Here are some facts you should be aware of:
Buyers leverage social media to learn about products
50% of buyers use various social media platforms to learn more about a product
They are specifically interested in learning about other buyers’ experiences with the product as well as the brand’s customer service team.
Customer experience drives reputation
About 70% of a brand’s reputation is determined by the experiences of its buyers/clients.
This explains why and how can social media listening increase customer advocacy.
If you have a loyal base of super-fans who keep appreciating you and recommending you on social media, the people in their circle will also look up to you as a reputable, reliable, friendly, and modern business.
People trust recommendations from people they know
More than 90% of buyers trust recommendations from people they know.
This means, if you have a happy customer, you will have more chances of getting business from his friends and social media followers.
Online reviews are effective
More than 85% of people trust online reviews from other buyers, whether they know them or not.
Customer Advocacy boosts revenue
According to Harvard Business School Press, just a 12% increase in customer advocacy can boost your revenue by two times. Although 12% sounds like a small number, it consists of your most happy customers. They trust you and recommend you to everyone they can, with no intention of receiving any benefit from you.
So, it is fair to say that in 2021 and years to come, you need to create a social media strategy that helps increase your customer advocacy.
You need to create a base of most loyal customers who will stand by your side and advocate you to your prospects and your haters.
How to Begin
Don’t worry; social listening is the most effective answer to one of the most trending topics these days, which is ‘how can social media listening increase customer advocacy?’.
Social listening is different from social media monitoring, which solely involves tracking your brand’s social media presence and determining the way forward. Let’s learn some more details.
What’s the difference between social listening and social monitoring?
Most people assume they are the same because they do the same thing i.e. collect your online mentions. But, that’s not the case. There is a subtle difference between social monitoring and social listening and the image below from Sprout Social explains it quite well:
Social media monitoring is restricted to tracking down the mentions of the keywords relevant to your business. You can use this information in various ways such as for improving your social media customer service, lead generation, and analyzing the impact of your social media campaigns. And it helps a lot!
Wondering why we need social listening if monitoring works and how social media listening can increase customer advocacy?
Social Listening is Proactive
Social monitoring works at a micro level. It helps you identify the mentions and take necessary actions depending on its content. It involves reactive response but social listening works at a macro level and helps provide a proactive response. You can listen to your buyers and prospects even when they are not talking directly about you. You can analyze the tone of the conversations happening around your brand, your competitors, and the industry in general. You can get a demographic breakup of your audience and understand their needs. You can then use this information to come up with more impactful marketing and lead generation campaigns, create products or services that outpace the competitors, and approach (and influence) the leads before your competitors do.
Social media listening is not restricted to tracking your brand’s mention
It is all about listening to what your buyers, prospects, and your haters have to say about you and the industry you cater to.
Once you listen to their appreciations, concerns, comments, and suggestions, you will be able to provide them better services. Moreover, when you listen to them and address their concerns, they will feel valued. They will prefer doing more business with you than with a brand that doesn’t communicate with them. Soon, they will start recommending you to their family members, friends, relatives, colleagues, and even to random people in their social circle. Soon, they will become your brand advocates.
That explains how can social media listening increase customer advocacy.
If you want to know more about whats the difference between social listening and social monitoring, check out this blog.
Now, let us give you simple tips that can help you increase your customer advocacy using social listening:
How to use social media listening to increase customer advocacy
Respond to their complaints
Did you know 68% of buyers leave a brand or a business because they feel the company doesn’t care about them? Only 14% leave because of faulty products or services.
This proves that even if your product is the best of its kind, buyers will still choose not to buy from you if you do not listen to their concerns. It sounds pretty obvious. No one would like to buy something from a brand that has pathetic customer support. What if the product doesn’t work? How will you exchange or return it? What about the money and time you spent on it?
We would rather pay a bit more or ignore a few minor issues and buy from a brand that we can reach out to at any time. Simply put, we would advocate for a brand that is willing to hear us and this is where social media listening can help.
Build a social media customer service team
Until a year ago, buyers used to contact a brand through emails or phone calls. Now, they prefer social media. Whether it is an appreciation or a complaint, they choose social media because it is easy and has a massive reach.
They don’t care if you are on social media or not. They don’t even care about tagging you while posting about you. All they want is your response. So, you must attend to those social media complaints and suggestions as soon as possible before your haters and competitors join in and blow the issue manifolds.
Social listening tools can help you track all those complaints, especially those that aren’t posted on your social page or those where you aren’t tagged. But, you can’t do it without the help of a dedicated social media customer service team.
You must ensure that a part of your customer service team is exclusively assigned to handle social media comments (both positive and negative). They must be trained to use social listening tools. They will solely be responsible for listening to your buyers and prospects and respond socially whenever necessary. They should only focus on improving your social customer services.
The better your social media customer service team performs, the more customer advocates you will make and that explains how can social media listening increase customer advocacy.
Invest in a social listening tool
As expected, your social media customer support team will have to use dedicated listening tools so they don’t miss any important conversation. There are numerous options to choose from but too many options often create too much confusion. To make things easier, we have created a list of 20 best social listening tools.
