In this guide, we’ll break down the steps of a social media audience analysis, arm you with the tools you need, and unleash some insider tips to help you get it right. Ready to level up your social media game? Let’s do this.

Why Audience Analysis Matters

Understanding your audience isn’t just a nice-to-have — it’s crucial for crafting social media content that hits the mark. By diving deep into audience analysis, you uncover the insights you’ll need to guide your content strategy.

How? Well, first off, knowing your audience helps you create tailored content that resonates. Nailing down your audience helps you craft content that speaks directly to their interests, pain points, and aspirations. Whether it’s funny memes, helpful how-tos, or inspiring stories, tailoring your content ensures it keeps your audience engaged.

Similarly, audience analysis also plays a crucial role in making sure you’re not wasting your advertising budget. By pinpointing who your ideal customers are, you can target your ads more effectively and get your message in front of the right people.

And of course, when you speak your audience’s language, address their pains, and cater to their preferences, you’re building more than just followers — you’re cultivating brand loyalty.

Types of Social Media Audience Analysis

To conduct the ultimate social media audience analysis, you’ll need to look at different facets of your audience. Let’s break it down into four main types: demographic, psychographic, behavioral, and competitive analysis.

Demographic Analysis

This type focuses on the basic characteristics of your audience, laying the foundation for understanding who your audience is at a surface level. Think age, gender, location, and other demographic factors that can help you tailor your content and messaging.

Inter Miami, for example, uses both English and Spanish in its social posts. While based in Florida, this top sports team clearly knows the demographics of its audience, which includes a significant amount of Spanish-speaking soccer (or fútbol) fans.

Psychographic Analysis

Unlike demographics, psychographics go deeper into the interests, hobbies, and lifestyle choices of your audience. Knowing what they truly care about allows you to create content that truly speaks to them.

Patagonia’s social strategy reflects this well. With environmental activism as one of its core tenets, the brand seeks to connect with others who care about the same issues. Knowing that this kind of audience values businesses that take a public stand, its social feeds are filled with content spotlighting important initiatives, solidifying its place as one of the top sustainable brands on social media.

Behavioral Analysis

This type examines how your audience interacts with your content, engagement patterns, and online behaviors. What role does social media play in their customer journey? Understanding your audience’s behaviors helps you refine your social media strategy and optimize your content for the greatest impact.

For instance, Hard Rock Hotels has caught onto the rise of users using social media as a search engine. As explained in our run-down of the top hotel brands on social media, Hard Rock Hotels smartly includes common search terms such as “pet-friendly hotel” in its posts to maximize its reach.

Competitive Analysis

As the name suggests, competitive analysis involves evaluating your competitors’ audience strategies, identifying gaps, and uncovering opportunities in the market. By learning from your competitors’ successes and failures, you can refine your own strategy and stay ahead of the curve.

Ultimately, while each type of analysis offers valuable insights on its own, taking a holistic approach that combines all four types gives you a complete picture of your audience: who they are, what they love, how they behave, and how your rivals are interacting with them.

Your Step-by-Step Guide to Social Media Audience Analysis

1. Define Your Objectives

Before conducting your social media audience analysis, first define your objectives. What do you want to achieve? Are you looking to increase brand awareness, drive website traffic, or improve customer engagement?

By setting clear goals, you give your analysis purpose and direction. Plus, it ensures you’re not just collecting data for the sake of it but rather to inform actionable insights and strategies.

2. Identify Relevant Social Media Platforms

To effectively collect and analyze audience data, you’ll have to select which platforms to look at. Consider your goals and what you know about your target audience as you narrow it down.

Say you’re a B2B brand focusing on engaging decision-makers and professionals. LinkedIn is definitely a platform to include in your analysis. On the other hand, if you’re a fashion brand looking to connect with visually-driven millennials, platforms like Instagram or Pinterest might be more suitable.

Taking a look at Viking Cruises, it’s clear that they’ve honed in on the platforms that matter most to their main audience of older (often retired) adults. As reported in our coverage of the top travel brands on social, the cruise line prioritizes Facebook — a favorite among their target demographic — and omitted the comparatively newer platform TikTok from its strategy.

3. Choose the Right Tools

Many social media platforms have built-in analytics that offer insights into your audience. Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, TikTok, and LinkedIn all have these tools, providing data such as demographic information, engagement metrics, and even the peak times your audience is online. These tools are a great starting point, providing valuable info from the source.

If you want to step up your game, consider using third-party tools. Most social media analytics tools consolidate all your data in one place, which streamlines your analysis process. Plus, some platforms specialize in providing additional insights.

For instance, Rival IQ excels in competitive analysis, going beyond native tools’ capabilities by reporting information about competitors and allowing for in-depth benchmarking. Our dashboard makes it easy to see your performance stats, how your numbers compare to other brands, and even the top posts of each of your competitors.

Meanwhile, social listening tools make it possible for you to “eavesdrop” on your audience’s conversations about your brand, industry, competitors, and more. This not only tells you about their opinions and preferences but also gives you insight into how they use social. And, we can’t leave out web analytics tools like Google Analytics, which can help you understand how your social media channels are driving traffic to your site.

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4. Collect Data

Once you’ve got your goals, platforms, and tools, it’s time to roll up your sleeves and dive into the data.

First up, let’s talk about the kinds of data we’re looking for. The data discussed earlier is a good place to start, though feel free to adjust based on your goals: demographics (age, gender, location), psychographics (interests, hobbies, attitudes), behavioral data (engagement patterns, content trends, online behavior), and competitor performance.

Now, where do we find all this data? The tools we discussed earlier! Native tools can give you insights into your following on a specific platform, while competitive analysis and social listening tools can offer more details about your competition, trends, and audience behavior.

5. Analyze Data and Draw Insights

Once you’ve collected the data, it’s time to analyze it for meaningful insights. Here are a few ideas to help you get started:

• Identify trends and patterns. Look for recurring themes or behaviors in your audience data. Are there peak times when your audience is active? Are there certain keywords or hashtags frequently associated with your brand? Are certain demographics more engaged with your content?
• Discover audience preferences via engagement metrics. Pay attention to the types of content your audience engages with the most. Do they prefer videos, images, or text-based posts? Are they more interested in industry news or entertaining memes?
• Compare across networks. If you’re active on multiple social networks, compare the performance of your content across them. This can help you adjust your approach for each platform.
• Analyze competitor activity. Keep an eye on what your competitors are doing by analyzing their engagement strategies and content themes.
• Identify opportunities and challenges. Take note of any gaps or areas where your audience’s needs aren’t being fully met. Are there topics or themes that seem to be missing from your or your competition’s content strategy?

Essentially, you want to focus on pulling insights that can meaningfully inform your content strategy moving forward — which brings us to our next and final step.

6. Streamline Your Content Strategy

Now that you have a solid understanding of your audience, you can finally take what you’ve learned and use it to optimize your content strategy.

Tailor your content to match the identified trends and preferences of your audience. For instance, if your data shows that your audience loves videos over static images, consider ramping up your video production. Also, post during the peak times when your audience is most active to maximize visibility and engagement. Similarly, if you’re on multiple platforms, adjust your approach to match the findings on each.

Don’t forget to fill in the gaps you identified. Are there unexplored themes or topics that align with your brand but are missing from your strategy? Take this opportunity to incorporate the kind of content that your audience is already loving from others or has expressed an interest in.

Finally, consider audience segmentation as you streamline your strategy. Your audience is likely not a uniform bunch. Tailor specific content for different segments within your audience, recognizing and catering to their different preferences and interests. This strategic approach can help boost engagement and foster a deeper connection with your audience.

Remember, audience analysis is an ongoing process. Keep monitoring and refining your approach based on new data and changing audience trends. By staying agile and responsive, you’ll be better equipped to meet your audience’s expectations and keep them engaged.

Wrapping It Up

So, there you have it — the step-by-step to conducting a thorough social media audience analysis. To keep your social media game strong, make audience analysis a regular part of your routine. Your audience’s preferences, behaviors, and interests can evolve over time, so staying in the know is key. With ongoing analysis, you’ll continue to tailor your content, engage your followers, and ultimately, drive those results.

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But let’s face it, you can’t realistically ask every single customer how they feel about your brand. Luckily, the internet has made their thoughts public. By sifting through data from online conversations, you can uncover gold nuggets of insight into how your brand is doing. This whole process is what’s called brand sentiment analysis.

What is Brand Sentiment Analysis?

Brand sentiment analysis is the process of examining and interpreting the sentiments, attitudes, and emotions that people express about a brand, product, or service.

This analysis involves sifting through online data — social media conversations, customer reviews, news articles, and more — and using advanced algorithms to determine the emotional tone of these discussions. The goal? To understand how people feel about a brand and to use this information to improve the brand’s reputation and marketing strategies.

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How to Conduct a Brand Sentiment Analysis

Going beyond counting mentions or tracking hashtags, brand sentiment analysis focuses on understanding the context and feelings behind those mentions. Here’s a general breakdown of how to do it:

1. Goal Setting. Before you jump in, figure out what you want to achieve. Are you curious about how your brand is generally perceived, or do you want to assess a recent marketing campaign? Clear goals will help you focus your efforts.
2. Keyword Selection. Pick specific keywords and search terms to find relevant information. This helps you collect data that directly pertains to your brand and objectives.
3. Data collection. Use brand sentiment analysis tools to collect data from various sources — social media platforms, blogs, forums, news articles, etc. — that are relevant to the search query.
4. Analysis. Once the data is collected, these tools will typically use algorithms that employ statistics, Natural Language Processing (NLP), and machine learning to determine the feeling, or sentiment, behind the conversations.
5. Sentiment classification. Each piece of content that’s analyzed is classified, typically as either “positive,” “negative,” or “neutral.”
6. Reporting. After classifying content, sentiment analysis tools will then report the findings. Often, it’ll be displayed visually for you to identify trends and patterns in your sentiment analysis over time.

Best Tools for Brand Sentiment Analysis

While “manual” analysis of sentiment is technically possible, most brands rely on powerful tools and technologies that automate the process for them. Some solid options include:

Rival IQ

Rival IQ is your go-to tool if you want to dive deep into your competitive landscape. Our social listening capabilities let you monitor and analyze the sentiment of everything from campaigns to competitors to industry trends. Additionally, our platform is purpose-built for competitive analysis, offering tools and benchmarks that add competitive context to all of your social metrics for a fuller picture of how well your brand is performing.

Quid

Quid offers powerful brand sentiment analysis capabilities, excelling in turning massive data sets into actionable insights. With Quid’s market-leading NLP, users can dissect loads of online conversations to gauge brand sentiment accurately. Plus, user-friendly and insightful visualizations and dashboards make it easy for businesses to make quick data-driven decisions.

Awario

Awario is a social media monitoring tool designed to track and analyze brand mentions. It stands out for its monitoring of over 13 billion web pages daily, helping users stay in the loop regarding their brand’s reputation, customer feedback, and emerging trends.

