Of these conversations, less than half were positive. A proof point that illustrates what many social marketers already know: Presidential elections make social media a hard place to navigate, even if your brand isn’t inherently political. In a typical year, running social media for a brand account is complex. But during a year like this, the complexity and risk multiply tenfold.

To make it through this year unscathed, brands should consider what audiences actually expect from them, and have a plan in place to protect their brand safety.

Will brands sit this one out?

The dawn of social media activism—from #OccupyWallStreet to #ArabSpring to the 2016 US presidential election—changed people’s expectations of brands. Consumers started demanding that apolitical businesses take on a new level of corporate responsibility. According to Harvard Business Review, “Business has become enmeshed with politics and social issues…By 2018, CEO activism was seen as the ‘new normal.’”

In 2020, we saw brands speaking out more in response to the onset of the COVID pandemic, worldwide Black Lives Matter protests and growing concerns about climate change. So much so that brand activism on social became the expectation, and brands who remained silent on certain issues were heavily criticized.

But in the last few years, consumer demands have begun to shift again.

A few years ago, brands speaking out on issues was non-negotiable. But as The 2023 Sprout Social Index™ points out, today only 25% of consumers believe brands must speak out on causes and news that align with their values to be memorable. In fact, only 21% of consumers follow brands on social because their mission or values align. With skepticism around performative activism on the rise, audiences value brands that prioritize providing excellent service over lackluster public statements.

And it seems brands are growing weary of taking hard stances on political issues for fear that it could alienate members of their audience, invite a tidal wave of hate and trolling, or backfire in the future. When doing research for this article, no brands were willing to speak about their approach to this year’s election—suggesting brands are tired of being burnt by the harsh political limelight.

Some brands, like nonprofits and political associations, will inevitably need to be present in social media conversations about controversial topics. But even they will be selective about how they engage to reach their goals on social. They must be strategic in order to increase awareness, drive engagement and emerge from election season a thought leader. The key is being quick to the draw when it comes to sharing their unique POV on timely topics, and understanding which issues are important to their community. For example, Gen Z voters are particularly interested in mental health, while Gen X is more concerned about employment opportunities.

Though it’s still early, it seems likely that brands will be far less involved in this year’s US presidential election than in 2016, and instead focus on audience engagement and protecting their brand image.

The influencer loophole

While most brands might shy away from sharing explicit statements about their political affiliation, there might be one way they can still demonstrate their values: influencer marketing. Like Reformation’s latest campaign with Monica Lewinsky and Vote.org, some brands will rely on influencers and celebrities to communicate their brand values.

Interestingly, the Reformation campaign focuses most heavily on their new line of women’s tailored workwear and Lewinsky’s political icon status. Even the political message of the campaign—“get out and vote”—strikes a much less political tone than brand activations in 2020.

When looking for the right influencers to work with, consider how their political views will land with your target audience and reflect on your brand. Even if your influencer campaigns are apolitical, your brand will be associated with the influencers’ values. Which can work to your advantage.

As Greg Rokisky, Social Media Strategist at Sprout Social puts it, “When partnering with influencers and creators, the Sprout team examines potential partners’ overall content and presence to ensure they align with our core values. That doesn’t mean uniformity in thought or that we shy away from bold opinions…At the end of the day, these partnerships are meant to create meaningful connections and add value to our community.”

So, if you take the “influencer loophole” in your approach to this year’s election, make sure you do it thoughtfully, authentically and with your brand’s larger goals in mind. Rokisky goes on, “We know creators, like anyone, have their own views and the right to express them. Our focus is on the content that directly relates to our brand, products and the positive impact we hope to create for our current and potential customers and businesses everywhere.”

Social listening is critical to assessing brand health

Whether brands go all-in on an election strategy or dial it back, one thing is true: Businesses have far less control over their brand narrative in the age of social—and social media during an election year is even less predictable.

That’s why leaders from across the business should ask their social team for regular updates on brand health during a presidential election. With social listening tools, they can dive into the sentiment and scope of political topics on social, and monitor for impending crises.

For example, Sprout relies on listening even more in election years. “During the election we will use social listening to tune into conversations that could impact our brand health and image. We are more mindful of protecting our brand from a crisis during the election because tensions are running high, and it increases the risk for every brand online—even B2B SaaS brands,” says Olivia Jepson, Senior Social Media Strategist at Sprout Social.

Sentiment analysis is particularly helpful to gauge the tone of political conversations, and how they intersect with brand health and industry trends.

Social listening isn’t just relevant for this year’s upcoming US presidential election. It’s just as valuable to elections happening around the world. With 64 countries holding national elections this year, potential voters make up 49% of the world’s population. By using a Social Listening solution like Sprout’s, teams can set up queries that track millions of conversations happening worldwide to zero-in on key learnings in seconds and ensure they protect their brand globally.

What it takes for brands to “win” in this election season

Managing social in a presidential election year can feel uncomfortable and nerve-wracking. Like you’re walking on eggshells—one misstep away from your brand cracking under pressure.

But changing consumer preferences suggest many want brands to stay in their lane, and only speak about issues selectively. While this takes some of the heat off of brands, the risk is still high. Companies that want to emerge from election year relatively unscathed and with their goals achieved, need to take more care safeguarding their brand.

Looking for help maximizing your brand protection strategy this election year? Check out our communications plan templates and webinar.

The post Navigating social media marketing in an election year appeared first on Sprout Social.

In total, they have 64 social media accounts and hundreds of thousands of followers across platforms. I was surprised to learn the team behind Nelnet’s vast social presence is only a team of two (who work with customer care and marketing groups across the company).

I interviewed Dan Levey, Social Media Manager and Team Lead at Nelnet, to learn how his “small and scrappy team” balances their limited resources across a wide range of business lines. He explained the relationship building and resource prioritization required to manage multiple accounts effectively. Keep reading for his tips to allocate social resources—especially for nimble teams with bandwidth constraints.

The dream team: How social team structures can support product portfolio marketing

According to Dan, “The Nelnet social team sits on the corporate marketing org, and functions like an in-house agency for Nelnet’s various brands—each with different goals and identities on social.”

Dan leads the team strategy by consulting on strategy, best practices, and interpreting key campaign metrics and trends. The Social Media Specialist who reports to Dan handles scheduling, pulling metrics and monitoring conversations across social channels. Together, the duo conducts social listening research and generates monthly reports for relevant business lines and internal teams. The team also partners on content production with other in-house creatives, like copywriters, graphic designers, project managers and video producers, and consults the legal and compliance team to remain compliant with industry rules and regulations.

To ease collaboration with each of the business lines they serve, Dan created a presentation within his first few months at Nelnet that explains the breadth of the social team’s capabilities and the different skills they can offer each business. “We are here to educate the partners on best practices and what goes into social media management and strategy,” Dan said. “The big misconception about social is that it’s easy. It’s so much more than posting. It’s A/B testing, reporting, interacting with audience members and more.”

He shares the presentation with each business marketing leader, who mix and match the services they need á la carte. Dan explains, “The presentation I created lists each of our capabilities, including creating content, strategy, end-to-end production, graphics, social listening, reporting and regular check-in meetings. Each of our business lines needs different things.”

Make it your own: Whether your social team functions like an in-house agency or uses a center of excellence model, it’s critical that they have open lines of communication with each brand or business line. Give social team leaders a seat at the table, and encourage them to build relationships and educate other leaders about what goes into managing (and maximizing) social.

Accomplishing each brand’s goals requires having hard conversations

Managing multiple brand accounts does not mean copying and pasting your approach to social from one brand to another. Every brand or business line has their own objectives and audiences.

As Dan explains, “Each business line wants to accomplish different things. For example, some are more focused on organic growth, while others are more invested in paid campaigns.” It’s up to Dan, his team and the business lines to decide where they can spend their time and resources, and consider how to prioritize projects with company-wide goals in mind.

Dan’s team adapts their approach to social strategy accordingly, while also being honest with stakeholders about what’s feasible for a small team. Dan often pushes back in conversations with partners by asking, “What goal are you trying to accomplish? What’s the greater purpose of this proposed project?”

The Nelnet social team has a comprehensive view of brand performance and company-wide strategy, which gives them a unique and valuable perspective. Dan is tasked with keeping each business line grounded in their own goals and the business’ vision.

