staying up to date on industry news.”

Phillips explains why all of this data exists on social: “When someone is looking for a [financial solution], they go on social media and see what their friends recommend. Then, they look up your profile to get a first impression of your brand…Social is where your community is talking about solutions to their financial problems.”

This is especially true for Gen Z consumers. According to Accenture, 82% of consumers aged 18-24 acquired a financial services product from a new provider in the past 12 months, proving that younger demographics are a growing market whose loyalty is up for grabs. Social is critical for reaching this audience and discovering more about their needs, especially for traditional and legacy brands fighting for market share against digital-only challenger banks.

Listening enables you to tap into consumer conversations, and deliver insights and key learnings you need to guide your organization-wide strategy. The tools reveal how consumers feel about your competitors, and help you identify industry gaps to find new opportunities to differentiate your business.

Provide a best-in-class customer experience—on social and beyond

Social is a prime place to boost your discoverability, drive brand awareness and loyalty, and help your company deliver business development results—while ensuring higher customer satisfaction. Brands achieve this by creating meaningful connections with customers and advocates, and providing real-time customer care. But Phillips warns this can create reputation risks if you don’t have a strong customer care strategy in place, or if you have an inconsistent posting cadence.

Data supports his claim. According to The 2022 Sprout Social Index™, when consumers wait too long for a brand to respond on social, 36% say they will share that negative experience with friends and family. A comparable 31% won’t complete their purchase, while 30% will buy from a competitor instead.

Your audience wants to see that you care about helping your customers, and have a POV on the pain points, topics and trends that matter most to them. For example, see how expense management solution company Brex creates content that speaks to the needs of their target audience.

And attentively responds to incoming customer queries on social.

With a social media management tool, you can empower your team to create consistent and compliant brand experiences that level-up to your organization’s goals. A tool like Sprout enables you to elevate customer care experiences, find authentic ways to engage your audience, streamline your posting strategy and make more strategic decisions with analytics solutions.

Keep your friends close and social insights closer

Especially in highly regulated industries, it’s easy to see social as a threat rather than an opportunity. But the right social media management partners can help your company see around the corner of a crisis and future-proof your strategy long-term. Rather than get caught up in a downward spiral, build consumer confidence and boost brand awareness on social.

Looking for more insight into how you can build a compelling social presence? Checkout these social media tips for banks and financial institutions to help you maximize performance and minimize risk.

The post For financial services brands, social media is a risk mitigation friend—not foe appeared first on Sprout Social.