Brandwatch

Brandwatch offers a suite of tools to help companies conduct research, monitor their brand, and engage with their consumers. The solution tracks mentions on over 100M sources across the web, broadcasts, and news. It also offers AI-powered analytics to help brands understand customer perceptions and sentiment.

Why Brand Sentiment Analysis Matters

It’s often declared that your brand is “what other people say about you.” No doubt, how your audience feels and talks about your brand can make or break your company’s success. That’s why being aware of those sentiments is so important.

Positive sentiment can turn the tide in your favor and draw customers in. Negative sentiment, on the other hand, can damage your image and steer potential customers away. And in the era of online reviews and social media, these opinions can spread like wildfire. By conducting brand sentiment analyses, you’re equipped with insights to help you take control of your reputation.

Sentiment analysis also goes deeper into the nitty-gritty of customer opinions, preferences, and emotions. This knowledge is invaluable for tailoring your products, services, and messaging to match your customers’ wants and needs.

Overall, those who understand and act on sentiment insights gain a distinct competitive advantage. By being in tune with your audience’s feelings, you can address issues head-on, note when your efforts are successful, and change course when necessary. It also helps you spot trends and identify opportunities to get ahead of the competition.

Use Cases for Brand Sentiment Analysis

When leveraged correctly, brand sentiment analysis can be a game-changer for businesses. Let’s dive into some practical use cases that showcase its incredible potential.

Campaign Monitoring

Brand sentiment analysis is a great way to keep tabs on your campaigns and see how they’re doing. Are consumers excited and engaged with the campaign, or are they disappointed or confused? Understanding these sentiments helps you tailor your messaging and strategy, ensuring campaigns resonate with your audience.

Take Dunkin’ Donuts’ campaign to give out free coffee to educators in celebration of World Teachers’ Day on October 5th. Did the campaign successfully generate favorable buzz for the brand? Did it have an impact on how its customers viewed the brand? Should this campaign continue each year? These are the kinds of questions that brand sentiment analysis can help answer.

As Rival IQ’s social listening feature shows, “free coffee” was the top driver of positive sentiment for Dunkin’ Donuts within a recent 30-day timeframe, suggesting that the campaign successfully left a positive impact on its audience.

Product and Service Improvement

Sentiment analysis can also reveal product issues via online customer feedback about your products or services. This helps you pinpoint recurring issues, allowing you to address them proactively. For instance, if you discover a pattern of negative sentiment around a specific issue, you can prioritize fixing it.

For United Airlines, this would clearly be the issue of lost luggage. As seen in the sentiment analysis below, recent conversations about the airline were mostly negative, driven largely by the phrase “lose luggage.” This insight can then inform the brand’s future strategies, which could be anything from improving their baggage handling procedures or providing better customer support for customers who have lost their luggage.

On the flip side, sentiment analysis can also reveal suggestions and ideas for improving your products or services. Customers may provide valuable insights into what they would like to see. These ideas can help you plan your product development roadmap.

Crisis Management

Regularly analyzing brand sentiment can also serve as an early warning system for potential crises. By actively monitoring brand sentiment, you have the chance to address any negative sentiments before they spiral out of control.

Similarly, when a crisis does hit, sentiment analysis can help you assess the impact and inform your crisis management strategy. The better you get at understanding the emotions behind conversations about your brand, the better you’ll be at protecting your reputation by taking the right actions.

A great example of the importance of sentiment analysis is the #McDStories incident back in 2012. As part of an effort to shine the spotlight on its suppliers, McDonald’s had intended to use #McDStories as a promoted hashtag. However, the plan quickly backfired, with Twitter users using the tag to share all types of negative experiences with the brand.

Now, if the fast food giant had simply tracked the use of the hashtag, the campaign would’ve seemed like a success. Thousands of users were tweeting the tag and #McDStories ended up trending. Luckily, though, McDonald’s had diligently analyzed the sentiment behind the tweets and ended up pulling the plug on #McDStories. The tag was promoted for less than two hours.

According to the brand’s social media director at the time, “Within an hour of pulling #McDStories the number of conversations about it fell off from a peak of 1600 to a few dozen. It is also important to keep those numbers in perspective. There were 72,788 mentions of McDonald’s overall that day so the traction of #McDStories was a tiny percentage (2%) of that.”

In a world where 51% of consumers aren’t shy about calling out brands on social media, staying on top of sentiment is essential. Preventing crises and navigating through them becomes smoother when you’re in tune with your audience’s feelings. Take a cue from the #McDStories episode, where a little sentiment analysis went a long way in averting a massive PR storm.

Wrapping It Up

The scenarios above are just a few of the many use cases for brand sentiment analysis. As you can see, it’s not just about understanding how your audience feels; it’s about transforming those insights into actions.

So, if you haven’t already embraced brand sentiment analysis, it’s time to take that leap. Explore the tools and techniques available and start listening to the emotions and opinions of your audience. Your brand’s story is a conversation and sentiment analysis is the key to shaping it.

The post What Is Brand Sentiment Analysis and Why Is It Important? appeared first on Rival IQ.

All of the data your brand needs to better understand your audience, keep tabs on industry trends, and make better business decisions can be found on social channels — but you need a social listening strategy to help you uncover it all.

Whether you’re new to social listening or need a quick refresher, let’s go over the benefits of integrating it into your marketing efforts and how to create a powerful social listening strategy for your brand.

How to Create a Social Listening Strategy in 5 Steps

Social listening is the process of analyzing and interpreting online conversations relevant to your brand, your product, or your industry even if your brand or product isn’t directly mentioned.

To make sure you’re paying attention to the right conversations, you need a social listening strategy to use as a guide. Keep these key components of a social listening strategy in mind if you want to meet your goals.

1. Set a specific social listening goal

As with any successful strategy, the first step is to set a specific goal that you want your social listening strategy to achieve. Without a goal, your strategy will lack direction and you won’t know where to focus your efforts.

What do you hope to achieve with your social listening strategy? Do you want to better understand your potential customers or do you want to gain insights into industry trends and competitor data? Here are some examples of social listening goals you may want to achieve:

• Improve customer sentiment and experience
• Develop content, product, or marketing ideas
• Discover new audiences to target
• Increase brand partnerships and influencer relationships

If your biggest goal is to improve customer sentiment and experience, then your strategy should focus on gathering as much data on your audience as possible to determine their overall perception and attitude toward your brand. Or perhaps your goal is to find and connect with more influencers. In this case, you could keep your eye on people who organically mention your brand or product — or influencers who mention your competition.

2. Identify the key metrics

Within those goals, there are several social listening metrics you can focus on. The key is to figure out which ones make the most sense to track for the goals you set. At Rival IQ, our top social listening metrics include:

• Sentiment
• Mentions
• Post volume
• Share of voice (SOV)
• Impressions
• Reach
• Engagement rate

While you’ll likely want to track all of these through your social listening efforts, there are some you may want to focus on more than others. For example, if one of your primary social listening goals is to improve brand perception, then you’d want to focus on sentiment analysis in your strategy.

Sentiment analysis involves analyzing posts, mentions of your brand, and online conversations to understand people’s attitudes and general feelings toward your brand. You can do this on a high level or conduct sentiment analysis for individual campaigns or products.

3. Choose a social media tool

To execute your social listening strategy, you need a comprehensive social listening tool that aligns with your goals. No matter how big or small your marketing budget is, there are a range of social listening tools that can be helpful for your strategy. Here are some of our favorite social listening tools:

• Rival IQ: No surprise here, but we have to recommend our own social listening tool. Social listening is integrated throughout the app, which is built through the lens of competitive analysis. If you want to listen to your competition alongside your own brand’s mentions, social conversations, and more, then create a landscape and tap into our social listening capabilities.
• Quid: If you’re looking for an enterprise-level social listening tool, Quid offers comprehensive consumer and market intelligence from all sources of the internet — from social channels to forums and blogs to news sites.
• Mention: Mention monitors online media, brand mentions, and audience insights and compiles everything into one easy-to-track dashboard.
• Twitter (X): Despite the recent changes on Twitter (now X), it remains a valuable tool for staying tapped into current conversations and budding trends.
• Google Alerts: You can use Google Alerts to set up real-time notifications (sent to your inbox) for articles and keywords that mention your brand, your competitors, or anything else you want to track.

Check out this round-up if you’re looking for a more detailed breakdown of the best social media listening tools.

4. Conduct competitive analysis

One of the key differences between social listening and social monitoring is taking a look beyond your own brand mentions and seeing what the competition is doing — and how they’re being perceived — online.

Conduct a competitive analysis to see how your current social channels, online presence, and brand perception compare to similar brands. To get started, think back to your primary social listening goal. If your goal is to improve customer sentiment, then analyze what the overall sentiment is for your competitors. If it’s more positive than yours, dig into what consumers are saying about them. Maybe they applaud their customer service or perhaps people love their mission. Whatever insights you’re able to pick up on, you can use that knowledge to highlight similar elements of your own brand.

5. Create a response plan for social monitoring

If your goal is to improve your brand management and be proactive about potential PR crises, then a response plan is critical. Social listening and social monitoring should work together. This means that your social listening strategy needs to include a plan of action for how your team conducts social monitoring and how your social listening efforts play a role.

For example, the team behind Postmate’s Twitter account responded to this tweet from a concerned customer even though the tweet doesn’t directly mention the brand (note: Uber owns Postmates after acquiring it in 2020). This is a great example of being proactive when it comes to monitoring online conversations to prevent potential crises or backlash.

To stay on top of conversations or comments that involve your brand but don’t directly mention you, compile a list of search terms, keywords, or brand names that you want to monitor. Then, use your social listening tool to track them and be alerted anytime they’re brought up online. Setting up a system like this ensures you and your team can address potential crises or negative conversations before they take off.

Social Listening vs. Social Monitoring

Before you dive into creating your social listening strategy, it’s important to understand the difference between social listening and social media monitoring.

As we mentioned earlier, social listening involves tracking and analyzing online conversations,  even if your brand or product isn’t directly mentioned. Social monitoring is when you keep tabs on direct mentions or tags of your brand.

While the two go hand in hand, the key differences between listening and monitoring are perspective and context. Social monitoring is important for real-time actions and direct communication such as responding to customer service questions or concerns. Social listening, on the other hand, is about reading between the lines and translating relevant online conversations into actionable takeaways.

To give you a better idea of how this works, take a look at this interaction between Warby Parker and a customer. Customer inquiries like this are common on Twitter and Warby Parker is quick to ensure customers have access to a discount code they can use right away. Warby Parker’s prompt response is an example of social media monitoring in action.

Social listening comes into play if Warby Parker were to take a look at recent customer interactions and identify patterns or opportunities to better understand customer sentiment. For example, a social listening strategy could help Warby Parker notice that questions about discounts come up often. To solve this, the glasses brand could make their discounts more discoverable to Twitter users by adding a discount code to their bio or pinning a tweet at the top of their page.

Social listening is about understanding brand perception and customer sentiment and acting on those findings.