He brings valuable insights to these conversations with the help of Sprout Social’s Smart Inbox and Social Listening solution. As Dan says, “We use Sprout’s Automated Rules and Social Listening tools to give us alerts on brand sentiment, competitive analysis and customer satisfaction.”

Make it your own: Trust social team leaders when they say it’s impossible to achieve every goal. Be their champion when they ruthlessly prioritize projects. Use the performance intel they share to shape your company’s goals, and keep them in the loop of the larger business strategy.

Ensure all of your brands get the right level of support

One of the most challenging things the Nelnet social team faces is the fear of making any of the internal partners they work with feel like other business lines are being prioritized over them. As Dan puts it, “How do we make every business line feel like they’re getting the right amount of support?”

This is especially challenging when they need to shift resources from one product line to another—whether it’s because corporate goals changed or a campaign is falling short of expectations. In those moments, Dan relies on the trust and relationships he’s built with stakeholders. In his words, he has a “heart-to-heart” with internal partners to let them know they need to pull back social team resources.

Sometimes, the conversations result in business leaders being more invested in their social strategy, and signing their own teams up to take a more active role in social management. Through compromises like these, the social team is able to free up bandwidth and nurture more meaningful stakeholder collaboration.

Make it your own: In the face of tight budgets and plateaued headcount, make sure your org has the right tools to do more with less. With collaborative enterprise social media software, the social team and other departments can co-manage social together—ensuring no brands slips through the cracks and there are enough resources to go around.

Set all your brands up for success on social media

Dan sums up his approach to managing different internal clients like this: “Be realistic about what you can accomplish. Set clear expectations that are tied to their goals. Over communicate.”

When your social team faces an overwhelming amount of requests from your many brands, remind them to seek simplicity and go back to the basics of building relationships. Advise them to be honest, accountable and transparent.

To help them more easily share results from social across your company, use our social media scorecard templates to give leaders a digestible view of their brand’s (and your company’s overall) health and strategy.

The post Balancing social resources across multiple business lines appeared first on Sprout Social.

Skillful brand storytelling requires using insights about your audience so you can connect with them, iterate your storytelling and, ultimately, impact your marketing strategy and brand reputation.

You can use feedback from your audience on social media to build brand loyalty and make your brand’s story unforgettable. In this article we’ll cover why a brand story is so important and show you how to create a strong narrative that resonates. And we’ll share four brand storytelling examples to inspire you.

What is brand storytelling?

Have you ever felt so connected to a brand that using their product or service made you feel like the person you aspire to be? That’s successful brand storytelling.

At its core, brand storytelling establishes emotional connections with people based on the values you share with them and their needs, desires and aspirations. Innovative brand stories convey empathy, create experiences and demand urgency.

“Telling a brand’s story begins with finding its truth. Whether in social or broadcast or any medium in between, consumers will seek out brands that feel authentic to both their values and what they want from a product or company. Once we’ve mined that truth we then convert it into an outward-facing message that can be disseminated and interpreted in every channel to every audience.”

— Peter Levin, Creative Director at Finn Partners

Your brand’s story impacts your entire public relations strategy—from the way your executives should sound or respond to a crisis to how you build your social media presence. Your story should be a throughline across channels.

Why do you need a brand story?

There are several benefits of having a brand story. An effective brand story will connect you to your target consumers, support your social media marketing efforts and inspire your customers to take action.

A brand story connects you to your customers

Customer care goes beyond fulfilling support inquiries and answering questions before people make a purchase—it’s about nurturing an emotional connection with customers and fostering loyalty. A brand story enables you to shed light on these empathetic customer touch points and merchandizes your brand’s values.

Storytelling is a core element of social media marketing

Brand storytelling is a cornerstone of social media marketing strategy. Every post on Instagram or video on TikTok or YouTube Shorts ladder up to your brand narrative. For example, if you were to post a behind-the-scenes look at how your brand sources materials on social media, that’s a part of your brand story.

Brand stories inspire action

Effective brand storytelling not only evokes an emotional connection, but it ignites your target audience to interact with your brand. Whether it’s purchasing a new product or becoming an advocate, authentic brand storytelling can inspire you to take action.

How to create a strong brand story

Where should you start when creating your brand’s story? Here are six steps to follow to help your story make an impact.

Start with your customer

To craft a brand story that’s compelling, you’ll need to define and consider your target audience. Use buyer personas or archetypes that embody the traits of your target audience. Think of your customers as the protagonist of your story. What problems do they face? What are their wants and needs? What are their behaviors and interests?

Through user surveys and research like social listening, you can uncover more about your customer and shape a stronger brand story.

Use narrative techniques

People are drawn to stories. The foundation of good brand stories is the same as your favorite movies, shows and books. Characters. Settings. Conflict. Climax. Resolution. By incorporating these five essential elements into your brand’s story, you make it possible to build emotional connections with your audience. And when you emotionally connect with them, you increase brand recall and transform your audience into brand evangelists.

Have a clear purpose

Your brand’s story needs to have a defined purpose so you can guide the narrative in the right direction. Try to narrow down the purpose of your story into one or two sentences. What is your brand trying to accomplish? For example, an organic personal care brand may want to help people embrace self-care through eco-friendly products.

Lean into authenticity

The most compelling stories glow with authenticity. Avoid creating stories for the sake of jumping on a trend. Instead, stay true to your brand’s identity when telling your story. Lean into refining your brand voice and stay true to it. Don’t feel pressured to use colloquial language or internet slang, unless it makes sense for your brand. Use your brand’s legacy, aspirations and values as your north star.

Patagonia is a great example of a brand leaning into authenticity. Some of their values include quality, integrity, justice and environmentalism.

Collaborate with your audience

It’s not just your team that needs to align on your story. Today, brand identities aren’t created in an incubator. Instead, creators, loyal fans and marketers work together to co-create a brand’s essence. To tell brand stories that resonate with your audience, you need to get their perspective. Social media is where you can find it.

Keep brand storytelling consistent

Maintain consistent storytelling to stay connected with your audience. Your audience should feel like they know what to expect from your brand. If your messaging and brand voice isn’t cohesive or consistent, your brand story won’t be as strong.

Tell a brand story that resonates

On social media, people tell brands exactly what they want. They share their thoughts, feelings and opinions about brands, products, current events and more. Listen to them first, develop your story second.

Why? Because they want to know your brand empathizes with their needs and aligns with their values. According to The Sprout Social Index™, transparency about business practices and values is ranked as the second type of content consumers say they don’t see enough of on social media.

“If you can get a pulse from your audience in the comments section, DMs or via AMA, that qualitative data can help inform creative and content strategies, your editorial calendar and even your larger marketing strategy. It’s an awesome focus group at your disposal 24/7 that can help you refine your brand story on social and beyond.”

– Alex Suazo, VP Digital Marketing & Social at Finn Partners

Let’s dive into the specific aspects of social media that help brands interact with their audience and uncover voice of customer (VoC) data.

Comments

The easiest way to access your customers’ feedback is by monitoring your comments section and mentions. They’ll let you know what they love about their experience with you.

For example, Cava posted a response video on TikTok about one of their most commented menu items: roasted sweet potatoes. In the video, the restaurant chain shares that they brought back the highly requested menu item and showed how they’re prepared. Cava’s seasonally sourced ingredients and in-house preparations are a key part of their brand story and customer experience. Fans were quick to sound off in the comments to share their love for the brand’s sweet potatoes, among other favorites.

On the other hand, when customers experience a roadblock in their journey with you, they’ll let you know by mentioning you or commenting on your posts. Whether they have a customer care concern or disagree with your approach to social media activism, consider negative feedback a learning opportunity. Use it as data to help shape your future brand storytelling.

Polls

When you want to know your audience’s perspective, don’t be afraid to ask. Creating interactive polls on social platforms is a great way to get hot takes on industry-specific debates or product preferences. Polls are a low-lift way to build an engaged community that’s more likely to provide their opinions in the future.

It’s important to note your poll should be appropriate for your followers. Consider what’s in it for them and why they’d want to participate. For example, could they learn something about industry best practices? Do they feel like they have a voice in your company’s stance on an issue?

