The importance of social listening on review sites

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To be clear, every individual you have business interaction with talks. For every transaction, communication, purchase or no purchase, there are many ways your customers share their pleasure or displeasure about their experience.

And, there is a wealth of ways you can find out what is being said. Indeed, with a customer feedback management strategy, you can ask them directly and measure their responses.

But, how many of us receive bad service or experience a product, then head immediately to our social media to share with friends?

And, if you think that sharing with our friends and family on Facebook or Instagram, for example, is the only thing we do, you are fooling yourself. Review sites like Yelp, TripAdvisor, Expedia, Booking.com, are full of both positive and negative reviews and ratings.

Unfortunately, if you’re not using social listening along with online feedback management as part of your reputation marketing, you won’t know anything about these views. And that is insight, knowledge and experience you are leaving on the table – perhaps for competitors to use for their benefit.

What is social listening?

Simply put, social listening is when you track, monitor and analyse your social media platforms including review websites for reactions, mentions and conversations relating to your brand. And then act based on what you find.

The monitoring process itself is very metric-based and includes measurements such as:

  • Brand mentions;
  • Engagement rates;
  • Hashtags;
  • Competitors;
  • Keywords;
  • Monitoring ROI;
  • Testing campaigns; and
  • Industry trends.

However, it is the second stage of social listening that looks beyond these metrics. And it’s where you get to understand the MOOD of your customers – or their sentiment.

By listening and understanding how people feel about your brand, you can make sure that your products and services are what YOUR customers need and want. And that they are being delivered in the correct ways by employees who wish to provide exceptional service and support. It allows you to engage with your customers, generate goodwill and provide a fast response rate to anything critical or negative.

As such, social listening keeps every part of your marketing machine on the right path and is critically important for your reputation marketing activities.

Here are just some of the areas you must listen for:

  • The brand name and various handles;
  • Your product name including common misspellings;
  • Competitors’ brand names, product names, and handles;
  • Industry buzzwords;
  • Your slogan and those of your competitors;
  • Names of key people in your company and your competitors’ companies;
  • Campaign names or keywords;
  • Your branded hashtags and those of your competitors; and
  • Unbranded hashtags related to your industry;
  • Unstructured data such as Google, TripAdvisor and Yelp reviews, blog and social media comments and posts.

Social listening tools

Of course, social listening can be a time-consuming activity. And a recent poll during a webinar moderated by CustomerCount®, Do You Have A 5-Star Reputation, indicated, 43 per cent of businesses are doing this manually.

But there are services and business tools that do help. And there are some that claim to help, but don’t. So-called “reputation management” companies are plentiful, and most are very reputable. Some are not.

Typically looking for posts on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, is the norm. Looking at social media only and ignoring the essential elements of monitoring your reputation, review sites, is a mistake. And, there are hundreds of review websites for every industry.

Customers are looking at your Stars today. If you aren’t monitoring the rating sites, along with the measurement a customer feedback management system brings, you are at serious risk of losing loyal customers. And never know what they are saying about you and the why.

CustomerCount and Keatext

Leading customer feedback management company CustomerCount has teamed up with Keatext to help clients understand what is being said about them on review sites. This exciting technology quickly provides them with a picture of their entire interaction with their customers, across all touchpoints, so they can take the right action.

Keatext uses natural language processing technology to analyse unstructured customer feedback such as customer comments and product reviews on websites including TripAdvisor and Yelp. Bob Kobek, President of CustomerCount explains: “the process ‘sees’ patterns within comments on the survey. It then evaluates and interprets the output delivering precise and actionable interface with our other 70+ reporting templates.”

Keatext takes unstructured data from the verbatim comments from responders and reports them in a structured format. This helps businesses determine which words and phrases are used most often and in what context. The power of the system lies in the report export capabilities. These include user-friendly graphs as well as the further breakdown of categories into four primary buckets: Praises, Problems, Suggestions and Questions. Users are able to pull out data for each component and further cross-reference it with others.

To find out more about CustomerCount’s integration with Keatext contact Bob Kobek today to arrange a full online demo on 317-816-6000 or [email protected]