The Benefits of Social Listening

As a data-driven marketer, social listening should be integrated into your overall marketing strategy. Social listening not only guides your actions and content on social but also helps you uncover data related to your target audience, industry trends, brand perception, and more. Here are some ways that your brand can benefit from a social listening strategy.

Audience insights

One of the biggest benefits of social listening is that it helps you get to know your audience on a deeper level. When you listen to online conversations your audience is having, you can pick up on their language, interests, and behaviors beyond the surface-level feedback you may get through direct interactions like mentions and comments.

For example, using Rival IQ’s social listening tool, we can see the popular terms, phrases, and emojis used in posts about Fenty Beauty. It’s no surprise that Fenty’s famous founder is mentioned the most in people’s posts, but we can also see that the term “NEW” is used often, too. This could indicate that Fenty’s customers and fans tend to be excited and post more when a new product launches.

What’s helpful about Rival IQ’s social listening tool is that you can also see which emojis are most used in your audiences’ posts. This not only gives you a sense of the general sentiment around your brand, but also lets you know how your audience talks online. You can then use this to inform the tone of your own content so you can interact with your followers in a way that resonates with them.

Campaign measurement

You can also use social listening to measure the success of a campaign, whether you’re launching a new product, announcing a partnership, or hosting an event. While the engagement on your campaign posts gives you a sense of how your followers feel, direct interactions don’t always tell the whole story. Social listening can help you understand the overall sentiment around a marketing campaign based on online conversations that might not directly mention your brand.

For example, let’s take a look at the sentiment around some of Fenty Beauty’s recent campaigns. Below is a word cloud for Fenty Beauty generated in Rival IQ’s social listening tool. The terms are shown in either green or red to represent positive and negative sentiments, respectively. A quick glance reveals that some of the biggest terms (the size indicates the number of posts that contributed to them) revolve around makeup and specific products.

If we look closer, we can also see that terms like “come to Target” drove positive sentiment. This specific term correlates with the announcement that Fenty Beauty launched in Ulta Beauty at Target on October 1st. The teams at Target, Ulta Beauty, and Fenty, could tap into their social listening tool to see that this campaign resonated positively online.

Another campaign that yielded positive reactions is Fenty’s Holiday Collection, specifically the packaging. The term “holiday collection packaging” is listed above as a term with positive sentiment. When we dig deeper into that term, we can see that there were 30 posts in a 30-day period that contributed to the sentiment, all of which are positive. Fenty’s marketing team could then lean into that sentiment by highlighting the packaging when marketing the holiday collection.

Product development

Listening to conversations online is a great way to inform your product development. There are a couple of ways to do this. One way is to take note of what your followers constantly ask about or mention in your posts. For instance, in the comment section under one of Live Tinted’s Instagram posts, a follower asks if the beauty brand plans on releasing a tinted brow gel. If Live Tinted didn’t already have this in the works, seeing frequent comments like this would prove that they probably should.

You can also use your social listening tool to see what ideas come up online. Using that same Fenty Beauty example above, we can see that “lip pencil” is one of the positive words that drives positive sentiment when people talk about the brand. Fenty Beauty doesn’t currently carry a lip pencil, so this could indicate that people are interested in one from the beauty brand.

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Industry trends

Social trends come and go within a day or two, so it can be a challenge to stay on top of them if you’re a solo marketer or on a small team, let alone decide whether or not to participate. Social listening tools can help with this by gathering data on industry trends so you don’t have to do all of the research yourself.

The data below shows the trending topics and hashtags used by brands in the beauty industry. Discovering these trending hashtags and topics can help you identify potential content ideas. For instance, one of the most engaging hashtags in this set is #ASMRUnboxing with a 23.3% engagement rate by follower.

ASMR (autonomous sensory meridian response) is the tingling sensation that can be triggered by soft noises like whispers and has been popularized by YouTube and TikTok creators. Here’s an example of an ASMR unboxing video:

As a beauty brand marketer, you could use this insight to create your own ASMR unboxing content for TikTok, Instagram, or YouTube. You could also partner with one of these ASMR creators and send them a box of products for them to feature in their own videos like the one above.

Identify influencers and brand partnerships

Another benefit of having a social listening strategy is being able to identify potential partnerships. You may already have an eye on influencers who align with your brand, product, or industry, but you likely found them organically or through outreach. Social listening helps you discover people who may not already be on your radar.

For example, let’s say you want to generate buzz around a new pumpkin spice-flavored lip balm launching in the fall. You can use a tool like Rival IQ to search for the term “pumpkin spice” to see if there are influencers who mention it in their content and could potentially be a good fit to promote your new product. You can also see which brands mention the term a lot. This can help you identify potential competitors or partnerships, depending on the industry they’re in.

Keep tabs on the competition

The same methods you use for your own social listening strategy can be employed for your competitors. Use social listening to stay on top of what similar brands are doing in regard to product development, customer relations, and marketing strategy. You can also identify opportunities to differentiate your brand from the rest.

To do this, you can organically track what the competition is doing online, or you can use a social listening tool that automatically collects and analyzes data from your competitors. Tracking their activity and data alongside your own brand monitoring helps you get side-by-side insights into how you’re performing in relation to similar brands in your industry.

Here’s an analysis of Live Tinted’s social media posting activity compared to other beauty brands. The visual breakdown of posts per week and on which channels could help Live Tinted decide where to focus their efforts if they wanted to match the posting frequency of their competition.

Social Listening Strategy Best Practices

A social listening strategy is only as good as you make it — as in, it’s not enough to just create a strategy and let it work on its own. As you’re putting your social listening strategy into action, keep these best practices in mind to get the most out of your efforts.

Set up alerts

Online conversations move fast. As soon as a trend, conversation, or sentiment is out there — good or bad — it can easily gain traction. The only way to ensure your brand stays ahead of these conversations is to get real-time notifications about changes or trends within your industry. You can set up Google Alerts for your brand name, competitor brands, or industry topics to get notified as soon as something newsworthy crops up.

If you use Rival IQ, you can also set up custom alerts that are delivered straight to your inbox. You can set up alerts for a range of updates that are important to you including stand-out posts, trending topics and hashtags within your industry, or even when your competitors change their bio.

Filter out the noise

As important as social listening is to a brand’s marketing success, you don’t need to tune into *everything* that’s being said online. One key to effective social media listening is understanding how to hone in on the important metrics and filter out the rest.

What you focus on and what you choose to filter depends on your social listening goals. For example, maybe one of your goals is to find new audiences to reach. If your current audience spends a lot of time on Twitter, then you probably don’t want to analyze data from that channel for this particular goal. You could filter that data out and instead focus on YouTube or forums.

Measure your results

Like the rest of your social media strategy, your social listening efforts should always be measured. Use your original objective and KPIs to track your results and determine if you’re meeting your goals or if you need to make adjustments.

If your goal was to improve customer sentiment over a set period of time, then track your progress month to month. In Rival IQ, you can track your brand’s net sentiment per day which helps you visualize how the sentiment around your search terms has changed over time.

Wrapping it Up

A social listening strategy is essential for every brand. When social listening is done right, it not only impacts your social performance but also informs your overall marketing strategy and can influence major business decisions. For social listening to be effective, you have to take an active role by setting specific goals, identifying the KPIs that you want to measure, and regularly monitoring and analyzing online conversations. The data is there — you just have to know what to listen for.

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Social listening involves tracking and analyzing online conversations to understand public opinions, trends, and sentiments about your brand, industry, or other relevant topics. It goes beyond social media monitoring by not just observing what’s being said but also analyzing the context and emotions behind online discussions and extracting actionable insights.

Watch the video below and learn how to leverage Rival IQ’s social listening features to boost your marketing strategy.

But why exactly does social listening matter? From understanding your audience to staying one step ahead of your competitors, we’re exploring five ways social listening can impact your brand’s success.

Why Social Listening Is Important for Brands

Social listening takes advantage of the vast amount of information and insights available on social media. Let’s dive into why social listening matters for brands and how it can be a game-changer in your marketing strategy.

1. Understand Your Audience Better

One of the most significant advantages of social listening is its ability to help you understand your audience like never before. By monitoring conversations, comments, and sentiments shared across social, you get an inside look at the preferences, interests, and pain points of your target audience.

For instance, are they thrilled with your latest product release, or do they have concerns about your customer service? Social listening helps you tailor your efforts to address their specific needs, ultimately fostering stronger brand-consumer relationships.

See how a social listening tool like Rival IQ can give a brand insight into how its customers feel about a new product below. To Apple’s delight, the recent release of their iPhone 15 lineup garnered mostly positive reactions, with words like “love” and “best” used often.

Perhaps more helpful, though, are the negative comments. Only by keeping an ear to the ground was Apple able to understand a major issue its customers were experiencing and promptly respond to it.

2. Evaluate Your Performance

Effective marketing strategies aren’t just about reaching your audience; they’re also about assessing how well you’re resonating with them. Social listening can help brands evaluate their performance and gauge the impact of their campaigns in real-time.

Are your social media posts generating buzz, or are they falling flat? Is your latest product launch sparking excitement or confusion? With social listening, you can track mentions, sentiment trends, and even measure your share of voice against competitors. Armed with this data, you can adapt your strategy on the fly, making immediate improvements and staying agile in an ever-changing digital landscape.

Take the recent reveal that Usher would be the performer for the 2024 Apple Music Super Bowl Halftime Show. The announcement campaign had a major social media component and featured collaborations with recognizable figures like Odell Beckham Jr., Marshawn Lynch, and Kim Kardashian.

So, how well did the campaign do? Did it generate extra buzz around the Super Bowl? Are people responding positively or negatively to the announcement? These are questions that social listening can help answer.

Evidently, the September 24th reveal was an overall success, generating a massive jump in (largely positive) online conversations about the Super Bowl and the Halftime Show.

3. Protect and Improve Your Brand Reputation

Your brand’s reputation is one of your most valuable assets, and social listening is a powerful line of defense in protecting it.

By tracking mentions and sentiment surrounding your brand on social media, you can swiftly identify and address any issues or negative feedback. Whether it’s a customer complaint, a viral controversy, or a glowing testimonial, social listening empowers you to address customer concerns quickly, engage with positive mentions, and manage any potential PR crises.

Social listening can also help you identify brand advocates and influencers who can champion your products or services, further strengthening your reputation. By proactively listening, you can ensure that your brand’s reputation remains untarnished and even leverage positive sentiments to boost your image further.

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4. Keep an Eye on Competitors

Knowing what your rivals are up to can give you a significant edge. Social listening allows you to gather valuable competitive intelligence by tracking your competitors’ online activities. You can discover their marketing tactics, customer sentiment, and areas where they excel or fall short.

This information is invaluable for seeing how you stack up against competitors, identifying gaps in your strategy, and seizing opportunities to differentiate yourself. By understanding what’s going on with your competition, you can refine your own approach and make data-driven decisions to gain a competitive edge.

Mint Mobile is a prime example of a brand that excels at social listening and staying ahead of its competitors in the wireless industry. Known for its commitment to offering low prices and challenging the status quo of “big Wireless,” the brand has its ear to the ground, and when its competitors make unpopular moves like hiking up rates, Mint Mobile seizes the opportunity to make its mark.