Monitoring engagement

It’s easy to miss social media engagements, especially when your social team monitors multiple accounts and channels. It’s further complicated when posts only mention your brand by a variation of your name or shout out a product rather than reaching out to you directly. Social media monitoring tools make it easier to catch these instances.

Sprout’s Smart Inbox unifies all social channels into a single stream so your team can efficiently respond to untagged mentions of your brand keywords and hashtags from all channels in one place—even if your brand isn’t tagged. The Smart Inbox also allows you to see incoming messages, comments and mentions, so you never miss a detail that could shape your brand story.

How social listening can help boost brand storytelling

While monitoring tells you what people are saying, listening tells you why they’re saying it. With social listening, you can better understand your audience and improve your brand’s story by accessing the full spectrum of conversations around your industry, brand and competitors.

You get a window into the candid thoughts and feelings of an audience to illuminate trends, uncover patterns and gauge emotional response around any topic.

“Listening helps brands stay relevant. Without listening, you have to dig through a sea of social messages or conduct surveys and focus groups. Listening streamlines that process and ensures brands can keep up with the speed of the social trend cycle.”

— Kristin Johnson, former VP of Content and Communications at Sprout Social

Here are some ways you can use social listening to boost your online reputation and create a new, unique brand story.

Build stronger relationships

If you’re feeling out of touch with your audience, the first step is to discover opportunities to build stronger relationships with your community.

Ask yourself:

• How do our customers feel about us?
• What makes customers want to share about our brand?
• Is our campaign resonating? Why or why not?

In Sprout’s Listening tool, you can review sentiment trends related to your brand. For example, note how positive and negative feelings have evolved over time. Consider how sentiment aligns with your ongoing campaigns, PR efforts or other current events.

Improve your products or services

In many cases, creating a new brand story includes improving products or services. Use customer feedback on social media to refine your product development or service experience.

Ask yourself:

• Why do people like or dislike our brand and products or services?
• How do our products or services align with our customers’ values?
• How do our customers respond to the stories around our products or services?

Sprout’s Listening tool allows you to monitor keywords related to your products. This makes it possible to identify new trends that can help shape your product and service improvements and launches.

Join industry conversations

Innovative brands on social don’t miss a chance to join—and even start—conversations. To make sure you’re in the know, it’s important to be aware of where and why conversations are taking place.

Ask yourself:

• Why are certain hashtags and discussions trending in our industry?
• Why is our audience responding to an event or trend?
• What are people saying about our competitors (and their products or services)?

It’s natural to have a fear of missing out on trending conversations. In Sprout’s Listening tool, you can add themes related to trends and events relevant to your brand’s story to determine how they resonate with your audience. You can also visualize how your brand stacks up against your competitors by comparing share of voice and volume.

Authentic brand storytelling examples that connect with audiences

So, what does it look like to use social media data to tell compelling brand stories? Here are a few examples of brands leading the way.

Calm

The story: Health and happiness in our daily lives starts with meditation, mindfulness and better sleep.

Calm is an app created to help guide users through meditations, soundscapes and mindfulness exercises. With Calm, mental health and wellness feel less complicated. They reinforce why meditation is an important tool and how their app makes it easier.

Calm not only relies on feedback from social media to refine the user experience of their app, but also to keep a pulse on the direction of mental health and wellness trends.

Nuuly

The story: Rented and thrifted clothing is eco-friendly and stylish—while also saving you money.

Nuuly is a retail brand that offers a clothing rental program and thrifted merchandise. They make on-trend, high-quality styles available to everyone. Nuuly customers take pride in using the brand because it’s sustainable, financially sound and exceptional caliber.

Nuuly uses social insights to stay current on en vogue style, and make sure they’re in alignment with their customers’ values and needs. They also use social monitoring to respond to and research their audience. For example, Nuuly linked to their formal dresses page after a customer recommended using their site to find an affordable black tie dress:

Greenpeace UK

The story: We need to take immediate and radical action to fight climate change.

Greenpeace UK is a branch of Greenpeace, a global campaigning network dedicated to protecting the planet. On social media, Greenpeace UK uses visual imagery to convey the truth of the destruction to the planet, while also providing hope and inspiration.

For example, they shared a trailer for Forsaken, a film installation highlighting the life of Immortal Jellyfish and their mass extinction on Earth:

In the thread, Greenpeace UK explains they’re supporting the film because it’s as a reminder of how humans can negatively impact oceans, but note it’s not too late to protect them:

Greenpeace UK also partners with local politicians and environmental activists to serve as ambassadors to help tell their story. For instance a conservationist advocated for their #BigPlasticCount campaign:

This aligns with Greenpeace UK’s approach: every good story needs good visuals and strong brand advocates.

Target

The story: America’s happy place.

Target is a store for everything. The Target brand has been around for over 100 years, but they constantly reinvent themselves to continue providing the best shopping experience for their customers.

Today, they partner with influencers like Tabitha Brown to offer trendy clothing, food, skincare and hair care products, electronics, toys and more. People choose Target when they want a bit of extra joy in their life—whether it’s from recreating online aesthetics at home or being delighted in store.

Target looks to social media to understand emerging trends, how they can infuse more joy into people’s experiences with their brand and what their next collaboration should look like.

Use social media to create an impactful brand story

Brand storytelling is an essential part of your overall marketing strategy. To tell better stories, you have to listen to what people are saying. That starts with social monitoring, but can’t stop there. Social listening is critical to understanding people’s experiences with your brand because the best storytellers are engaged listeners.

Looking to learn more about how you can grow and protect your brand? Download this corporate communication plan template—it guides you through creating a calendar roadmap with quarterly initiatives, crafting a distribution strategy and more.

The post Brand storytelling: Creating a story that resonates appeared first on Sprout Social.

Customer sentiment, brand perception and cultural trends can change in minutes. Yet, getting the most value from social business intelligence requires the ability to access and take action quickly. From understanding the pulse of social trends to fine-tuning your customer care strategy, or informing your go-to-market plans, social data should be leveraged in all parts of your business.

Check out our panel discussion with Alex Lewis, Sr. Social Strategist at Hollister & Gilly Hicks, Deandre Moore, Social & Brand Marketing Lead at Affirm, and Jazmin Griffith, Social Intelligence Consultant. We’ll discuss why social data is the missing link for brands to best connect with their audiences. Plus, Corporate Erin stops by!

You’ll walk away from this event with:

• Key takeaways from new research on social media marketer productivity
• Reasons why your brand should embrace social listening
• Examples of how brands leverage social data to inform social and business strategy

Your Speakers:

The post Building Data-Powered Social Strategies: Insights from Hollister, Affirm, and Consultant, Jazmin Griffith appeared first on Sprout Social.

Literally: The Sprout Social Index™ found 51% of consumers agree responding to customers on social media makes brands the most memorable. Despite popular belief, your online reputation isn’t something that’s totally beyond your control.

If you want more positive reviews and glowing praise from your customers, you need an actual reputation management strategy. In this guide, we’ll show you how to put together your own.

What is social media reputation management?

Social media reputation management refers to the process of monitoring social networks to shape and maintain a positive perception online. Along with monitoring social networks, it can include reviewing online reviews on channels like Yelp and Google Reviews. Building a social media reputation requires frequent observation because your audience’s perception of your brand fluctuates over time.

It involves posting content, responding to feedback, conducting performance audits and using social listening data to uncover how your audience views your brand. Overall, social media reputation management aims to build and nurture trustworthy, long-standing relationships with your audience.

Why do you need a social media reputation management strategy?

We get it: some businesses might be skeptical of why ratings, reviews and positive comments hold so much weight.

Because if you know that you’re doing good business, who cares what other people are saying?

And besides, it’s easier to put on blinders and ignore your haters than it is to face your critics head-on. However, consider the following trends that highlight the importance of managing social media reputation:

Consumers are increasingly dependent on third-party reviews

It’s not a stretch to say that businesses live and die based on customer feedback.

People overwhelmingly rely on reviews when it comes to purchasing decisions. A survey from BrightLocal shows 76% of consumers regularly read online reviews when browsing for local businesses. And 46% of consumers feel that online business reviews are as trustworthy as personal recommendations from friends or family.

These stats illustrate the power of reputation management. Customers view brands with more positive reviews and recommendations as genuine and credible.

