In 2024, more than 61% of businesses employ social listening as a key marketing strategy.
The simple process of listening to your consumers and mapping your brand mentions can put you miles ahead of your competitors when it comes to staying in the loop regarding industry trends, brand sentiment, and viral content marketing strategies.
The question is, how do you know if your social listening strategy is operating at full power?
With the average person now using more than six different social networks per month, it can be challenging to measure the success of your social listening on each platform.
In response, we’ve created a guide to measuring social media ROI using social listening across all platforms, using strategies such as sentiment analysis, and recording the rise in social commerce conversions as you get closer to your target customers.
With this in mind, let’s take a closer look at how your social listening strategy can make your business more profitable in 2024 and how you can track those changes using platforms like Mention.
Can Social Listening Make Your Social Media Strategy More Profitable In 2024?
There are many ways your social media listening strategy can improve your business’s profitability in 2024.
As you get closer to your demographic by monitoring your brand sentiment and mentions across social media, you increase your chances of generating leads from your social strategy and gaining a competitive position in the market as you adjust your social strategy accordingly.
Here are some of the ways social listening will make your social strategy even more profitable in 2024:
Boosting Lead Generation
Some of the most effective marketing strategies come from social campaigns. As more demographics choose to interact with brands on social networking sites, the easiest way to generate leads in 2024 is to create a successful social strategy.
Social listening ensures that your social content takes off. By monitoring data related to content engagement alongside any brand mentions or positive/negative sentiment towards your products/services, you, in turn, create content that attracts interaction and feeds your target’s preferences.
Improving Customer Satisfaction
Social listening tools remain valuable for determining whether a target group is satisfied with your brand.
After Shopify revealed that 14% of purchases come from social commerce in 2024, it’s crucial to know how your customers view your brand on different social channels.
Social listening tools like Mention allow you to quickly analyze your brand mentions and flag any negative sentiment towards your products/services. This provides you with a chance to take immediate action and respond to any negativity with solutions to improve customer satisfaction moving forward.
In turn, you gain more happy customers, which equates to greater consumer advocacy and an influx in conversions as they speak about your brand positively online.
“We use Mention’s Feed feature every day to ensure we’re checking in on who and what is being said about our brand. Our aim is to never let a conversation go unread” says, Ashton Egner, Communications Manager at Kiroo.
Using Mention’s Feed feature to listen and react to conversations online, Kiroo leverages easy daily monitoring and stays in touch with every brand mention across all of its social feeds.
“Mention helps us better understand what is being said and how people are talking about our industry in general, which greatly informs how we respond, relate and create a connection with our audience and influencers through social media. ”
Competitive Positioning
As well as mapping consumer engagement, social listening tools can determine your brand’s overall positive within a social commerce market.
With the ability to easily gauge how successfully you perform on social media platforms compared to your nearest competitors using the share of voice, you put yourself one step ahead of your rivals.
For example, if you notice a trend towards eco-friendly products, and your competitors haven’t tapped into this, you can launch a campaign highlighting your sustainable practices. This puts your brand in a competitive position when scoring leads and establishing yourself as an option leader within your industry.
How To Measure The ROI Of Your Current Social Listening Strategy
Now that we’ve discussed some ways you can boost brand profits using social listening, let’s examine how well your current listening tactics are working.
Measuring the return on investment (ROI) of your social listening strategy is essential. It helps determine whether your investment improves lead generation and identifies the areas that need work to drive profits in a competitive social arena.
Here are five ways to measure and calculate your social listening ROI for continued success.
Establish Your Social Listening KPIs First
One of the easiest ways to measure the ROI of your social listening strategy is to set the process in motion before you start. This involves creating key performance indicators (KPIs) that can be tracked as you deploy your listening strategy to different platforms.
Your goals will guide you through your social listening efforts and encourage your brand to take a more targeted approach to monitoring individual aspects of your social strategy.
For example, if your social listening strategy aims to raise brand awareness, creating a KPI based on the number of likes and shares your posts receive can help you assess whether you’re meeting your objectives.
Here are some KPI examples for different social listening goals:
Goal: Increase Brand Mentions
KPI: Increase brand mentions on Instagram by 25% over 12 months
Goal: Improve Brand Seniment On TikTok
KPI: Reduce negative brand mentions on TikTok by 50% over 6 months.
Goal: Boost Social Commerce Conversions
KPI: Increase clicks on social ad links by 15% over 3 months.