When a competitor increases rates or makes a move that doesn’t sit well with consumers, Mint Mobile isn’t one to stay silent. Instead, it swiftly responds with witty and often humorous posts that not only highlight the competitor’s misstep but reinforce its stance as the David against the Goliaths of the industry. Whether it’s calling out AT&T like in the tweet below or Verizon for raising prices, there’s no doubt that social listening is an essential part of Mint Mobile’s strategy.

5. Stay On Top of Industry Trends

Staying ahead of the curve in a rapidly changing market is a constant challenge for brands.  Social listening offers a real-time window into the latest developments, discussions, and emerging topics within your industry.

Let’s say you’re a travel agency that wants to capitalize on emerging travel trends. With Rival IQ’s social listening tool, you could identify the most popular terms used in conversations about “travel destinations,” “travel ideas,” “top travel spots,” and so on.

Looking at the results, it’s easy to see that a ranking of the “happiest travel destinations” had gained traction online, with Rome, Barcelona, and Bangkok topping the discussions. With these insights in hand, you could take advantage of this buzz by tailoring your marketing efforts to promote travel packages for these “happy” cities.

Ultimately, by tracking relevant keywords and hashtags, you can identify emerging trends, anticipate consumer demands, and adjust your strategies accordingly. This trendspotting ability enables you to adapt your strategies and offerings to align with what’s hot and happening in your industry, positioning your brand as a trailblazer rather than an outdated follower.

How to Get Started with Social Listening

Before you start tracking every social media mention out there, it’s essential to lay down a solid foundation for your social listening strategy. Let’s walk through some tips for getting started.

Setting Objectives and Goals

The first step is to set clear objectives and goals. What do you hope to achieve through social listening? Are you looking to enhance customer satisfaction or observe public sentiment around a new campaign you just launched? Setting specific goals will not only give you a sense of direction but also help you determine the metrics to measure success.

Start by asking yourself a few key questions:

• What specific insights are you seeking?
• How will these insights help your business grow?
• What metrics will indicate success in achieving your goals?

By answering these questions, you’ll not only have a clear direction for your social listening efforts but also a benchmark for measuring your progress.

Tip: Set goals that are specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound (SMART). For example, you could aim to increase positive brand sentiment by 10% over the next quarter.

Choosing the Right Tools for Social Listening

Once you’ve defined your objectives, it’s time to pick the right tools for the job. There are several excellent social listening tools available, each with its unique features and capabilities. Here are three notable options.

Rival IQ

Our social analytics platform includes robust social listening tools that allow you to effortlessly monitor mentions, sentiment, and conversations about your brand and competitors. Tapping into data from millions of websites, including popular platforms like Reddit, Twitter, and Quora, it offers a comprehensive view of how your brand is perceived online.

For instance, with sentiment analysis, you can easily see what words are driving positive or negative sentiment around your search terms, as displayed in a word cloud like the one below. This visualization provides valuable context to help you understand what words and phrases have the biggest presence in these online conversations.

With a user-friendly interface, best-in-class sentiment analysis, and AI-driven search, our tool makes social listening accessible for teams without dedicated data experts. Plus, always-on alerting keeps you in the loop, ensuring you never miss out when there’s a large increase in conversations about your brand, competitors, or other relevant topics.

Mentionlytics

Mentionlytics is a plug-and-play social media monitoring tool that scours social media and the web to uncover, analyze, and report mentions of your brand. You can use advanced filters and boolean searches to narrow down the information that’s most relevant to your business, as well as keep an eye on your competitors and manage customer service inquiries in this one platform.

The tool also offers a personal Social Intelligence Advisor (SIA), powered by AI, which reports real-time charts and feedback about your social media campaigns and provides guidance for enhancing marketing and sales strategies.

Quid

Quid combines social listening with advanced AI and natural language processing to help you build, grow, and protect your brand. This tool is particularly effective in identifying subtle nuances, allowing you to understand the why behind mentions and other relevant social media conversations.

And it’s not just about monitoring your own brand. Quid also offers a big-picture look at the broader market and industry, making it easier to improve brand health, boost campaign performance, and drive innovation.

SproutSocial

Sprout Social’s social listening capabilities are built on intuitive workflows and AI-driven technology. It excels at handling high-volume data ingestion with automation, providing you with actionable insights about your brand, competitors, industry, and consumers.

With a range of features, from audience analysis and customer feedback tracking to influencer recognition and crisis management, Sprout Social can help you capture audience reactions to marketing campaigns, identify industry gaps, and stay ahead of trends in your industry.

Alternative Resources

If you’re just dipping your toes into social listening and are looking for accessible options, there are a couple of alternatives worth exploring.

Google Alerts is one straightforward and free way to monitor mentions of your brand or keywords across the web. You can set up alerts for specific search terms, and Google will notify you whenever new content matching those terms is published. While it may not offer the advanced features of dedicated social listening tools, it’s a great starting point for businesses.

Additionally, most social media platforms provide built-in tools to track mentions, learn about trends, and search posts. For example, Twitter’s Search feature allows you to hunt down tweets containing specific keywords, hashtags, or mentions. While these tools are limited to the specific platform they belong to, they can still offer valuable data for businesses looking to optimize their social media presence.

Creating Search Queries & Analyzing Results

With your objectives defined and the right tools in hand, it’s time to create effective search queries and make sense of the data you gather. Here are some tips:

1. Craft precise queries. Use Boolean operators (AND, OR, NOT) to create search queries that capture relevant conversations. Include filters such as date ranges, location, and language to narrow down your results.
2. Analyze the data. Look for patterns, trends, and sentiment changes in the conversations. Are there common pain points among your customers? Is there a viral discussion that you can use to your advantage?
3. Benchmark against competitors. Compare your social listening data with that of your competitors. Identify gaps and opportunities to improve your brand’s online presence
4. Extract actionable insights. Turn your social listening data into actionable insights. Identify areas where you can improve, seize opportunities, and address issues promptly. Share these insights with your team to inform decision-making.
5. Regularly review and adjust. Make social listening an ongoing process. Set aside time to review and interpret the data regularly. Make adjustments to stay aligned with your latest goals and objectives.

All in all, getting started with social listening involves setting clear objectives, choosing the right tools, and honing your search queries and data analysis skills. With these fundamentals in place, you’ll be well on your way to harnessing the power of social listening to enhance your brand’s success.

Wrapping It Up

In an era where every tweet, post, and comment can sway perceptions, social listening isn’t an option; it’s a necessity. Embrace social listening as an effective way to stay relevant, responsive, and ahead of the competition. Your audience is talking — are you listening?

The post What is Social Listening and Why Does It Matter? appeared first on Rival IQ.

The same holds true for social listening, especially if you’re involved in the world of social media marketing. When you use social listening, you’re tracking what people are saying about your brand, competitors, and industry as a whole. Although it often gets confused with social monitoring, the difference between the two is that social monitoring is more passive. When you use social listening, you’re using the information you’ve gathered to take action and engage with your audience.

From McDonald’s to Barbie, brands have seen major success with social listening because they pay attention to the many different social listening metrics that can help boost their brands. Whether you’re looking to generate more leads or create buzz about your business, social listening can help. Let’s get into the top social listening metrics and how they can be a boon to your brand.

7 Social Listening Metrics and What They Do

1. Mentions

As the name implies, social media mentions refer to when someone mentions your brand online. Mentions can be done in a variety of ways. Your brand may be directly tagged in someone’s post, which is a sign that the social media user is trying to get your attention. However, mentions aren’t always this direct.

Mentions can also simply be someone talking about your brand, perhaps in a conversation with another user. Or they may just feel like making a post about your brand. The high number of mentions isn’t good or bad on its own. Mentions can be positive, negative, or neutral.

More mentions do demonstrate greater brand awareness, regardless of whether they are positive or negative. The more people talk about your brand online, the more people will see your brand.

They also provide you with the opportunity to engage with your fans, something fast food brand Wendy’s does particularly well. One of the company’s top tweets of 2022 came about from a mention. When Twitch streamer @HeyStani caught sight of a new character skin in the game “Fortnite,” he noticed that it looked quite a bit like Wendy’s mascot and tweeted at Wendy’s with an image comparing the two.

Wendy’s reshared the post with a caption playfully calling their mascot a “goat,” aka the greatest of all time. The retweet earned an engagement rate of 0.68%, about 5x the brand’s average engagement rate on Twitter.

2. Post volume

Post volume and mentions go hand in hand, as post volume refers to the number of posts containing mentions. Just like mentions can be positive, negative, or neutral, a higher post volume isn’t necessarily good or bad. However, more posts do mean that your name is spreading more across the online world, for better or for worse.

The higher your post volume is, the more people are seeing your name on social media channels, which is why it can be beneficial to your brand awareness. Let’s take a look at coffee brand Starbucks’ post volume over the last 30 days. According to our social listening feature, Instant Search, we can see that Starbucks was mentioned in 249K throughout the past 30 days.

Think about how many posts are published in a day. Instagram last shared this metric in 2016, claiming that 95 million posts were created in a day on the platform alone. Considering Instagram’s growth since then, the number is likely far higher. With all those photos, videos, and Stories, it’s easy for your own content to be drowned out. That’s why it’s so crucial as a business to build up your online fanbase so they can be your biggest cheerleaders on social media.

They’ll spread your business’s name throughout the many social media platforms. In turn, your brand awareness will grow. In this way, you’ll create a cycle. One fan mentions you, that post gains you more attention online, and then your new fans will become champions of your brand. Ideally, post volume should be an ever-increasing metric, though you’ll likely experience some spikes depending upon things like new product launches.

3. Share of voice

When you talk about share of voice (SOV) in terms of social media, you’re referring to how much people are talking about your brand in comparison to others in your industry. To track this metric, you could look at the overall number of posts mentioning you and a group of your top competitors written over a specific amount of time. Then, calculate the percentage of posts with mentions that were specific to your company.

It’s essential to know where you stand in your industry. While tracking mentions and post volume can help you engage with your audience and get an idea of how you’re growing online, knowing your SOV can help you create benchmarks.

These numbers can help you understand how quickly you’re growing for your industry and evaluate where you stand. Like mentions and post volume, SOV can help with brand awareness, as your goal is to become more well-known than your competitors online. Knowing your post volume is helpful, but what’s more beneficial is being able to compare that post volume to others in your industry.

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For instance, let’s say Wendy’s wanted to know what their SOV was in comparison to McDonald’s. With our Saved Searches feature, we can keep track of how the two fast-food brands are faring online in terms of their SOV. Over the last 30 days, Wendy’s has received 152K posts mentioning them.

When we compare the number of posts from the same time period for McDonald’s, we see that the brand significantly outpaced Wendy’s, earning 1.3M mentions. Therefore, compared to McDonald’s, Wendy’s SOV is only about 11%.

4. Sentiment

We’ve already discussed how mentions, post volume, and SOV aren’t necessarily positive or negative. You may have more posts talking about you because they’re written by your fans. Or you may have more posts because you’re in the news for a negative reason.