There’s massive demand for customer feedback and consumers aren’t shy about delivering it. Want evidence? Look no further than the millions of users on sites like Yelp.

Or the hundreds of categories scattered around sites like G2, a peer-to-peer review site for business software.

Or the millions of reviews on Google Reviews and Trustpilot:

You can sing your own praises all day long, but consumers are on the hunt for authentic, third-party reviews for peace of mind. The more of ’em you have, the better.

Digital word-of-mouth is crucial to growing your audience

Data from The Sprout Social Index™ found 68% of consumers say they primarily follow brands on social media to stay informed about new products or services.

Like it or not, people talk. A lot. Your own customers can do some serious legwork by marketing on your behalf, granted they’re satisfied with your service.

The takeaway here? Digital word-of-mouth marketing remains powerful because more conversations around your brand on social media represent additional opportunities to win customers and followers.

Customers hold the reins when it comes to your social media reputation

This is perhaps the biggest challenge of social media reputation management. Social media is authentic and unfiltered. That’s why it’s a great place to discover products and customer feedback—people can pretty much say whatever they want, for better or worse.

As a business, this presents a distinct challenge. Just as satisfied customers are empowered to hype you up, you can’t control your worst critics. That said, you’re still responsible for what they say–responses to reviews and using feedback to improve your products and services are essential parts of your overall reputation management process.

A 5-step social media reputation management strategy for your business

Now that we’ve acknowledged how much brand reputation management matters, let’s talk about the proactive steps you can take to improve your own. The following five step strategy is fair game for businesses both big and small.

1. Determine where your online reputation currently stands

First things first: you need to figure out how people feel about your brand right now.

Are your customers happy and satisfied? Are you struggling with naysayers? Perhaps you’re somewhere in-between?

Digging into a combination of qualitative and quantitative data can help clue you in on where your reputation stands. This includes:

• Social media posts, comments and @-mentions from customers and competitors
• Online reviews and star ratings from third-party review sites
• Mentions from industry blogs or trade publications
• Feedback gathered from actual customers (think: emails, customer surveys, contact forms on your website)

The key here is to look at the ratio of positive versus negative comments. If your customer sentiment seems to err on the positive side, that’s good! If not, you have some work to do.

The health of your social media reputation can be difficult to quantify manually. That’s where a platform like Sprout Social that offers social media reputation management tools can help.

For example, our sentiment analysis features can take mentions and turn them into a meaningful, quantifiable metric that you can track.

You can use your sentiment analysis summary as a starting point which you can monitor or strive to improve. Our platform also highlights trends in your customer sentiment (think: positive versus negative and neutral comments) over time without you having to sort them out manually.

Beyond comments are those ever-so-important reviews. Creating an online review management strategy to address feedback on third-party sites will enable your brand to maintain a full view of your customers’ opinions.

Another key feature of Sprout is the ability to wrangle all of your reviews from social media and beyond in a single platform. This gives you a more comprehensive view of your social media reputation and what your customers have to say about you without having to bounce between platforms.

2. Track your company’s mentions (the good, bad and ugly)

Social media reputation management is an ongoing process.

Once you determine where your reputation stands, you need to set up your business to be able to respond to customers swiftly in the future.

This means setting up real-time notifications and listening for the following:

• Comments, tags and @-mentions of your business (e.g. @SproutSocial)
• Hashtag analytics including brand-specific hashtags (e.g. #SproutSocial or #SproutChat)
• Branded keywords (e.g. recognizing “Sprout Social” and “Sprout” as keywords across networks)

Having a pulse on these elements makes it easier to craft the appropriate best practices to follow when someone has a question, concern or reason to shout you out.

This once again highlights the benefit of using a platform like Sprout. With Sprout, you can consolidate all of your social messages and mentions in a single inbox. You can likewise share your various dashboard(s) among your teammates to cover more ground and speed up your social media response time.

Our Index data shows that 76% of consumers value how quickly a brand can respond to their needs. And over half (69%) expect responses from brands on social within 24 hours or less.

3. Be proactive and positive as you respond to your social mentions

Whether it’s a concern or a compliment, social mentions represent prime opportunities to make a positive impression on customers and improve your social media reputation.

Doing so comes down to having a strategy for social customer service. Some key tips for responding to customers include:

• Personalizing each reply rather than just using a generic one
• Always give yourself the last word by saying “thanks”
• Moving questions or concerns off of social media to avoid unnecessary conflict or back-and-forth

It might sound cheesy, but a positive, proactive attitude goes a long way in social media reputation management. This rings true whether it’s answering a customer question or simply responding to shout-outs like in the example below:

4. Take control of your company’s narrative (and make it positive)

As noted, the key challenge of social media reputation management is that online comments are pretty much a free-for-all.

Arguably the best approach to combat the negative is by encouraging your own positive praise.

And yes, there are ways to do so beyond begging (which you definitely shouldn’t do).

For example, you might consider publishing success stories and existing positive reviews from your satisfied customers. This can help highlight positive experiences to your social prospects who might not have checked out any third-party reviews yet.

Beyond customer comments, employee advocacy and mentions from your own team can also create more positive sentiment. Don’t be shy about re-posting your customers’ positive responses or shout-outs, either. This includes asking for permission to republish user-generated content to use in your future marketing.

5. Take action based on comments, criticism and analytics

Finally, consider the power of listening to what your customers have to say.

Maybe they’re glowing over your recent customer service initiatives. Perhaps they’re unhappy about recent pricing changes.

Either way, don’t just take those comments in stride. Instead, listen to such feedback and make changes to your business accordingly.

And yet again, this is where Sprout can help. Digging into your listening data, you can uncover specific terms that pop up in your customer conversations to help you understand what you’re doing right and where you can improve.

The same applies to your third-party ratings, reviews and mentions. Being a business today means having a thick skin, but it also means taking criticism where it’s due.

Based on all of the above, you can circle back to square one to understand how your reputation management efforts are paying off and whether you’re moving the needle in a positive direction.

Top social media reputation management tools

As we mentioned earlier, manually monitoring and reviewing customer feedback is time-consuming. Using a for business can make a huge difference. Here’s a quick round-up of five tools so you can find the best review management software for your brand:

Sprout Social

Choosing the best social media reputation management software will depend on your business’s unique needs, but Sprout Social integrates with many top review networks to fit various needs. These networks include Facebook Pages, Google Reviews, TripAdvisor, Yelp and Glassdoor, which are the most popular in terms of volume and reach. We also offer integrations for the app stores (Google Play and Apple App Store).

With the Reviews Overview report, view a summary of your customer feedback. It includes vital metrics like reply rate and review volume. The report is part of Sprout’s larger customer care solution. Sprout creates a seamless experience across channels by enabling users to monitor multiple conversations, all the while providing priority metrics and automated reports so you can ensure your social customer service strategy is effective and efficient.

Brand24

Brand24 is another helpful tool for social media reputation management. Users can create projects to track online conversations about your brand and industry peers. You can also explore by searching mentions by campaign, analyze sentiment and create reports.

Mention

Mention is a social media management tool that offers a variety of features you can use to manage your reputation. Mention offers the ability to track specific keywords and various filtering options so you can narrow down the @-mentions and feedback that is most relevant and meaningful for your brand.

Birdeye

Birdeye is another leading platform for social media reputation management. Birdeye collects reviews from review sites and 150+ different platforms, giving users a comprehensive view of their business’ online reputation. You can organize feedback by filtering (rating number, region, product, etc.) them into custom fields. Similar to the other social media reputation management software, it centralizes reviews in a singular platform.

Broadly

Supporting over 3,000 local businesses, Broadly is a great option for small businesses looking to maintain a positive online reputation. Users have the option to automate review requests from customers. Broadly offers the ability to monitor and respond to reviews from Google, Facebook and more within a central platform as well.

Is online reputation management a top priority for your business?

Listen: Your brand’s reputation matters.

Rather than treat it as something beyond your control, you should take steps to secure and boost your social media reputation sooner rather than later.

This means both listening and reacting to conversations related to your business. With social media management tools like Sprout Social, you can roll out a more effective and efficient strategy on social media and beyond.

And if you haven’t already, take a test-drive of Sprout’s full suite of social listening and reputation management features today by signing up for a personalized demo.

