Delight Existing Customers (and Your Bottom Line) With Social Listening

The Internet has approximately 550,000,000 more “get new clients” posts than “keep existing clients” ones. Let your competitors become obsessed with that. You know the importance of not just acquiring new clients but also maintaining clients. After all, they are your best brand advocates and valuable assets.

This article provides six tips for using Agorapulse’s social listening and monitoring tools to improve customer satisfaction and loyalty. You can also sign up for a free trial of our social media management tool and start listening now!

Quick summary of how to keep clients happy

• Use Agorapulse’s social listening tools to understand what customers are saying about your brand.
• Monitor customer feedback and address any issues or concerns promptly.
• Use the data gathered from social listening to improve your products or services.
• Engage with customers on social media to show that you value their feedback.
• Use Agorapulse’s monitoring tools to track customer sentiment and trends.
• Implement changes based on customer feedback to enhance their overall experience with your brand.

Why Building Relationships with Your Client Base Helps Bring in More Revenue

Building relationships beyond the initial sale offers multiple business benefits. First, selling to current clients is cheaper and faster than acquiring new clients. Current clients already know your brand, general offerings, and customer service. Selling them something new should be relatively easy.

Erica Favorito, Founder/Principal of Slice Advisory, elaborates:

“Your existing customer base is your largest source for both revenue and growth. Growing existing customers through increased usage, services, and product expansion—as well as second-order growth through word-of-mouth referrals and testimonials—is much more cost-effective than new customer acquisition. If your customers value your offering, feel seen and heard, and feel good about working with you, it’s a down payment on your company’s current health and future prospects.”

Second, building rapport with your clients leads to a more satisfying customer experience and greater customer retention rates. And increasing customer retention rates by just 5% increases profits by 25% to 95%.

How Social Media Listening Helps Build Client Relationships

According to Zendesk, only 35% of businesses take an omnichannel approach to engaging with customers. Fewer than 30% use social messaging. That’s leaving money on the table regarding reducing churn and increasing a loyal client base.

If your customers are on social platforms, you should be, too—at least as an active listener. Listening to others’ conversations via email and chat is impossible. You’ll soon find marketing gold once you begin to use social listening.

Social listening can help turn your indecisive customers into loyal customers and your loyal customers into passionate brand advocates.

As Ashley Serotta, Senior Director, Global IT Digital and Ecommerce at Revlon explains:

“If you invest in delighting your existing customers, not only will they have a higher lifetime value, but they will be your strongest marketing asset, spreading the good word about your brand.”

Now that we know all these benefits, let’s learn how a social listening tool can unearth more customer conversations that drive growth and build advocates.

Social Monitoring vs Social Listening

Let’s clarify two terms often used synonymously: social monitoring and social listening. Both activities are integral to a successful social media strategy and have some overlap, but they have notable differences.

What is social monitoring?

Social monitoring (also called social media monitoring) looks for direct mentions that often require a quick response, a critical aspect of any real-time social media engagement strategy. Social monitoring examples include:

• Comments
• Direct or private messages
• Username tags used to communicate with the brand behind the tag.

What is social listening?

On the other hand, social listening (aka social media listening) has a wider scope, seeking online conversations with generally less urgency for a response. Think of:

• Web and blog reviews or articles that mention a brand by name
• Username tags or hashtags used as shorthand for mentioning a brand
• Competitor mentions
• Customer mentions

Social media listening also digs into the overall sentiment of these mentions. Are these conversations generally positive, negative, or somewhere in between?

This article will use the term “social listening” for both listening and as shorthand for listening and monitoring when applicable. “Social monitoring” will just refer to monitoring.

Social Listening Tip 1: Make a Social Listening Schedule

You know that social media conversations go on 24/7. That doesn’t mean you need to listen all the time!

Set a daily listening schedule to handle customer insights regularly.

Example of a social listening schedule

Try this one to start:

• 5-10 minutes in the morning
• 5-10 minutes after lunch (or during lunch if you can’t break away from your laptop)
• 5-10 minutes during the last hour of your workday.

This will allow you to nurture customer relationships throughout the day while allowing you to get to all of your other work responsibilities.

Social Listening Tip 2: Refine Your Searches

Social listening tools can be so powerful that many new users try to capture everything. Going wide in your searches will leave you sifting through a mountain of results to find that one golden conversation. Don’t make that rookie mistake.

What to do to refine your listening searches

With Agorapulse, you can set up listening searches across social media channels that include:

• Mentions of your username on Facebook or Instagram public posts
• Any hashtag on Instagram public posts
• Mentions of your username or any hashtag or keyword on Twitter public posts and replies
• Any keyword on news sites and blog posts

Refine your searches by location, language, or social media platform to better target your audience and align with your business strategy.

You can even use boolean search operators to narrow your listening results to get exactly what you want.

Start with an overly restricted search that you can loosen up than a broad search that you have to reign in.