Sentiment tells you if your mentions are more positive, negative, or neutral. Let’s consider coffee chain Philz Coffee. Over the last 30 days, its net sentiment was only 28%. Typically, this popular Bay Area brand fares much better with its audience. So, what happened?

The brand had 110 positive posts mentioning them but 72 negative posts. According to our Sentiment Drivers by Type word cloud, which pulls together the most frequently said words appearing in the posts mentioning the brand, the most prominent negative words were “close original location.” Judging by this information, we can venture to say that the negative sentiment comes from fans being unhappy that the brand chose to close its first location, located in San Francisco’s Mission District.]

5. Reach

Reach is defined as the total number of people who choose to see and engage with your post. One person who views your post is equal to one unit of reach.

Reach is challenging to determine. You might expect your reach to equal your follower count, but that’s typically not the case. Your content will most likely not be seen by all of your followers. For example, according to our 2023 Instagram Stories Benchmark Report, brands with the largest followings actually saw the smallest reach rate on Instagram. And there are a variety of reasons why this statistic is occurring.

For one thing, your content is competing with not only the other Stories on Instagram but also all the other forms of content on the social media platform, like posts and Reels. But with a growing number of social media channels, like TikTok and Threads, you’re also competing with all of the content on these other applications.

A lower reach rate may also tell you it’s time to switch up your content. On social media, posts and Stories are prioritized on people’s pages based on whether or not the app thinks they’ll want to see them. If you’re getting a low reach rate on a particular channel, that social media platform may be telling you that your followers don’t care to see your content.

Reach can help with lead generation because the more people who see your content, the more potential customers you can create. Though higher reach doesn’t directly translate to more buyers, it can help you in the long run as you may convert a social media fan to a customer.

On Instagram, reach is a private metric that a social media team can see on their analytics page, but what if we wanted to take a look ourselves? If you’re a competitor to Peet’s Coffee, you might be curious about what kind of reach they’re getting. One of their top posts of 2022 on Instagram simply asked their audience to share how they would take their coffee alongside a video of a latte being made.

The post earned 2,790 likes and 77 comments, totaling 2,867 engagements. Assuming that some people may have both commented and liked the post, we know that Peet’s reached at least 2,790 people with this post.

6. Impressions

Reach and impressions often get confused with one another, but they have an important distinction. While reach refers to the number of people who see and interact with your content, impressions are defined by the number of times your content is seen.

Consider the above Peet’s example. While this post’s reach was only at least 2,790, its impressions are estimated to be around 53,400.

When you post content on social media, it may be viewed by your audience several times. So, why does it matter? Well, someone may be viewing the content multiple times because they want to, which shows that you may have a highly invested audience. But even if they view the content unintentionally, more impressions may still help you with lead generation.

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In the marketing world, we often talk about the Rule of 7. The Rule of 7 claims that people need seven touchpoints with a brand before they take action, with the goal usually being that the action is to make a purchase. If your audience is viewing your content many times, they’re creating those touchpoints for you. The more they see the content, the more likely they’ll engage with your brand and perhaps even make a purchase.

7. Engagement rate

What exactly is engagement? At Rival IQ, we define engagement as the measurable interaction on organic and paid social media posts, which includes likes, comments, favorites, retweets, shares, and reactions.

Your engagement rate can be calculated in many ways, but we generally focus on two forms. The first is engagement rate based on follower count, which is calculated by dividing the number of engagements by the number of followers. The second is engagement rate by impressions, which is when the number of engagements is divided by your impression count.

Either form can help you see how your social media strategy is faring. Still, because these engagement rates typically differ, you should stick to either the follower count engagement rate or the impressions engagement rate when comparing data. Otherwise, you may get an inaccurate picture of your social media success.

Your engagement rate can give you a deeper understanding of how your content (or your competitors’) resonates with your audience. While more engagement doesn’t necessarily translate to more sales, it can help you spread further online and get in front of people who are more likely to buy your products. According to content planning application Planable, posts with more engagement tend to rank higher on hashtag pages and the Explore page on Instagram. The social media platform will be more likely to show your post to people directly interested in your content and potentially your company.

One of coffee brand Dunkin’s top posts of 2022 was a carousel of “rejected taglines” filled with Gen Z vernacular. The post earned an engagement rate of 2.70% by follower but scored 5.03% as its engagement rate by impression.

How to Measure Your Social Listening Metrics on Rival IQ

What if you wanted to measure these social listening metrics using Rival IQ? Let’s walk through how to use these additions to the Rival IQ suite of tools.

You’ll find the social listening features in the left-hand column under “Social Listening.” From there, let’s take a look at Instant Search.

This feature tracks all the posts mentioning the words you search across the online world, including blogs, Reddit, Twitter, news sites, and much more. You can start with one of our recommended searches or look up a brand or phrase yourself. To encompass more of your mentions, you can search multiple terms at once. For instance, if you wanted to see how many times Starbucks was mentioned in the last 30 days, you might look up Starbucks, #Starbucks, and @Starbucks.

Let’s continue on with Starbucks. From there, you’ll get an in-depth look at Starbucks’ post volume, mentions, and sentiment for the last 30 days. You’ll get breakdowns of your post volume alongside the sentiment of those posts, the most commonly said words about your brand and whether they’re positive or negative, and what the sources of these posts are.

You’ll also get detailed lists of popular terms appearing in these posts, the most common hashtags in these posts, the domains that post about you most often, the authors who talk about you the most, the most common people and brands mentioned in posts about you, and which hashtags appear in posts about you the most.

Scrolling further down, you can dive deeper into these social listening metrics by checking out the Sample Posts section. This section will show you the top posts mentioning you, as well as additional information like the post’s impression count and sentiment. You can also see more about specific sections by clicking the View More button.

You can refine your search if you only want to look at specific sources or want to exclude posts with particular words or phrases. At the top of the page, you can select the source you want to look at, as well as choose to look at just posts with positive, negative, or neutral sentiment. Or you can click the Edit button to edit your search further.

If you select the Edit button, you have several options for narrowing down your search. Choose the sources you want to look at, include or exclude posts with specific words, exclude authors or domains, or reduce noise by excluding things like sponsored posts, coupons, or profanity.

Rival IQ also has additional social listening features, including Twitter Discover and Instagram Discover tools. With Twitter Discover or Instagram Discover, you can search for mentions in a variety of ways. Search for a specific handle or look for how many times a hashtag appears, either in top posts mentioning it or in recent posts containing the hashtag. Let’s search for #BarbieMovie on Instagram, looking for top posts with the hashtag.

From there, you’ll get an overview of the hashtag’s usage, including post volume, how many likes on average posts containing this hashtag get, how many comments, total engagement, other hashtags used alongside this one, and other common phrases appearing in these posts.

Want to learn more about the engagement on these posts? Scroll further down to find the Most Engaging Posts mentioning your hashtag or handle. From there, you can click View More to see more posts or click on a specific post to learn more about its engagement.

Wrapping Up Social Listening Metrics

Paying attention to your own online performance can help you boost your business online, but social listening takes things a step further. By staying on top of your social listening metrics, you can engage your target audience better, turning your followers or even your competitors’ followers into fans.

However, some brands may be getting hundreds or even thousands of mentions a week, which is hard to keep track of. Social listening tools can help you stay ahead of your competitors and engage with your audience in a timely manner. Using such a tool makes social listening much more manageable, so you don’t have to scour the web on your own.

Looking for more ways to use social media to help your brand? Check out our guide to the best ways to use social listening to give your marketing a boost.

The post The 7 Most Important Social Listening Metrics to Monitor and How to Track Them appeared first on Rival IQ.

Imagine being able to tune into conversations happening all over social media about your brand, products, and industry. That’s social listening in a nutshell. It’s the art of tracking and analyzing online chatter to gain valuable information, identify trends, and build stronger connections with your audience.

At Rival IQ, we’re all about empowering brands with data-driven insights. With our latest social listening features, we’ve made it easier than ever to dive deep into the conversations happening around your brand and industry.

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To showcase how impactful social listening is, we’re taking a look at 4 brands doing it right. First up is the fast food giant itself — McDonald’s.

McDonald’s: Tracking Campaign Growth & Evolution

McDonald’s excels at using social media listening to keep a pulse on its marketing campaigns, and one prime example of this is its recent “Grimace’s Birthday” campaign.

Launched in June, Grimace’s Birthday was a celebration of the iconic purple mascot’s birthday. To commemorate the occasion, McDonald’s introduced the limited-time Grimace meal and shake, along with a range of unique experiences for its customers. The campaign aimed to boost engagement, create excitement, and ultimately increase sales.

Little did McDonald’s know that the campaign would take on a life of its own on social media channels. A trend soon emerged on TikTok — the “Grimace shake trend.” People created videos of themselves drinking the purple shake and then cut to horror-inspired reactions, resulting in shareable content that was “obsessed” over by the masses.

Thanks to its keen focus on social listening, McDonald’s quickly caught wind of the Grimace shake trend. Proactively monitoring social media platforms, the brand detected the trend’s meteoric rise and realized the unique opportunity it presented. Instead of being passive observers, McDonald’s embraced the conversation wholeheartedly.

The brand’s witty response came in the form of a meme featuring Grimace with the text “meee pretending i don’t see the grimace shake trendd.” This clever engagement not only delighted the online community but also highlighted McDonald’s ability to stay in tune with the latest trends and social media conversations.

By acknowledging the trend, McDonald’s garnered even more attention for its campaign. User-generated content flooded social platforms, essentially becoming free marketing for the brand. The campaign transcended the boundaries of a traditional marketing effort and became an authentic cultural moment, generating immense organic reach and engagement.

Of course, the success of the Grimace’s Birthday campaign wasn’t just confined to internet buzz. It had a tangible impact on McDonald’s bottom line with the fast food giant proudly linking its strong Q2 earnings to the phenomenon. By having an effective social listening strategy, the brand was able to go beyond its owned channels and observe the success of its campaign according to real consumer conversations.

In conclusion, this campaign shows how social listening can be used to amplify and accurately track a brand’s marketing efforts. By paying attention to the online chatter, McDonald’s not only strengthened its relationship with its audience but also celebrated a successful campaign that left a lasting impression on the internet and, ultimately, its financial success.

Barbie: Fueling Fan Conversations & Engaging Mega-Influencers

Another brand that expertly harnessed the potential of social listening is Barbie The Movie, using it to add excitement to fan conversations and amplify the promotion of its highly anticipated movie.

One such instance was when the keen-eyed social media team at Barbie noticed some online chatter gaining momentum. Fans were drawing comparisons between Ken’s wardrobe in the movie and an outfit sported by BTS member Jimin in a 2021 music video. As talks of the connection spread, the Barbie team seized the opportunity to turn it into a memorable moment.

With the help of Ryan Gosling, who played Ken, a lighthearted video message was filmed in which Ryan acknowledged the fan observations, extended his warm regards to Jimin, and gifted him Ken’s guitar from the movie.