The post Social media reputation management: How to stay in good standing with your audience appeared first on Sprout Social.

Decoding those emotions and understanding how customers truly feel about your brand is what sentiment analysis is all about.

But tracking sentiment is no piece of cake.

We’re talking about analyzing thousands of conversations, brand mentions and reviews spread across multiple websites and platforms—some of them happening in real-time.

You need a sentiment analysis tool for the job.

In this post, you’ll find some of the best sentiment analysis tools to help you monitor and analyze customer sentiment around your brand.

• What is a sentiment analysis tool?
• Applications of a sentiment analysis tool
• Top 15 sentiment analysis tools to consider
• Use sentiment analysis tools to make data-driven decisions back by AI

What is a sentiment analysis tool?

A sentiment analysis tool uses artificial intelligence (AI) to analyze textual data and pick up on the emotions people are expressing, like joy, frustration or disappointment.

It leverages natural language processing (NLP) to understand the context behind social media posts, reviews and feedback—much like a human but at a much faster rate and larger scale.

Then, it calculates the average sentiment around your brand, classifying it as positive, negative or neutral. Some tools also help you monitor your competitors’ customer sentiment score.

Some sentiment analysis tools can also analyze video content and identify expressions by using facial and object recognition technology.

In the context of AI marketing, sentiment analysis tools help businesses gain insight into public perception, identify emerging trends, improve customer care and experience, and craft more targeted campaigns that resonate with buyers and drive business growth.

Applications of a sentiment analysis tool

Sentiment analysis tools are revolutionizing how businesses understand and respond to customers. Here are some specific ways brands can benefit from these tools:

• Social Listening: Keep an eye on customer opinions and reactions to brands, products, services, campaigns, events and trends on social media.
• Review Management: Analyze customer feedback across multiple platforms and respond promptly and empathetically to improve customer satisfaction.
• Competitive Analysis: Compare sentiment towards your brand with competitors to understand where you stand in terms of positioning and public perception.
• Brand Insights: Gather and interpret data on brand reputation, customer experience, and product strengths and weaknesses to develop a solid brand strategy.
• Opinion Mining: Analyze both customer and employee feedback to get a clear picture of your company’s performance and identify areas for improvement.

Top 15 sentiment analysis tools to consider

Full stack sentiment analysis tools

These tools can pull information from multiple sources and employ techniques like linear regression to detect fraud and authenticate data. They also run on proprietary AI technology, which makes them powerful, flexible and scalable for all kinds of businesses.

1. Sprout Social

Sprout Social offers all-in-one social media management solutions, including AI-powered listening and granular sentiment analysis.

Monitor millions of conversations happening in your industry across multiple platforms. Sprout’s AI can detect sentiment in complex sentences and even emojis, giving you an accurate picture of how customers truly think and feel about specific topics or brands.

View the average customer sentiment around your brand and track sentiment trends over time. Filter individual messages and posts by sentiment to respond quickly and effectively.

Sprout also supports multilingual sentiment analysis, which helps you understand and resonate with a diverse, international customer base. Access a full scope of data tagged and filtered by smart category, without changing your query, whether by people, place, product or more. Furthermore, our Queries by AI Assist feature generates keyword suggestions for Listening queries that can further enhance your analysis landscape

2. InMoment (Lexalytics)

InMoment is a customer experience platform that uses Lexalytics’ AI to analyze text from multiple sources and translate it into meaningful insights.

It supports over 30 languages and dialects, and can dig deep into surveys and reviews to find the sentiment, intent, effort and emotion behind the words.

3. Medallia

Medallia’s experience management platform offers powerful listening features that can pinpoint sentiment in text, speech and even video.

The platform excels in collecting and analyzing real-time feedback from multiple sources, including social media, surveys, reviews, SMS, emails, voice conversations and more.

4. Qualtrics (Clarabridge)

Qualtrics is an experience management platform that offers Text iQ—a sentiment analysis tool that leverages advanced NLP technology to analyze unstructured data from various sources, including social media, surveys and customer support interactions.

The tool can automatically categorize feedback into themes, making it easier to identify common trends and issues. It can also assign sentiment scores to quantifies emotions and and analyze text in multiple languages.

Social media sentiment analysis tools

Focusing specifically on social media platforms, these tools are designed to analyze sentiment expressed in tweets, posts and comments. They help businesses better understand their social media presence and how their audience feels about their brand.

5. Brandwatch

Brandwatch offers a suite of tools for social media research and management. Their listening tool helps you analyze sentiment along with tracking brand mentions and conversations across various social media platforms.

Classify sentiment in messages and posts as positive, negative or neutral, track changes in sentiment over time and view the overall sentiment score on your dashboard.

6. Buffer

Buffer offers easy-to-use social media management tools that help with publishing, analyzing performance and engagement.

One of the tool’s features is tagging the sentiment in posts as ‘negative, ‘question’ or ‘order’ so brands can sort through conversations, and plan and prioritize their responses.

7. Agorapulse

Agorapulse is another social media management software that specializes in publishing and organizing your inbox.

It offers basic sentiment analysis capabilities in that it lets you add labels like “positive” and “negative” to inbox items that contain specific words, such as “happy”, “great”, “bad” or “awful.”

Add labels to messages manually or use the Inbox Assistant to automatically go through your messages and label all relevant items that contain the specified keywords.

8. Awario

Awario is a specialized brand monitoring tool that helps you track mentions across various social media platforms and identify the sentiment in each comment, post or review.

You can track sentiment over time, prevent crises from escalating by prioritizing mentions with negative sentiment, compare sentiment with competitors and analyze reactions to campaigns.

News sentiment analysis tools

These tools specialize in monitoring and analyzing sentiment in news content. They use News APIs to mine data and provide insights into how the media portrays a brand or topic.

9. Aylien (Quantexa)

Aylien uses AI to monitor, organize and analyze sentiment in news content. This makes it a valuable tool for PR and communications teams to keep an eye on trends and monitor public opinion and perception about brands and topics.

A key feature of the tool is entity-level sentiment analysis, which determines the sentiment behind each individual entity discussed in a single news piece.

10. Cision Communication Cloud

Cision is an AI-powered PR platform with robust media monitoring capabilities.

Its features include sentiment analysis of news stories pulled from over 100 million sources in 96 languages, including global, national, regional, local, print and paywalled publications.

11. Meltwater

Meltwater’s AI-powered tools help you monitor trends and public opinion about your brand. Their sentiment analysis feature breaks down the tone of news content into positive, negative or neutral using deep-learning technology.

The tool can handle 242 languages, offering detailed sentiment analysis for 218 of them. This makes it versatile and useful for tracking global news sentiment.

Text sentiment analysis tools

These tools run on proprietary AI technology but don’t have a built-in source of data tapped via direct APIs, such as through partnerships with social media or news platforms.

12. MonkeyLearn

MonkeyLearn is a simple, straightforward text analysis tool that lets you organize, label and visualize data like customer feedback, surveys and more.

The tool uses AI to detect, categorize and track sentiment over time. You can use ready-made machine learning models or build and train your own without coding. MonkeyLearn also connects easily to apps and BI tools using SQL, API and native integrations.

13. Google NLP API

Google NLP API is a text analysis tool designed to extract insights and opinions from various documents, including emails, chats and social media, through entity and sentiment analysis.

It supports multimedia content by integrating with Speech-to-Text and Vision APIs to analyze audio files and scanned documents. Plus, its Translation API can analyze sentiment across multiple languages.

14. Amazon Comprehend

Amazon’s text analysis tool goes through documents, emails, social media and customer support tickets to uncover insights. It identifies key elements such as phrases, sentiment and topics, and even lets businesses train models to classify documents.

Moreover, it helps maintain data privacy and protects sensitive information by identifying and redacting Personally Identifiable Information (PII).

15. Microsoft Azure

Azure AI Language lets you build natural language processing applications with minimal machine learning expertise. Pinpoint key terms, analyze sentiment, summarize text and develop conversational interfaces.

The platform offers multilingual models that adapt across languages. Azure also maintains strict privacy standards by using text inputs exclusively for training models.

Use sentiment analysis tools to make data-driven decisions backed by AI

AI-powered sentiment analysis tools make it incredibly easy for businesses to understand and respond effectively to customer emotions and opinions.