Social Listening Tip 3: Turn Client Base Conversations Into Business Insights

If you’re in marketing, you’re always looking for customer feedback to turn into social proof. You’ve set NPS and CSAT survey sequences, sent out surveys, facilitated focus groups, and sat in on customer success calls.

Sure, customers often provide feedback in these activities that you’ve used in marketing campaigns. But because these activities have been brand-led, do you always feel that customers are holding back?

Well, customers don’t hold back on social media.

What you can learn from listening to online conversations

That’s why monitoring social media comments and brand mentions that speak to you directly is important.

Pro tip: Comments on social ads are often overlooked as a source of customer feedback. They’re usually hard to track or in the hands of your paid marketing colleague.

Agorapulse monitors organic and paid comments on Facebook and Instagram. (It also captures comments on Instagram reels.) These comments are delivered automatically to your inbox. You can review them all at once or filter by comment type.

But don’t let these comments sit by themselves. Agorapulse has CRM integrations with HubSpot and Salesforce, so you can easily share customer feedback across marketing channels to enhance product development and boost customer satisfaction.

Social Listening Tip 4: Share Client-Generated Content

Here’s another reason to use social media listening: free content. Regular social listening uncovers customer photos of your product or service.

Example of user-generated content

An outdoor nonprofit organization used the Agorapulse listening search to find this gorgeous photo taken by someone from their client base. In green, Agorapulse highlights which hashtag triggered the listening search.

With a kind response and request to share, this client will likely let the nonprofit post the photo across its social media platforms.

If one of your customers is an influencer and you notice through listening that she regularly posts about your brand, ask them if they’d be up for a future collaborative post on Instagram.

Once they agree to the collab, creating a collaborative post on Agorapulse is easy.

With collaborative posts, both their followers and your followers will know how much this influencer loves your brand.

Social Listening Tip 5: Use Social Listening Productivity Hacks

Do you like these ideas so far but are thinking, “How on earth will I have time to do all this?”

Then it’s time to learn how Agorapulse is a social media management tool built for productive monitoring.

Build and reuse saved replies

Saved replies are a time saver when if you plan to:

• Ask customers to share their content
• Thank customers for their kind words
• Request customers to DM you to handle a situation.

Simply create an on-brand message for the above scenarios and save each as a saved reply. When the time comes for you to engage, you’ll have a response all ready to go!

Assign client base conversations

When social monitoring, you sometimes may want to delegate. Smart delegation clears your to-do list and gives your customers the best possible reply.

Say you’re in charge of US marketing, and a question about an upcoming EU customer event appears in your inbox. Simply assign the comment or direct message to your EMEA colleague and have them give your customer a more informed answer.

Label client base conversations

Agorapulse inbox labels are a great way to better organize and track trends in your customer conversations. Here are a few labels to consider using:

• Geographic labels: US, EMEA, LATAM, APAC
• Live event conversations
• Webinar conversations
• Product conversations
• Testimonial potential.

Then, check out the “Label distribution” section in Agorapulse’s reports to see which types of conversations have been most frequent. Be sure to tell your colleagues the results—folks in product, marketing, and customer success appreciate these customer insights.

Continue to track these label trends each month to spot dips or jumps over time.

Use bulk actions

Instead of labeling or assigning each comment or message, use the inbox’s bulk actions feature to assign a single action to multiple conversations.

For example, if three customer conversations should be labeled “Testimonial potential,” label them in a third of the time with bulk actions. Here’s more information on how they work.

Automate inbox tasks

Do you know what’s even better than assigning and labeling conversations?

Automatically assigning and labeling conversations.

With moderation rules in Agorapulse’s Inbox Assistant, set keyword conditions to instantly trigger an assignment or label to customer conversations.

Social Listening Tip 6: Discover What Works in Your Social Media Listening Strategy

Once you implement the five tips mentioned so far, you’ll want to see how your efforts bring value to your business.

With Agorapulse, it’s easy to see how things are tracking. When you land on the listening section, you immediately receive a top-level overview of online conversations about your brand, with volume, sentiment analysis, and engagement figures based on the last seven days.

Click the overview for details on volume, sentiment, and engagement. You can also see how these metrics track across all networks.

Then, filter by network to determine which one yields the most conversations, produces the most positive (or negative) sentiment, and encourages the most (or least) engagement.

Use the label distribution report mentioned in Tip 5 to determine which topics often appeared in your inbox. Explain how these customer conversations impact the various teams in your company. If you’ve connected a CRM to Agorapulse, check notes there to see if these conversations led to retention, testimonials, case studies, renewals, or upsells.

 

Attention marketing agency folks: You can share a social media monitoring snapshot with your clients. Use Agorapulse’s community management reports to show how many queries you review and reply to over a designated time period.

 

Ready to Use Social Listening to Pump Up Your Client Base?

Social listening and monitoring with Agorapulse is key to nurturing client relationships and boosting retention. By implementing these six tips, you can transform casual interactions into meaningful engagement and drive measurable growth.

So why not sign up for a free trial of Agorapulse and see for yourself?