The result? The message became Barbie The Movie’s most engaged tweet ever, garnering an engagement rate of 295% for a lift of 744x compared to the average of all of its tweets since the account was established.

Even more, the video message became its most viewed TikTok and secured a place among the movie’s top five most engaging Facebook posts.

But it didn’t end there. Jimin then responded to Ryan’s gesture with a video message on Instagram. The Reel garnered an estimated 149 million impressions, extending Barbie The Movie’s reach even further. This powerful ripple effect showcased the power of social listening combined with influencer collaborations.

Beyond the engagement and views that the above posts received, the film’s efforts also led to spikes in the total volume of conversations about Barbie the Movie — spikes that can be observed through, you guessed it, social listening.

Check out how the number of posts about the film increased on July 19th, when Ryan Gosling’s message was published, and on July 24th, the day Jimin posted his reply. The spikes fittingly sandwiched the jump in online conversations on the date of the movie’s premiere, July 21st.

Barbie The Movie’s case is a prime example of how social listening can amplify a brand’s promotional efforts. By closely monitoring fan conversations, it identified an opportunity to engage with a mega-influencer and create an authentic moment that resonated with its audience. It serves as an inspiration for brands, big and small, to actively listen, adapt, and make the most out of the opportunities presented by paying attention to online conversations.

Duolingo: Staying Relevant By Chiming In

While many companies focus solely on monitoring brand mentions, the best of the best take it to the next level by leveraging social listening to engage with broader conversations related to their niche, even when their own name isn’t directly mentioned.

For instance, when there was buzz on Twitter about Cillian Murphy learning Dutch for his role in Oppenheimer, the language education app Duolingo didn’t miss a beat. The app seized the opportunity to engage with the culturally-relevant moment, praising the actor and then playfully bringing attention to its own role in language learning by tweeting “when a sexy actor does it, he gets an Oscar. when i do it i’m annoying. double standards smh.”

In another instance, Duolingo showcased its social listening skills by cleverly reacting to Twitter’s brand change to “X” with a humorous twist. As Twitter unveiled its new identity, Duolingo, known for its iconic owl mascot, cheekily proclaimed that its owl had now become the “alpha bird.”

In both examples, Duolingo demonstrates its mastery in social listening by being proactive, clever, and relevant in conversations that may not directly involve its brand. Instead of solely focusing on promoting its language-learning app, the brand takes a more human approach, engaging with users on a broader level and being part of conversations that resonate with its target audience.

Spotify: Turning Customer Demands Into Reality

When Spotify users in the UK and Ireland took to social media channels expressing their desire for an AI DJ feature, the folks at Spotify didn’t just ignore it as another random comment. Instead, they sprang into action, leveraging social listening to identify the recurring demand for the feature.

Fast forward to the grand reveal — the launch of Spotify’s AI DJ feature for their UK and Ireland listeners. But hold on, they didn’t just silently push out the update and call it a day. The streaming giant actually spotlighted the original posts that sparked the launch, showcasing the power of listening to their users and the impact their voices can have.

This example shows how businesses can leverage their social listening data to understand their audience better and improve their products accordingly. In conclusion, brands that genuinely pay attention to their customers’ feedback and respond proactively can not only identify and meet demands but also build a strong emotional connection with their audience.

The Wrap Up

Social listening has emerged as a game-changer for brands striving to stay ahead. The examples we’ve explored demonstrate how actively listening to your audience can lead to incredible outcomes, from boosting your brand’s relevance in cultural conversations to sparking product updates suggested by your customers themselves.

So, let’s level up your social listening game and make your brand a force to be reckoned with. With Rival IQ’s social listening tools, you can supercharge your brand’s success. Stay ahead of the game by monitoring competitors, analyzing sentiment, and engaging with your audience like never before.

The post 4 Social Listening Examples From Brands Doing It Right appeared first on Rival IQ.

Tools like Rival IQ’s new social listening features allow you to analyze data sources from tons of online locations, from Reddit to Twitter to Quora. And with additional features like Instagram Discover and Twitter Discover, you can go even deeper to learn about the people talking about you.

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Understanding your audience can help make you a better marketer and make your brand even more popular. Perhaps even more importantly, it can help make your brand more popular in a positive way as you track online sentiment. Let’s dive into how you can use social listening to boost your brand.

6 Ways to Use Social Listening for Better Marketing

1. Pay attention to your competitors

With social listening, you don’t want to just listen for your name: you also want to pay attention to certain keywords. And you should listen for your competitors’ names and their specific taglines or key phrases as well. When you pay attention to your competitors through social listening, you can see how much of the online conversation is dominated by you or them. You can also get insights into their current marketing strategies.

Using social listening to track your competitors also allows you to see specific opportunities to engage in the greater conversion online and even use your competitors’ marketing to your advantage. When McDonald’s announced that their burgers would be changed, Wendy’s opted to make fun of their announcement by retweeting an article about the alterations alongside their famous catchphrase, “Where’s the beef?”

According to our social media analytics features, which can help you track your competitors’ marketing strategy even further, this tweet earned a .11% engagement rate, outperforming 65% of Wendy’s tweets in the past year.     

2. Build better buyer personas

When you use social listening, you can learn who is talking about your brand. From online conversations, you can gather what they think about your company and what they love about it. Paying attention to what your real customers like can help you retarget them, as you’ll be able to use their comments to guide your marketing strategy.

Let’s use Rival IQ’s new Instant Search feature to look for what people are saying about Starbucks. We can even use the advanced edit features to specifically look up what people are talking about around certain menu items or collaborations. If we were to look up how people are talking about Starbucks’s new collaboration with K-pop group BLACKPINK, we’d find that the reception has been overwhelmingly positive. The Sentiment Drivers by Type word cloud tells us which words are commonly showing up online about the collaboration, as well as if the phrases are related to more positive or negative comments.

Through features like this word cloud, we can enhance our buyer personas to target new customers or retarget existing ones. According to the word cloud, buyers are happy with the new BLACKPINK merchandise and the new BLACKPINK-inspired frappuccino. But words like “crash” and “not available” may indicate customers’ frustration with the fact that the merchandise sold out quickly and the drink is not available everywhere. Starbucks may want to consider expanding the collaboration to satisfy their audience, as there are more buyers interested in it than they may have anticipated.

3. Find influencers who already love you

In addition to using social listening to find out who your buyers are, you can also use it to find out who your best influencers would be. A study by Matter Communications shows that consumers want authenticity from their influencers. Rather than someone who is joining many companies as an influencer, they want someone who genuinely uses and loves the products they’re talking about. If you find someone who authentically loves your brand, you should make them an ambassador of your company.

Rival IQ’s social listening features can help you build a better influencer network. Using the new Instant Search feature, you can look up your brand name or specific keywords and see who is talking about you on blogs, Reddit, Twitter, YouTube, and more online sources. You can also use the Instagram or Twitter Discover feature to find people talking about or tagging your brand on those two social networks.

Say you’re the social media manager at Dunkin’ and want to find a new Twitter influencer to work with. If we were to use the Twitter Discover feature, we could look up top posts tagging @dunkindonuts or with the hashtag #dunkindonuts.

The Twitter Discover feature allows you to tailor your search to find the exact influencer you need. You can look for Twitter influencers with specific followings so you can find the perfect nano-, micro-, macro-, or mega-influencer for your campaign. The tool can also help you see how often they post about you, what they’re saying, and how much of an influence they’re expected to have on Twitter.

4. Get ahead of your social media sentiment

How are people feeling about your brand? How about any particular new product launches? What about your greater marketing strategy? All of these feelings fall under the category of social media sentiment. Using social media listening to track online conversations, you can do a sentiment analysis to determine what people’s opinions, emotions, and attitudes are around your brand.

Staying on top of social media sentiment helps you acknowledge growing concerns before they become a bigger problem. Maybe a new product isn’t landing with your audience the way you thought it would. You may have to pivot to make changes to the product or begin marketing it differently. Or perhaps there’s something that’s beyond your control, but you’re being asked to weigh into the conversation by your audience. By optimizing your social listening strategy, you give yourself more time to respond to such issues, allowing you to craft the perfect response instead of one that’s rushed and flawed.

Perhaps you’re a social media manager working with Pinkberry and wanted to know how the new “Barbie” promotion is going, as a collaboration between the two brands has resulted in a Barbie Land Berry Pink frozen yogurt. Using the Instant Search feature on Rival IQ, you can look up keywords like “Pinkberry” and “Barbie.” A search of these terms yields a graph showing how much people are talking about it and if the results are positive or negative. While the number of posts remains relatively low, nearly all comments are positive.

If you scroll through some of the comments, you’ll find that most people are excited about the collaboration or have already tried it and loved the flavor. Pinkberry may want to consider talking up the frozen yogurt more as this product seems to have very high positive social media sentiment.

5. Engage with your audience

There’s a major difference between social media monitoring and social listening, and that difference is your engagement. When you monitor your social media channels, you’re paying attention to what’s happening online and seeing what people are saying about your brand both on your own posts and in the greater online conversation.

But social listening is as much about listening as it is about responding. When you focus on social listening, you’re using what you’ve monitored to influence your decisions, including how you engage with your audience. According to Sprout Social’s research, 64% of consumers want brands to engage with them online. But engagement goes beyond replying when social media users comment on your posts, although that still remains a good way to show that you’re listening to your fans. But other ideas may include commenting on competitors’ posts in a bit of friendly rivalry or commenting or resharing your fans’ posts.

Few brands engage with their audience as well as Wendy’s, especially if you’re looking on Twitter. One of the brand’s top Tweets of this past year was Wendy’s resharing @DlyStickFigures’ drawing of their mascot. Wendy’s added the caption, “say hi before you keep scrolling pls,” keeping with the brand’s voice. A scroll through the comments shows that Wendy’s wrote back to over 150 fans, many of whom did as Wendy’s asked and simply said hi. That commenting resulted in an engagement rate of 0.36%, 2.6x Wendy’s average engagement rate on Twitter for the past year.

6. Set alerts

What’s the hardest part about social listening? The biggest challenge is that the online world is a vast place. It’s difficult to track your brand mentions, your competitors’ mentions, and every conversation online that you might be able to leverage in your marketing. One of the best ways to ensure you don’t miss anything important is by setting alerts. And you have several ways to do it.

One of the easiest ways to set social listening alerts is through Google Alerts. Simply go to google.com/alerts. From there, a white bar will appear, and you type in there what you’d like Google to track for you. Whenever something you’re tracking shows up on Google, whether in a news article, blog post, or something else that would pop up in Google’s search results, you’ll get an email.

Unfortunately, most social media platforms are lacking in similar alert functions. If you were to want alerts for specific keywords, it’s not currently possible on TikTok, Instagram, or Twitter. There were reports that Twitter was rolling out a feature that would include keyword alerts, but no such tool has been released yet.

That’s where social listening tools like Rival IQ’s new features come into play. Rival IQ has a slew of alert options, including a new feature that alerts you to any drastic changes in post volume, as well as a larger Alert Feed that’ll show you what’s happening with your competitors.