While there are dozens of tools out there, Sprout Social stands out with its proprietary AI and advanced sentiment analysis and listening features. Try it for yourself with a free 30-day trial and transform customer sentiment into actionable insights for your brand.

The post Top 15 sentiment analysis tools to consider in 2024 appeared first on Sprout Social.

According to The 2023 State of Social Media Report, 91% of business leaders agree that their company’s success will depend on how effectively it can use social data and insights to inform business strategy.

Putting your social interactions into context can uncover new opportunities to grow and expand. Social media monitoring tools can help you do just that.

Below, we’ve broken down some of the best social media monitoring tools out there. We’ve also included tips to help you craft a successful social media monitoring strategy.

Table of contents:

• What is social media monitoring?
• Benefits of social media monitoring
• Social media monitoring tools to use
• Tips for social media monitoring

What is social media monitoring?

Social media monitoring is the process of tracking and reacting to social engagements. These engagements include @mentions, comments, #hashtags and keywords related to your brand.

Despite the name, “monitoring” is not a passive activity. Brands should track everything from shout-outs and reviews to questions and complaints. More importantly, brands must react to all of the above. This is the distinction between social monitoring and listening.

Social media monitoring involves much more than just direct mentions and branded keywords, too. For example, a competitor call-out presents an opportunity for your brand to intervene. The same rings true for people asking for product recommendations.

The problem? These types of conversations don’t typically pop up in your notifications. This is especially true if you’re active on multiple networks. That’s why brands use social media monitoring tools to supplement their native data.

4 benefits of social media monitoring

Using data to fuel your campaigns is always a smart move. But what kind of data does social monitoring help you get? How can you use it to grow your business?

Here are some specific benefits of social media monitoring for your brand:

Maximize the ROI of your social media campaigns

Social media monitoring helps you gather valuable data to inform your future campaigns.

For example, by understanding what resonates with your audience, you can craft more engaging posts that boost brand visibility and sales—directly impacting your social media ROI.

Also, you can use this data to run more targeted ads and choose the right influencers to work with. This ensures your content reaches people who are genuinely interested in your products or services— giving you more bang for your buck.

Get insight into your industry and competitors

Social media monitoring is more than just tracking brand mentions—it’s about keeping an eye on emerging trends, industry news and what the other players are doing.

This helps you make proactive decisions like creating viral content, adopting new strategies or tools and even developing product features that give you a competitive edge.

Competitive intelligence also helps you set realistic benchmarks for your brand’s performance. What’s the engagement like for the top players in your industry? How efficient is their customer service? How frequently do they post and which channels do they use the most?

Reputation management

Social media is a great place to manage your reputation.

In fact, according to State of Social Media Report, 9 out of 10 business leaders agree that social media insights help them proactively manage crises and create effective PR strategies.

For example, you can catch negative comments or reviews about your business early on and prevent issues from escalating.

Plus, with regular customer sentiment analysis, you’re always up-to-date on how customers feel about your brand. If there are any unexpected drops, you can go back to the drawing board and take swift action to get your brand’s social media reputation back on track.

Social media monitoring also helps you deliver exceptional customer service. Research shows 69% of customers expect brands to respond within 24 hours on social. By promptly addressing queries, comments and messages, you can improve public perception of your brand.

Monitor your brand mentions on social media

Want to gauge your brand’s actual popularity? Start listening. What are customers saying about your products? Which influencers are using your hashtags? Do you have any haters spreading negative vibes about your brand?

Monitoring your brand mentions can answer all of these questions. Better yet, it can reveal valuable insights about customer sentiment, product strengths and weaknesses, competitive opportunities and even user-generated content.

15 social media monitoring tools to use

Social media monitoring tools let you track your brand’s meaningful engagements wherever and whenever they happen.

There’s no shortage of monitoring tools out there. The following list can help you hone in on a tool that makes sense for your brand based on your needs.

1. Sprout Social

Sprout Social gives you everything not only to track important interactions but also to act on them.

For starters, our platform keeps track of mentions, comments and keywords across multiple networks including Instagram, Facebook, Twitter and TikTok.

The ability to condense all of your interactions into one platform is a massive time-saver. Doing so ensures that you don’t miss any noteworthy mentions or let customer service concerns go unanswered.

For example, Sprout’s Smart Inbox provides a real-time, up-to-date list of all of your social interactions. This includes communications between leads, followers and customers.

With a collaborative inbox, you and your team can reply to mentions and call-outs without leaving the platform. These features speed up response times and allow your team to offer a consistent experience to your customers.

Beyond monitoring, Sprout’s s suite of social listening tools is equally powerful. You can track specific queries using boolean operators to zero in on conversations that matter most. We make it easier to detect call-outs and shout-outs as they happen.

And with Sprout’s social analytics, you can report on all of the above to track the progress of your social presence.

Keep track of metrics including average response times and engagement volume to ensure that you’re consistently growing and improving. Consider that the best social media monitoring tools work across multiple platforms and encourage growth wherever your team is active. That’s exactly what Sprout does.

2. Agorapulse

Agorapulse’s platform lives up to its namesake with features to help brands keep a better pulse on their social mentions.

The platform’s monitoring and listening features are designed to help brands focus on “what counts.” With countless notifications and mentions for busy brands to sift through, it’s easy to get overwhelmed.

To combat comment overload, Agorapulse allows users to set parameters to filter specific phrases and platforms out of their monitoring feeds. The platform also makes it a cinch to label and organize notable customer conversations and competitor activity. This activity includes negative competitor mentions and opportunities for your brand to intervene.

These features highlight the fast-paced, high-stakes nature of social media monitoring and why tools matter so much.

3. RivalIQ

Perhaps not surprisingly, RivalIQ’s platform focuses on competitive analysis to help brands keep an eye on their business rivals.

Monitoring and benchmarking features allow brands to understand their share of voice and how they’re growing versus their competitors.

The most notable features of RivalIQ are the platform’s variety of real-time alerts. For example, the platform can identify when a competitor has changed their social media bio as soon as it happens. Recent features include the ability to also see when a competitor boosts an organic post as an ad.

These alerts can give you a head start on understanding your competitors’ positioning, promotions and campaigns.

4. Mention

Mention is yet another monitoring tool that lives up to its namesake as a powerful @mention tracker.

For brands and agencies alike, the platform claims to monitor over one billion sources for relevant mentions and comments. With so many conversations to sift through, the platform offers plenty of filtering options to help brands “eliminate noise.”

Likewise, the platform’s alerts can keep brands in the loop. Additional features of the platform include identifying spikes in mention volume. These instances can help brands identify a potential social media crisis or PR opportunity sooner rather than later.

5. Keyhole

Keyhole’s monitoring abilities are primarily focused on helping brands find influencers to work with.

Automated keyword and hashtag searches uncover influencers posting about topics relevant to brands. The platform also uses hashtag analytics to highlight influential accounts, posts and conversations around any given topic.

6. HubSpot

If you’re already using HubSpot as your CRM, consider how the platform can double as your social media monitoring tool of choice.

HubSpot’s features aren’t radically different from most tools on our list. The platform tracks interactions, engagements and content performance.

Coupled with HubSpot’s sales CRM, the tool highlights the correlation between top-performing content and social interactions with sales. For example, you can see if customers interacted with a certain piece of content or a team member via social. This goes hand in hand with understanding your social media ROI and the impact of your social team.

7. Brand24

Brand24’s media monitoring features include sentiment analysis and instant notifications for all of your social mentions. The platform can also detect trending hashtags that relate to your brand.

A notable feature of the platform is its mention feed that detects spikes in activity. The platform’s “summary” feed also makes it easy to track your brand’s PR efforts from week to week.

8. Atribus

Atribus is a consumer intelligence tool with an emphasis on social media monitoring. Helping brands uncover “unmet needs,” the platform digs deep into customer conversations and data.

Specifically, the platform highlights common complaints within any given industry through sentiment analysis. This provides opportunities for competing brands to identify pain points and intervene. Atribus is capable of automatically classifying mentions into complaints versus inquiries, too.

9. Zoho Social

If you’re using Zoho as a CRM, the platform’s complimentary social media monitoring features are incredibly useful.

