Social Listening Strategies: Use Cases And Examples

Monitoring keywords on social media is a powerful marketing and customer acquisition technique, but it is not always easy to master it perfectly. In this tutorial, we will describe many social listening examples that you might want to consider for your business.

Social Listening Strategies

Generate leads by jumping into relevant conversations on social media

If you monitor the right keywords on social media, you will most likely be able to engage with customers pretty quickly and generate new leads. Here are some real world scenarios that can turn into powerful customer acquisition strategies:

Monitor your competitors and mention your brand as an alternative

The most common customer acquisition technique based on social listening is the following: receive alerts when your competitors are mentioned on social media.

One of our customers, NLP Cloud, is an AI platform that competes with actors like OpenAI, AI21, Anthropic... They created alerts on KWatch.io for "openai", "open ai", "ai21", "ai 21", "anthropic"...

If these keywords return too many results, you can adopt different strategies. For example you might want to listen to "alternative to openai" instead of "openai" as this is often something users will say when they are not happy with a product. On Reddit you might also want to monitor specific subreddits related to technical AI questions, like the r/MachineLearning subreddit.

Once these competitors are mentioned on platforms like Reddit, X, Hacker News, Quora, Facebook, or Linkedin, you can jump into the conversation and mention you brand as an alternative, if you deem it relevant.

Sometimes NLP Cloud receives alerts about their competitors but they do not think it is the right time to mention their brand yet. In that case they add the conversation to our conversation tracker and get notified in real-time about every new comment in the discussion in order to maybe intervene later when it is more relevant.

Monitor your competitors' solution and mention your solution as an alternative

Monitoring your competitors' brands is very powerful, but you might also want to monitor their products or services when they compete with your own solutions.

For example, NLP Cloud developed an in-house generative AI model called ChatDolphin. ChatDolphin is an alternative to ChatGPT (by OpenAI), Claude (by Anthropic), or Gemini (by Google).

Here are some keywords they currently actively monitor:

Monitor use cases and concepts related to your business

NLP Cloud's API can be used for many use cases like text summarization, chatbots, question answering, ... so they created the following alerts:

Sometimes adding some variations can be useful. For example some users don't ask for a "text summarization api" but for an "api that summarizes text". So creating alerts for both keywords increases the chances to generate quality leads.

Monitor problems that your product or service can address

Potential customers often mention problems they are experiencing and look for a solution. If your product or service can solve this problem, then it is a match!

Here are some useful keywords that NLP Cloud monitors: "model hallucination", "model hallucinates", "model is too slow", "model response time", "ai latency", ...

Address customer feedback and improve your crisis management on social media

It is more and more frequent to see your own customers talk about their experience with your product or service on social media. Depending on whether the feedback is positive, negative, or neutral, you might want to intervene.

In that case, you will want to monitor your brand name and your product names when they are mentioned on social media. Some social listening platforms like KWatch.io propose a sentiment analysis feature in order to automatically determine the sentiment towards your brand.

Once you spot an important conversation about you, you might want to follow this conversation more closely. In that case you can add it to our conversation tracker in order to get notified in real-time about every new comment made in the conversation.

Address negative customer feedback on social media

Negative feedback on social media can sometimes be caused by an incident. For instance, NLP Cloud operates an API. If their API goes down, they enter crisis management mode as they know that some of their users might complain on social media. In that case it is paramount for them to intervene quickly in order to reassure these customers and any other potential user reading these negative public conversations about you.

Negative feedback can also happen from time to time whithout any specific incident. In that case it is still important to answer this feedback, but more importantly this feedback says something about how your brand is perceived (also known as "brand sentiment") so you might want to discuss this negative feedback internally and understand how you can improve your solution accordingly.

Address positive customer feedback on social media

It is also good to hear positive feedback about you on social media as it helps you understand whether you are headed into the right direction. In that case it might not be necessary to intervene in the discussion as it might give the false impression that you manipulated the discussion and that the feedback is fake. If you have access to sentiment analysis, you will most likely get access to sentiment dashboard too that will help you easily understand the volume of negative feedback vs positive feedback, and the trend over time.

Stay informed about important topics mentioned on social media

Social media are a gold mine full of useful information. This information is sometimes hidden in a lot of noise though, which is why social media monitoring can really help you stay ahead of the curve in your industry:

Perform market intelligence by following hot trends on social media

Staying up-to-date about specific topics is not that easy. It takes time and usually requires that you read a lot of information on a regular basis.

Social listening can dramatically help you optimize this process by filtering social media content for you and only sending you alerts about information worth reading.

For example, NLP Cloud's CTO is a machine learning engineer and this field has evolved very quickly over these last couple of years. New scientific papers, models, frameworks, and libraries, are released almost every week in the AI industry, especially since OpenAI has released ChatGPT. In order to stay ahead of the curve, here are some alerts their CTO created on KWatch.io:

Stay informed about what your competitors are doing and how customers see them

Carefully monitoring competitors is crucial because it gives you hints about how you should adapt your strategy.

You might want to monitor your competitors' official communication, but also what users say about your competitors.

Stock sentiment based on social media comments

Stock sentiment based on social media refers to the collective opinion or attitude expressed by investors, traders, and the general public about a particular stock or the overall market on social media platforms. This sentiment can be positive, negative, or neutral and is often gauged through the analysis of social media posts, comments, and discussions.

The sentiment on social media can have a significant impact on stock prices. For instance, a surge in positive sentiment about a particular stock on social media platforms can lead to increased buying interest, driving the stock price higher. Conversely, a wave of negative sentiment can lead to a sell-off, pushing the stock price lower.

Social media sentiment analysis is increasingly being used by traders, investors, and financial institutions to gauge market sentiment, make informed investment decisions, and identify potential market trends. However, it's worth noting that social media sentiment is just one factor to consider when making investment decisions, and it should be used in conjunction with other fundamental and technical analysis tools.

In order to assess the sentiment towards a stock it can be interesting to create alerts for the company name, the stock name, some flagship products released by the company, and some key competitors. For example, if you want to analyze the sentiment towards Nvidia, you might want to create alerts for the following keywords:

Analyze a marketing campaign performance

Assessing the impact of a marketing campaign can be challenging. After launching a campaign, many people might talk about you on social media whether they are users, bloggers, or journalists.

You will want to monitor the volume of mentions once you launch your campaign as it will give you a good idea about the efficiency of your campaign and how to adapt the next time!

Receive alerts about special deals

There are some hidden gems lying under social media conversations. For example, if you are looking for discounted tickets for the next Wimbledon tennis event, you can create the following alerts:

Conclusion

Social listening is a powerful marketing and sales strategy, but implementing it correctly can take some practice.

In this guide we tried to give you many examples, but maybe you have other use cases in mind? If so please do not hesitate to share them and we will be happy to include them in the article too!

If not done yet, feel free to try social listening: register on KWatch.io here.

Arthur
CEO at KWatch.io