To view your Alert Feed and unlock the new social listening alert to see how your post volume is changing, go to the Alerts section in the left-hand navigation. From there, you’ll see the Alert Feed for all the companies you’re currently tracking. Then, click Configure Alerts, which you’ll see in the upper right-hand corner of the page.

From there, you’ll be taken to your email settings. You’ll be able to change which alerts you’re tracking, including the post volume alert, which you’ll find under the Listening Alerts section. Click that box off, and you’ll start receiving notifications about post volume changes.

Wrapping Up

Social listening is incredibly valuable and worth investing in. Brands like Wendy’s teach us the value of finding ways to insert yourself into the conversation. Social listening lets you discover and influence how people think about your brand. You can engage with your audience in new ways, and engagement is exactly what your audience is after. You can even find ways to take your competitors’ marketing efforts and turn them into a win for your brand instead.

Looking for more ways to up your social listening game? Check out our list of the best social listening tools on the market today.

The post How to Use Social Listening to Improve Your Marketing in 6 Easy Steps appeared first on Rival IQ.

In this blog, we’ll explore the ins and outs of sentiment analysis, delve into popular sentiment metrics, and unveil helpful tools to help you measure sentiment effectively. We’ll also dive into real-life examples of brands that have used social listening to optimize their marketing efforts. So, if you’re ready to take your digital marketing game to the next level, keep on reading!

What Is Sentiment Analysis?

In a nutshell, sentiment analysis is the process of gauging and categorizing people’s opinions, emotions, and attitudes expressed in social media posts, comments, and other online interactions.

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By analyzing sentiment, you can gain valuable insights into what people love, loathe, or simply find “meh” about your brand. Armed with this knowledge, you can make data-driven decisions to improve customer experiences, fine-tune your messaging, and tailor your marketing strategies to align with the ever-changing sentiments of your audience.

The importance of sentiment analysis for brands in digital marketing continues to reach new heights as the number of users online grows. According to Statista, a whopping 4.8 billion people are active social media users worldwide. That’s a massive pool of voices, opinions, and emotions waiting to be harnessed.

Understanding Sentiment Metrics

When it comes to social media sentiment analysis, it’s crucial to grasp the key metrics that help us decode the emotional vibes swirling around online. To start, brand mentions are typically assessed and categorized into three types: positive, negative, or neutral.  

Positive sentiment represents the hearts, the thumbs-ups, and the general love and appreciation your brand receives from users. When people share their positive experiences, it’s a signal that you’re doing something right.

On the flip side, negative sentiment helps you identify pain points, customer frustrations, or areas where your brand might be falling short. Embrace it as an opportunity for growth and improvement.

But what about the in-between? Neutral sentiment fills that space, representing those times when people aren’t overly thrilled or disappointed.

It’s essential to acknowledge neutral sentiment too, as it gives you a baseline to measure against and provides context for the overall sentiment landscape.

You also want to go beyond just categorizing sentiments into buckets. Sentiment intensity looks at the strength or magnitude of the sentiment expressed. Volume and frequency shed light on how often people are talking about your brand and how the sentiment is distributed over time.

Finally, an overall social sentiment score gives you a big-picture look at how people online feel about your brand. This is usually calculated as a percentage of positive mentions out of your total mentions (or total mentions excluding neutral mentions). How you calculate it is up to you. Just be consistent with it so you can accurately track changes over time.

Tools for Measuring Sentiment

When it comes to analyzing sentiment on social media, having the right tools in your digital marketing arsenal can make all the difference. Let’s take a look at some of the top sentiment analysis tools available.

Rival IQ

Our comprehensive social media analytics platform includes social listening features in addition to other powerful social analytics functions. With a user-friendly interface, you can easily monitor mentions, sentiment, and conversations about your brand and your competitors. Some notable features include:

• Sentiment Analysis: Advanced algorithms analyze sentiment in social media mentions, providing you with a clear understanding of the positive, negative, and neutral sentiments surrounding your brand.
• AI-Powered Search: Use ChatGPT-powered search to skip the boolean and create custom queries without the data scientist.
• Trend Insights: Monitor sentiment changes, spot emerging patterns, and identify online advocates and top sources for conversations about your brand. Plus, spot conversation spikes with always-on alerting.

Quid

Our parent company Quid has tons of additional social listening and sentiment analysis features to offer, including analysis from channels like Facebook and Instagram. There are too many features to summarize quickly, but here are a few of our favorites:

• Real-time brand monitoring: Quid’s brand perception features enable real-time monitoring of your brand’s online presence, providing immediate insights into conversations, mentions, and sentiment across platforms to understand how consumers are perceiving and interacting with your brand.
• Sentiment analysis and trend identification: Quid helps you identify positive, negative, and neutral sentiments from consumers across the web, helping you understand overall brand perception and stay informed about emerging trends relevant to your brand.
• Brand passion measurement: Easily measure brand passion to quantify consumer enthusiasm, loyalty, and emotional attachment. Use these tools to identify passionate customers, cultivate brand advocates, and strengthen brand loyalty strategies.

Talkwalker

Talkwalker is a social listening and analytics platform that allows you to monitor sentiment across online, social, print, and TV/radio content. It provides real-time insights to help brands measure sentiment and make informed decisions based on public opinion. Its key features are:

• Sentiment Tagging: Talkwalker employs machine learning algorithms to tag social media mentions with sentiment labels, enabling you to identify sentiment patterns quickly.
• Multilingual Analysis: Analyze sentiment in 180+ languages to gain a global perspective on your brand’s reputation.
• Crisis Detection: Receive real-time alerts when there is a significant change in sentiment, allowing you to respond promptly to potential crises.
• Image Recognition: Talkwalker’s proprietary Image Recognition technology can analyze sentiment associated with images and visual content shared on social media.

Brandwatch

Brandwatch is a social media management tool that helps brands monitor and analyze social media sentiment. It offers an array of features designed to provide comprehensive insights into customer opinions and preferences. Some notable features include:

• Sentiment Scoring: Brandwatch provides sentiment scoring that assigns positive, negative, or neutral sentiment to social media mentions.
• AI Smart Alerts: Its AI assistant automatically detects spikes and drops in mentions.
• Social Inbox Integration: Its social listening tool (“Listen”) integrates smoothly with the Brandwatch’s Engage tool, making it easy to analyze, monitor, and act swiftly according to online conversations.
• Boolean operators: Specify your searches by leveraging 48 different Boolean operators.

Mention

Mention is a social media monitoring tool that includes sentiment analysis features. It allows you to monitor brand mentions, analyze sentiment, and publish posts to connect with audiences through online conversations about your brand. Some key features are:

• Sentiment Analysis: Grasp the sentiment of an audience and compare data with robust filtering options.
• Real-Time Monitoring: Never miss a conversation with Mention monitoring over one billion sources across the web daily.
• Competitive Analysis: Monitor what is said about your competitors online and measure your performance against them.
• Sentiment Reports: View key metrics, get qualitative insights, and build your social listening strategy accordingly with a comprehensive social listening report.

3 Brands Leveraging Social Listening

By actively listening to conversations online and analyzing social media sentiment, savvy brands can gain valuable insights into their audience’s preferences, opinions, and needs. Let’s explore three real-life examples of brands that have successfully utilized social listening and sentiment analysis to impact their strategies and actions.

1. Topicals: Listening To Customer Ideas

Topicals is a skincare brand that specializes in treating flare ups with science-backed formulas for hyperpigmentation, eczema, KP, and ingrowns. In monitoring social media conversations, the brand keeps a finger on the pulse of conversations surrounding its products and proactively engages with users that mention its brand.

In particular, Topicals is highly responsive to customer feedback, regularly quote-tweeting product suggestions from customers and seeking validation from other users. In doing so, the brand gains ideas for future products directly from its audience while also showing its customers how much they value their opinions.

In addition to being a great use case of social listening, the brand’s open-minded quote-tweet also had the advantage of getting customers engaged with its social posts. As of writing, this tweet was Topical’s fourth-most-engaging tweet of 2023.

2. Starbucks: Finding Viral Content To Engage With

By closely monitoring platforms like TikTok, where trends and viral content thrive, Starbucks identifies posts that mention its brand and seizes the opportunity to join the conversation.

One notable example is a TikTok video where the user not-so-subtly expressed their distaste for having to make their own coffee at home to save money and tagged Starbucks for help. Recognizing the video gaining traction, the coffee giant responded with an empathetic “We’re always here for you,” further fueling the engagement and generating positive brand associations.

Even more, Starbucks also leveraged this piece of user-generated content (UGC) in its content strategy. The brand’s account stitched the above TikTok with a cheeky response, as seen below.

These examples highlight how Starbucks effectively uses social listening to identify viral content and actively engage with it. By responding to or repurposing such posts, Starbucks demonstrates its genuine interest in customer experiences, generating buzz and strengthening its brand presence across social media platforms.

3. Delta: Delivering Timely Customer Support

Delta is another brand that’s effectively utilized social listening. By keeping a close eye on its mentions online, the airline brand consistently demonstrates its commitment to customer satisfaction by using social media platforms to troubleshoot and resolve customer problems.

One example of this is a recent tweet from Delta. In response to a customer asking about lost items, Delta quickly replied with a friendly message, offering their assistance and asking for additional details. This demonstrates Delta’s commitment to actively listening and engaging with its customers in real-time.

Delta’s focus on delivering timely customer support through social listening sets a positive example for other brands. By actively monitoring social media conversations and promptly addressing customer concerns, Delta fosters a stronger bond with its customers, earning their trust and loyalty.

Tips for Effective Social Media Sentiment Analysis

When it comes to social media sentiment analysis, having the right strategies and tools in place can make a world of difference for your brand. Here are some essential tips to ensure your sentiment analysis efforts are effective and yield valuable insights.

Establish clear objectives and goals.

Before diving into sentiment analysis, it’s crucial to define your objectives and goals. What do you hope to achieve? Are you looking to measure customer satisfaction, identify brand advocates, or gauge public opinion about a specific campaign? Clearly outlining your objectives will help you focus your efforts and pull actionable insights from the data.

Choose the right social media platforms to monitor.

Not all social media platforms are created equal. Each platform has its own unique user demographics and communication styles, so it’s important to choose the platforms that align with your target audience and industry.

Whether it’s Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, or industry-specific forums, make sure you’re monitoring the platforms where your audience is most active. This will ensure that your sentiment analysis efforts are concentrated where they have the most impact.

Select relevant keywords and hashtags for sentiment analysis.

To effectively gauge sentiment, you need to identify the right keywords and hashtags that reflect the topics you want to monitor and analyze. Consider industry-specific terms, product names, brand mentions, and relevant hashtags that are frequently used in conversations related to your business.

Be mindful of industry jargon, slang, and variations in language usage, and include both positive and negative keywords to get a comprehensive view of sentiment. You’ll also want to regularly review and update your keyword list to keep up with evolving trends and discussions.

Apply human judgment for accurate interpretations.

While sentiment analysis tools can be a huge help in providing automated analysis, it’s still crucial to apply human judgment for an accurate understanding.