Beyond the standard monitoring features we’ve talked about, the platform lets you build a custom listening dashboard. From hashtags to specific platforms or media outlets, this gives you a comprehensive understanding of your PR and social presence at a glance.

10. Awario

Awario’s monitoring features are also similar to many of the platforms mentioned above.

That said, Awario Leads is a noteworthy addition to the platform’s regular monitoring and listening capabilities.

In short, Awario can identify specific instances of people asking for recommendations for a particular industry. This again shows how monitoring is an active process that can help you win more business.

11. Cyfe

Cyfe is an analytics platform that lets you create custom dashboards to monitor key social media metrics from one centralized location.

Track followers, engagement, reach, top posts and more on Facebook, X (Twitter), Instagram, YouTube and LinkedIn. Cyfe is particularly helpful for observing trends and patterns across your social media KPIs over time.

Using Cyfe’s dashboard also makes reporting a breeze. You can easily present all your social media metrics to team members, clients or managers.

Plus, most metrics are presented in the form of data visualizations like colorful charts. This helps you make sense of the data and understand the overall performance of your brand.

12. Sendible

Sendible is a powerful social media management tool that lets users track analytics, generate reports, and design, schedule and publish content across multiple social media networks without leaving the platform.

You can keep tabs on brand mentions and industry keywords, and even respond to comments on multiple platforms from within Sendible.

The tool is built with agencies in mind, so if you’re monitoring the social presence of multiple client accounts, you can create a separate dashboard for each one. They also offer white-label solutions for those looking for customized software aligned with their brand.

13. Brandwatch

Brandwatch is a social media analytics platform known for its advanced social monitoring capabilities, including sentiment analysis and trend tracking.

The tool integrates with all popular apps and networks, and can gather data from millions of sources. It can also perform deep, granular analyses of social conversations and create custom dashboards to help you measure performance.

You can also use Brandwatch’s AI smart alerts to take swift action in response to unusual trends, such as spikes or drops in brand mentions.

14. Meltwater

Meltwater provides a holistic approach to brand monitoring—it combines social media, news and blog tracking. In fact, it even uses AI to find brand mentions in podcasts.

The platform lets you search for unlimited keywords and queries, dig into industry trends, scour historical analytics and even generate reports to uncover the meaning behind all that data. You can also leverage sentiment analysis to understand how customers feel about your brand.

Another cool feature Meltwater offers is visual analytics searching to analyze image/video content shared on platforms like Reddit, blogs, forums and news sites.

15. YouScan

YouScan specializes in visual content analysis—it uses AI to scan social media for images and videos that include brand mentions, logos and relevant scenes. This lets you uncover brand-related content that might be missed by traditional text-only social monitoring tools.

The platform also analyzes sentiment in visual content and puts it into context to help brands better understand how they’re perceived on social media. It’s a valuable tool for brands focused on visual branding and those interested in tapping into user-generated content.

4 tips for social media monitoring

Tracking metrics and mentions on social will only get you so far. The tools above offer plenty of other powerful features to help position your brand for success.

Follow the tips below to make the most of your social media monitoring efforts:

1. Monitor relevant keywords for your brand

Instead of just tracking brand mentions, keep tabs on specific keywords related to your brand and industry. This could include product names, features, popular hashtags, common industry phrases and even competitor names.

For example, a fitness app might monitor keywords like “workout”, “fitness tips” or “healthy living.” This could help them identify trends in the fitness sphere, such as a rising interest in at-home workouts. They could use that info to create more relevant content and features.

2. Monitor across different channels

Your audience is spread across various social media platforms, like Facebook, Instagram, X, LinkedIn, Reddit and others. And every channel has its unique dynamics.

You need to monitor your online reputation, customer sentiment and key metrics on every platform your audience is active on to create targeted strategies for each one.

For example, you might find engagement is low on Instagram but great on LinkedIn. Digging deeper might reveal you’re just posting at the wrong time on Instagram.

Luckily, most social media monitoring tools let you track insights across multiple channels from one dashboard. Sprout Social, for example, lets you create consolidated reports and get a birds-eye view of your overall social media performance.

3. Monitor customer sentiment

Understanding how people feel about your brand is just as important as knowing what they’re saying. Sentiment analysis involves studying the tone and emotions behind all the comments, reviews and mentions—so you know exactly what customers are thinking.

Customer sentiment can be positive, negative or neutral. Some tools like Sprout Social give you a sentiment score to help you quantify that metric. Use it to adjust your strategy to improve customer satisfaction and overall perception of your brand.

4. Monitor your competitors

Don’t just monitor your own brand. Use these tools to keep an eye on your competitors and their strategies. What kind of content are they posting? Is their brand getting more mentions than yours? What’s the customer sentiment like?

Sprout gives you visual reports to help you monitor your competition and benchmark performance across various channels:

Tracking your competitors’ campaigns, publishing behavior, engagement rates, interactions, response timings and other strategies helps you learn from them, anticipate their moves and capitalize on any gaps in their strategy.

Competitive analysis also helps you differentiate yourself from the crowd. What unique value do you bring to the table? Is there anything that your product offers that theirs is missing? Focus your energy on highlighting those areas in your promotions and campaigns.

Use social media monitoring to build better campaigns

Stepping up your social monitoring should be a top priority regardless of your industry.

The closer you track what people are saying about your brand, the better you can serve your target audience.

Likewise, you can form more meaningful relationships with your followers and customers. That’s because you’re already clued into their wants, needs and pain points.

Doing so means having the right social media monitoring tools at your fingertips. Try a tool like Sprout Social to align your publishing and customer service strategy with your monitoring insights in one place.

The post 15 social media monitoring tools you need in 2024 appeared first on Sprout Social.

Marketers need shortcuts. Managing different networks is demanding and it’s no surprise putting your social media channels on autopilot seems like a tempting offer. Especially for your Facebook marketing strategy—the platform giant with almost 3 billion monthly users.

But is it as good as it sounds? Could automation be more than just a passing trend?

Below we’ve combed through the fine details of Facebook automation and suggested ten tools to help you get started.

What is Facebook automation & how does it work?

Facebook automation involves using tools to manage and streamline Facebook activities, automating tasks such as:

• Leaving comments on statuses, images or pages
• Liking and sharing statuses, images or pages across your account(s)
• Inviting friends to specific pages or events en masse
• Accepting or rejecting all pending friend requests

But here’s the truth about social media automation: not everything can go on autopilot. It exists to make things easier and not to replace your personal touch.

Instead, strike a balance.

Use automation to manage routine tasks, but keep your brand’s personality alive through authentic engagement. Respond personally to complex queries and comments and share unique, humanized content that reflects your brand’s voice.

Remember, your audience values real connections. They want to interact with a brand that listens and responds genuinely, not just automated responses. Use automation smartly to enhance your presence by reducing repetitive tasks and leaving more room to make real human connections.

Benefits of Facebook automation

While social media marketers manage more responsibilities today, core tasks like scheduling posts remain the same. Automation tools are necessary to keep up with the pace of social and reduce the energy spent on these routine tasks. Here are the potential benefits of using Facebook automation:

• Boosts efficiency and productivity: While liking posts and leaving relevant comments are key to a well-functioning social presence, they’re not always considered the most important marketing tactics. Facebook automation takes care of routine messages and comments so you can focus your attention on more high-value tasks like promoting content or conducting outreach.
• Always on brand engagement: The idea of automated responses is appealing to marketers who want their business to be “on” 24/7. In The 2023 Sprout Social Index ™, 51% of consumers said that the most memorable brands responded to customers.

Automation enables you to respond to questions, comments and inquiries in a timely manner, regardless of industry or time zone, to increase engagement, reliability and customer satisfaction.

• Helps maintain a consistent presence: Batch content creation and auto-posting tools keep the ideas flowing and the updates steady. It’s much easier to stay on track when low-impact tasks, like posting, happen in the background. A consistent posting schedule keeps your brand top of mind and your audience engaged.
• Gives better targeting insights: When you automate Facebook tasks, you’re able to gather and analyze KPIs such as audience behavior, what content they interact with, etc. more easily. And since there is a lesser chance of human error, you get deeper and more precise insight. This allows you to deliver better personalized content, offers and deals to your customers and followers.