This is an unbiased list of tools that can help you make more and more social media advocates. We have spent weeks evaluating all these tools (and many more that we rejected), so be assured that no matter which one you will pick, it will be one of your best social media investments.
As we have mentioned in that blog, we highly recommend our tool Notifier to small and medium-sized businesses that want best-in-class features but do not want to spend thousands of dollars. Notifier comes with zero learning curve and provides instant alerts, a feature that even the most expensive social listening tools do not provide.
Notifier- the only tool you need to create more brand advocates via social media
Notifier can help you track down the conversations that happen around your brand or products. Well, that sounds obvious but these tools can work even if your buyers haven’t tagged you! They work even if the buyers have commented about their experience on millions of other social sites but not on your social media handle. And they work even if they misspell your brand name, product name, or your social media handle.
Social listening shouldn’t be limited to your FB and YouTube comments and tweets. You ought to respond to each and every comment about yours and Notifier can help you with this. You can get notifications of every mention about you across many popular social media platforms, so you don’t miss out on anything relevant. As we mentioned above, Notifier provides instant alerts, so you can immediately act on negative comments because they are the ones that can rip off your reputation before you could realize what went wrong. Our tool can help you analyze the sentiments of the conversations, so you can quickly figure out the effectiveness of your social media strategies.
The right approach to build customer advocates
Social listening helps do more indepth research and identify all the negative (and of course positive and neutral) conversations regarding your product/service. When you have identified all those negative comments, you need to respond to all of them asap because buyers expect an instant response. When you respond, they are more likely to tone down their negative feelings. When you resolve their issues, they are more likely to make a repeat buying decision. Soon, they will start liking you. And then, they will start advocating for you!
That pretty much answers how can social media listening increase customer advocacy.
Here is what you need to do to increase your customer advocacy via social media.
Once you know what people are talking about you, here is how you should respond to them.
- If they have any complaints, assure them that you are willing to resolve their issue as quickly as possible.
- Make sure you attend to those complaints on a priority basis and keep the complainant informed at every step.
- Do it socially (not privately), so others can see how prompt and dedicated you are.
- If they have any suggestions, appreciate them! They genuinely care for you, which is why they are suggesting an improvement. They could have left you but they decided to give you one more chance. They are your potential customer advocates.
- Tell them you are happy to hear their opinion and that you will definitely incorporate their suggestions in the future.
- As a token of appreciation, reward them with a discount! That is how social media listening can increase customer advocacy.
- We understand you may not be able to accept all their ideas and suggestions because most of them would require you to make significant changes. But, an assurance will boost the buyers’ confidence in you and turn them into your brand advocates.
- If they appreciate you, that’s a blessing! We are too quick to leave a negative comment but we hardly bother about writing positive, constructive feedback. So, if someone has appreciated you, NEVER EVER LET THAT BUYER GO, even if you have to send him a free replacement or offer a specific service for free. He is the one who will advocate for you for years to come.
- If they are your haters (could be your competitors trying to tarnish your brand image), deal with them too! It can be tacky to handle them but do not remain silent. If you don’t reply to them, it will throw a negative light on your brand.
- Don’t be afraid of negative feedback or criticism. Even huge brands get social media backlashes. You can’t avoid them but you can certainly prepare yourself to deal with them. And that’s possible only when you listen to your customers.
If you do what is mentioned above, you will make your customers realize that:
- You genuinely care about their satisfaction.
- You are interested in their feedback.
- You value them and do not want to lose them.
- You are ready to assist them and solve their issues whenever needed.
- You are not just there to make more money. You are there to build relationships.
- They matter the most to you.
When It Comes to Social Listening, How Do You Know Which Social Networks to Start With?
The above graph from PEW Research represents the most popular social media platforms in the US in 2021. If you are wondering how can social media listening increase customer advocacy and which social networks to start with, this graph is the answer. You must have a social account with the platforms mentioned in the graph and you must spend the maximum amount of your social media marketing budget on them.
But, there could be millions of other social networks, forums, blogs, news websites, etc. where your buyers, potential buyers, and industry experts (and your haters) could be talking about your brand. They could be appreciating your product or maybe roasting you badly. You definitely don’t want to miss those conversations and that’s why you need social listening tools like Notifier. These tools can scan millions of websites and alert you whenever there is a conversation happening around your brand or related keywords. Notifier comes with ‘whole word search’ feature and ‘string search’ feature. These features will provide you with precise results, saving your time and effort.
Wrap up
A recent survey has concluded that it takes 5 times more money to acquire a new customer than to retain a current one. So, it is worth investing time and money in an existing customer rather than just keep on acquiring new ones.
A ‘satisfied’ customer may still leave you but a ‘happy, valued’ customer will never do so.
He will stick with you for years and will become your customer advocate. Surprisingly, the only thing you need to do is to listen to them.
Thankfully, social listening tools such as Notifier can make it much easier and hassle-free for you and even small businesses can afford them.
Try it today and we bet you will be surprised to see how it can help you serve your customers better.