By creating and tracking your KPIs from the beginning to the end of your social listening campaign, you can effectively monitor its success and your revised business performance.
Depending on how close you are to meeting your KPI goals, you can determine whether your social media efforts are profitable or still need improvement.
Monitor How Your Sentiment Shifts
If your social listening strategy works, you should see your overall social sentiment shift.
Monitoring brand sentiment is one of the easiest ways to calculate the return on investment of your social listening strategy. If your customers are speaking more positively about your brand, this suggests that you have listened successfully to their concerns and acted accordingly.
One of the quickest ways to gain insights into brand sentiment is to monitor your mentions. How do customers talk about your brand in the comment section of your social posts? Are you being tagged in negative or positive posts that mention your brand?
Using tools like Mention, you can track your brand mentions in real-time.
This allows you to respond to sentiment shifts instantly and maintain high levels of customer service. For example, Champlain National Bank uses Mention to respond quickly to any negative sentiment online.
“Once we are notified of a negative comment, we can quickly respond to help resolve the problem, which we try to always handle with a phone call. The conversation almost always ends with ‘thank you so much. I can’t believe you cared about my issue and would reach out.’ Many times these people, who were so mad at us a few minutes before, will then go back online and update their original comment, to explain how we helped them. That’s always a fantastic result.”
You can also generate reports highlighting overall trends relating to your brand sentiment. Thus, you can map whether your overall score is rising or falling, determining the ROI of your social listening tactics.
Keep Track of Your Social Commerce Conversions
Conversion metrics can also be used to establish whether your social listening strategy is profitable.
You can track many different types of social media ‘conversions’ here. These include obvious stats, such as purchase data and other forms of conversions, such as signing up for a newsletter or downloading a brand app.
If your social listening strategy was employed to boost your social media conversions, mapping a pattern within your conversion metrics can help you determine how effective your current listening has been.
For example, if you have successfully listened to your social mentions and changed elements of your product marketing accordingly, you should see your conversions begin to rise due to improved customer satisfaction.
Are More Partnership Opportunities Opening Up?
A key sign that your social listening strategy is paying off is the flood of partnership requests in your inbox. Are more influencers talking about your brand on their social platforms? Are other brands looking to collaborate?
If you successfully understand the demographics and psychographics of key influencers within your target market, you’ll find that more famous faces will want to become affiliates of your brand.
You can track this by monitoring the success of your influencer marketing program. If you’re generating more leads from your current collaborations or seeing an influx of influencers looking to join, your strategy to increase positive brand awareness has likely been successful.
Calculate Your Social Listening ROI
While measuring general patterns and trends relating to your brand’s social media performance is a brilliant way to gain insight into the success of your social listening, you should take your ROI calculations one step further for an accurate result.
Here is the most common way to measure the exact ROI of social listening:
Social listening ROI = (net profit from social media campaigns ÷ total investment in social listening) x 100.
Calculate the total revenue generated from your social media campaigns to determine the net profit. Then, subtract any costs of these campaigns to get the net profit.
To calculate the total investment in social listening, sum up all the resources you’ve used, including the budget spent on social listening tools, as well as the salaries of the team members that are involved in social listening (by multiplying the number of hours spent with their hourly rate).
Let’s take an example:
If you’ve generated $50,000 from your social media campaigns, your social media listening software cost you $10,000 and your social listening team cost you $15,000 (300 hours at a $50 rate), the social listening ROI would be:
(50000 ÷ 25000) x 100 = 2
This means for each dollar spent on social listening, you’ve generated $2.
This formula will give you the return on your investment in employing social listening as a growth strategy for your social platforms.
This said, while achieving a high ROI percentage is the goal, the other metrics we have discussed, such as sentiment shifts, conversion rates, and an increase in positive brand mentions, also play a crucial role in determining the success of our social listening.
This is why it is essential to combine metrics from all angles to create an accurate picture of the profitability of your social listening efforts.
Wrapping Up
As the social listening scene heats up, you must monitor the success of your strategies.
Social media marketing spending is projected to reach $219.8 billion in 2024, meaning that brands will pay more than ever to build their online following.
Deploying a powerful social listening strategy can be the difference between those investments turning a profit and falling flat.
Take your social listening strategy to the next level with Mention. Start today to monitor your brand’s performance, engage with your audience, and boost your ROI!