How to use Facebook automation for your brand

Think of Facebook automation, whether for chatbot marketing or customer care, as a skilled sous-chef in your brand’s social media kitchen. This prep work enables you to focus on creating the perfect dish for your audience. Let’s break down how Facebook automation improves three key areas.

Facebook publishing automation

Facebook publishing automation is like setting up a smart, self-operating calendar for your posts. It lets you schedule Facebook posts in advance to make sure your page stays active, even when you’re not available.

You pick the time and content and the automation does the posting. It’s great for maintaining consistency in your posting schedule.

But it’s not just about quantity—quality matters. Mix in live, timely posts to keep your feed dynamic and engaging. This way, you strike the right balance between automated efficiency and authentic, real-time interaction.

Facebook response automation

Facebook response automation chatbots instantly reply to common questions—think “opening hours” or “location queries.” This feature keeps your audience engaged and shows them you’re responsive whenever they need you.

The key is to identify which inquiries or comments need human attention and which ones chatbots can handle.

Quick, routine questions are perfect for bots. They offer instant help and keep your audience happy with speedy responses. But complex or sensitive topics? That’s your cue to step in. These moments need your brand’s personalized attention.

Blending automation with human interaction creates a responsive and authentic experience for your audience.

Facebook ads automation

Your Facebook advertising strategy benefits from automation too. With Facebook ads automation, you set the parameters for your target audience and budget, then let the algorithm do its magic.

It analyzes data and adjusts targeting, bidding and placement in real-time. This means your ads are always in the right place at the right time while staying within budget.

The best part? You’re still in charge. Regular check-ins and a clear understanding of your objectives ensure you maintain control over the brand message and overall campaign direction.

10 Facebook automation tools to use in 2024

So where do you even start with Facebook automation? Tools make it easier and there are plenty to choose from, including:

1. Sprout Social

At Sprout, we understand the importance of combining a holistic social media strategy with automation and AI. Our tool inherits your manual tasks in publishing, listening, analytics and customer care so your team can focus on the strategic decisions that require human insight and creativity.

Data fragmentation across multiple tools also causes communication breakdowns, resulting in a disjointed customer experience and potential loss of crucial customer information. That’s what we’ve eliminated with Sprout’s Facebook integration. Publishing features, response management, approval workflows, reputation control and even scheduling posts across multiple pages and accounts—everything comes under one roof.

Tool-switching also leads to reduced efficiency and increased response times due to constant shifts between different platforms. Sprout gives you a unified inbox to simplify your workflow so you can view all your customer interactions across your other social channels as well in a single source of truth. This ensures you never miss a time-sensitive comment or message and have a holistic view of your social process.

Our AI Assist tool generates options for your post text and tone. Create posts in bulk to speed up content creation and never fall behind schedule.

Sprout’s Optimal Send Times in Compose also identifies the best send times for posting content on a specific day.

This helping hand eliminates guesswork by offering a list of suggested times based on engagement factors, enabling you to optimize your content’s reach.

Then, Sprout brings it together with detailed Facebook analytics that provide insights into post, page and tag performance.

Track these metrics to see how your social strategy measures up against quarterly goals and pivot accordingly.

Dive deeper with competitive Facebook insights on fan growth and top posts from other pages for a comparative overview of how your presence is doing. Identify content gaps and opportunities to capture specific audiences.

A combination of all these features allows you to automate your social media marketing from start to finish and your social media marketing from start to finish and focus your efforts on creative and strategic tasks that build your brand and engagement with customers.

2. Meta for Business

Meta for Business is a native Facebook and Instagram automation tool.

Features like automated responses based on pre-set keywords and phrases make it convenient for businesses to engage with their audience without constantly monitoring their social media pages. Plus, connected scheduling for posts across both platforms saves time and effort in content distribution.

What makes Meta for Business stand out is its Advantage+ feature, which uses machine learning to optimize sales campaigns and target the most likely converters within your advertising budget.

Say goodbye to manual ad targeting and hello to a smarter, more efficient way of reaching potential customers.

3. Loomly

Loomly’s Facebook automation features are quite straightforward and make it easy to schedule and publish your posts with minimal effort.

Loomly also has approval workflows to keep your team in sync. Complementary features like commenting systems, version logs and post mockups ensure everyone approves content before it goes live.

Beyond that, Loomly also offers audience targeting and post ideas. These features work together to ensure you create content your audience enjoys. Plus, advanced analytics make pivoting your strategy that much easier.

4. Tailwind

Tailwind is primarily a Pinterest and Instagram automation tool that now extends to Facebook as well. It uses generative AI tools called Ghostwriter and Tailwind Create to generate copy and design that matches your brand.

With automation and scheduling capabilities, Tailwind takes care of posting for you at the best times for maximum engagement from your audience.

Tailwind also has a powerful hashtag finder that pinpoints popular and hyper-relevant hashtags to ensure posts receive the visibility they deserve.

Plus, with one calendar for all your social networks, streamline and organize your content across platforms to maintain a consistent brand image.

5. NapoleonCat

NapoleanCat incorporates automation at several levels.

The tool includes an AI assistant that helps with content ideation and creates engaging post captions.

NapoleonCat also recognizes how important responsiveness is and has built-in features to automatically reply to simple questions and comments and redirect issues to relevant consultants.

Overall, NapoleonCat is a conversational tool that simplifies managing social media for businesses.

6. Agorapulse

Another tool for Facebook automation is Agorapulse.

This platform offers a variety of features that streamline your workflow and have a special focus on protecting your brand’s reputation on Facebook.

Features like automatically assigning, hiding, labeling and deleting content make social media monitoring simple and fast. Like other Facebook automation tools, Agorapulse has a Writing Assistant to help improve your content.

And for those messy inbox situations, the Inbox Assistant steps in to organize and manage your incoming messages. It detects questions and assigns them to the right person, saving you time and hassle.

7. IFTTT

IFTTT is a handy tool for automating tasks on Facebook. You’ll find it user-friendly, especially if you’re not tech-savvy. It connects different apps and services (like Sprout!), so you can create custom ‘recipes.’ Sync posts, manage content and trigger actions based on your page’s activity on Facebook.

IFTTT is a bit of a generalist tool, so you need to play around with it to find the recipes that are useful for you. Plus, you need to connect different apps and workflows to squeeze the most value out of it.

8. Planly

Planly is a scheduling and automation tool that streamlines content ideation and planning for businesses and creators on Facebook.

With its intuitive interface, Planly makes it easy to create and schedule posts in advance. Then, view and manage all your content in one convenient calendar.

Planly includes features for sending auto-responses and keeping your audience engaged with pre-written comments on Facebook, although the number of auto-responses is limited.

An integrated hashtag research tool and audience insights boost content optimization. These features save time with planning and maintaining consistency with your posts on the world’s largest social media platform.

9. BuzzSumo

BuzzSumo specializes in content research, analysis and monitoring.

Find trending topics, track brand and competitor performance and identify influential content creators and publications from one platform.

While Buzzsumo doesn’t offer a wide breadth of Facebook automation features, it makes up for it by providing an in-depth analysis of your page’s performance. From monitoring engagement metrics to identifying top-performing content, Buzzsumo offers valuable insights to guide future posts.

10. CoSchedule

Plan, organize and execute marketing strategies with CoSchedule.

Features include content calendar management, social media scheduling, project workflow coordination and campaign analytics. AI Social and Project Assistants speed up content ideation and generation to make sure you’re never stuck for ideas.

A highlight of CoSchedule’s automation features is its ReQueue function, which automatically republishes your evergreen content on social media and adjusts the schedule according to when your audience is most active. Automating repeating promotions like Motivation Monday also supports brand consistency and frees up time for more creative tasks.

Overall, CoSchedule is a valuable tool for streamlining and optimizing your social content efforts on Facebook and beyond.

How can your brand use Facebook automation?

As a social platform, Facebook is nowhere near a thing of the past. Your audience is very much there and very much active.

Through scheduling, analytics and content suggestions, Facebook automation tools speed up the process without sacrificing creativity.

See how Sprout compares to other social media management platforms and how it can amplify your brand’s presence across social networks.

The post Facebook automation: The ultimate guide for your brand appeared first on Sprout Social.

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.