Automated tools may not always capture sarcasm, irony, slang, or context-specific nuances accurately. By having skilled human analysts review and validate the sentiment analysis results, you can ensure more precise insights and avoid misinterpretations.

Remember to adapt your approach based on your specific brand, industry, and target audience. Sentiment analysis is a dynamic process that requires continuous refinement and adjustment. By following these tips, you’ll be equipped to unlock valuable insights that can transform the way you engage with your audience and drive your brand forward.

Wrapping It Up

Understanding the sentiment behind conversations online is now essential for digital marketers. Brands that embrace sentiment analysis in their digital marketing strategies will have a competitive edge, enabling them to connect with their audience on a deeper level and adapt swiftly to changing sentiments.

So, add social listening and sentiment analysis to your digital marketing toolkit. Use it to stay ahead of the curve, pivot strategies when needed, and truly connect with your target audience. By doing so, you’ll forge stronger connections, drive meaningful engagement, and ultimately propel your brand to new heights.

The post Social Media Sentiment Analysis: Tools and Tips for 2023 appeared first on Rival IQ.

As part of our Top Social Media Tool Reviews series at Rival IQ, we’re bringing you all things listening: mentions, influencers, and sentiment, oh my (and tons more too).

How to pick the right social media listening tool

Start with a few basic questions, like:

• Is listening an important component of my social strategy?
• How big is my brand or agency?
• What are my social media goals?
• How many competitors do I want to keep an eye on?
• What’s my social media budget?
• How big is my social media team?

The first question is obviously major: social media practitioners who are just starting out or who are wearing a ton of different hats may not prioritize social media listening the way that a Fortune 500 brand might. Even if you’re new to listening, we included some free and low-cost social media listening tools that can fit anyone’s budget to help you dip a toe into listening. Brands with some budget and a few team members devoted to the cause should check out mid-market tools, and enterprise brands, we have some great options for you too.

Free and low-cost social media listening tools

Our favorite:

Mention

How it works: Mention is a powerful, inexpensive monitoring tool that offers tons of flexibility for agencies interested in keeping track of who’s talking about their clients. It offers customizable search, tailored reports and alerts, and competitor monitoring alongside a nice suite of social media analytics.

Pros: Mention’s unique inbox-style approach helps account executives at agencies comb through piles of mentions about various clients at the speed of light. Agencies will also like Mention’s easy-to-read dashboards, influencer tracking, and competitive analytics, not to mention the ability to grow into the more powerful enterprise tools Mention offers as their businesses grow.

Cons: Agencies will quickly run into handle and user limits if they’re tracking more than a handful of clients.

Best for: Small agencies

Worth noting: Mention offers two different social listening packages: one for agencies and one for enterprise. For the sake of simplicity, we focused on the agency side, though you can read about their enterprise offerings here.

Runners-up:

Brand24

How it works: Brand24 is dedicated to ferreting out mentions of your brand and competitors across the far-flung web. This listening tool does a great job with tagged mentions, hashtag analytics, and competitor tracking. It even works to give you the 411 on who’s talking about you so you know if they’re an influencer or just a happy (or disgruntled) customer.

Pros: In addition to a set of great social media listening tools, Brand24 users will like its seamless meld into their workflow with a Slack integration, lots of team collaboration tools, and a handy mobile app for social listening on the go.

Cons: Brand24 does one thing and does it well, but if you’re looking for an all-in-one platform, you’ll have to keep hunting.

Best for: Listening, brands and agencies with a dedicated publishing tool already in place

Worth noting: Brand24’s resources game is strong with a smart blog and whitepapers, and also offers special discounts to its customers on popular software like Intercom, ClickMeeting, and more.

Google Alerts

How it works: Google Alerts are a free alert-based social media listening tool that’s easy to set up but pretty lightweight. Monitor your brand, your competitors, or keywords as they pop up across the web and get an email alert every time something new comes up.

Pros: You can’t beat the price or barrier to entry for Google Alerts. It’s really useful for finding little-known mentions of your brand or competition across the web. As you’d expect, it’s easy to tailor your alerts to specific languages, regions, sources, and frequencies.

Cons: Using Google Alerts can be noisy, since you’re tracking web presence instead of confining your search to social networks.

Best for: Solopreneurs or brands just starting out

Slack+Twitter

How it works: Hacky tech alert! Through the magic of Zapier, you can wire up a dedicated Slack channel that alerts you every time someone mentions your Twitter handle or brand name. We use it in addition to our own in-app social media listening tools to keep an eye on Twitter without leaving the comforts of Slack.

Pros: Easy as pie and doesn’t cost a dime for the bajillions of companies already using Slack. This method also helps put your Twitter activity where you’re really likely to see it. Say goodbye to leaving your workspace to log into a dedicated app or interrupting your flow to check your email.

Cons: There’s really no way to segment the flow of information, so we can’t recommend this hack for things like competitor or keyword monitoring.

Best for: Anyone whose home base at work is Slack and/or loves a good hack.

Worth noting: You could wire up just about anything with this Slack+Twitter pairing, so get creative. Want to know every time someone mentions the new Star Wars movie? This hack will hook you up.

Mid-market social media listening tools

Our favorite:

Rival IQ

How it works: Okay, we’re a little biased, but Rival IQ integrates social listening throughout our app to keep our customers competitive no matter what’s trending on social. Instantly search millions of sites online with our AI-powered query builder, and then explore and save relevant topics for always-on monitoring of sentiment, post volume, and conversations from advocates and detractors. Never miss a mention with automated alerts delivered straight to your inbox.

Pros: Social analytics and listening are most powerful when viewed in the context of your competition, so fans of that approach will like keeping an eye on competitors right alongside your own brand’s mentions, top authors, hashtags, and more. Easily query sites like Reddit, Quora, Twitter, YouTube, and more with our easy-to-use Instant Search.

Cons: We’re constantly expanding our list of supported sites, but you can always check in with our pals over at Quid for an even larger list of social listening sources.

Best for: Brands and agencies of all sizes

Worth noting: Marketers who aren’t quite sure where to start with social listening will like the auto-populated suggestions based on popular activity and content in their Twitter and Instagram feeds.

Runners-up:

Keyhole

How it works: Keyhole offers social media listening tools for brands of any size with its BrandIQ platform, which targets social listening for small brands and solopreneurs, and its Advanced Suite, which seeks to be an all-in-one platform for large and enterprise brands. Both products can help you keep track of your hashtags, keywords, and mentions.

Pros: With such a full suite of tools, brands of any size can find a listening home in Keyhole. Keyhole offers solid social listening and tracking and competitor research too, which you know we’re all about.

Cons: Keyhole, your name makes me giggle.

Best for: BrandIQ is best for smaller brands, while the Advanced Suite targets larger brands and agencies

BuzzSumo

How it works: BuzzSumo pushes the boundaries of social media listening tools by focusing on social sharing in conjunction with more traditional brand monitoring, influencer tracking, and more. These features merge seamlessly with competitor monitoring and research, some light SEO resources, and great email alerts to make one handy tool.

Pros: Anyone who’s relied on Google Alerts to let them know when something new has happened online will love BuzzSumo. It’s a great tool for keeping an eye on your competition’s mentions and social shares, and also for proving the power of your own content. Here at Rival IQ, we use BuzzSumo for all of the above. It also helps us research top pieces from our blog authors.

Cons: Some users criticize the power of BuzzSumo’s backlink analysis, and suggest combining BuzzSumo with SEMRush or Ahrefs.

Best for: Brands and agencies looking to centralize their social media listening and SEO in one tool

Sprout Social

How it works: As we mentioned in our social media management tools round-up, Sprout Social works to be your all-in-one social tool, with listening and monitoring riding alongside management, community engagement, and more. Sprout’s listening arm covers hashtag tracking, mentions, sentiment, competitor insights, and more.

Pros: Current Sprout customers will love being able to up their listening game without leaving Sprout’s colorful confines. Track by campaign, topic, or hashtag, and easily keep an eye on how the internet is talking about your competition.

Cons: Listening isn’t included in the standard Sprout package, so existing Sprout customers will need to pay more to gain access. Sprout’s social media listening is in development after their acquisition of Simply Measured last year, so expect this technology to be in flux until that transition is complete.

Best for: Current Sprout customers looking to expand their social muscle

Enterprise social media listening tools

Our favorite:

Quid

How it works: Quid delivers on enterprise-level social listening as well as consumer and market intelligence, with customers loving how comprehensive and powerful its suite of tools are. Their suite of tools expanded in 2020 with the acquisition of Quid, a leader in AI-driven text analytics, and again with the acquisition of a little social media analytics tool called Rival IQ in 2021.

Pros: Customers love the ability to track exactly how they’re being talked about on all corners of the internet, from media to social and beyond. Users also rave about the extremely responsive customer support team is and how intuitive the tool is right out of the box.

Cons: Quid is currently working to further expand its owned analytics capabilities with the acquisition of Rival IQ, so stay tuned for improvements there.

Best for: Enterprise-level brands and high-volume agencies

Runners-up:

Meltwater

How it works: Meltwater has everything a large brand needs by way of social listening: influencer tracking, brand mentions, and competitor analysis. It runs all these through an AI lens to let the robots help you do more.

Pros: Meltwater’s tools are comprehensive, nice to look at, and easy to spin up. And if you’re looking at centering all your management, listening, and analytics in one place, they play well with each other.

Cons: Some users wish Meltwater’s report and dashboard customization was a little easier to manage.

Best for: Enterprise-level brands

Brandwatch

How it works: Brandwatch features a suite of social media analytics and listening tools for enterprise customers. It also offers a product dedicated to making social media listening data easier to visualize. Brandwatch recently merged with Crimson Hexagon to bring more sophisticated social media analytics under its umbrella.

Pros: Data nerds will love how many ways you and slice, dice, segment, and filter all your social listening data. And in case their comprehensive set of listening and analytics wasn’t enough, Brandwatch also has dedicated consultants for an additional fee who can help you with setup, education, research, reporting, and more.

Cons: Brandwatch is missing social media management from its offerings, so enterprise brands will have to use two tools for all things social (which might be unpalatable at this high price point).

Best for: Enterprise brands who are ready to focus on listening

Worth noting: Brandwatch has a great blog that makes use of their tool to keep an eye on trending social content.

Nuvi

How it works: Nuvi’s powerful enterprise-level social listening offers everything you’d expect from a strong social media listening tool (competitive tracking, brand mentions, segmenting, sentiment, and more) wrapped in a dark but dreamy package–like Dark Mode before it was cool. Nuvi’s eye-catching visuals and rich analytics combine for a solid enterprise-level tool.

Pros: Large brands and agencies can do a lot within Nuvi by way of tracking how they (or their clients) are performing on social, especially when integrating Nuvi with its sister software, Groundspark, for social media management.

Cons: Nuvi’s signature neon-on-black style isn’t for everyone, and this powerful tool doesn’t come cheap.

Best for: Large brands and agencies

Methodology

First things first: what the heck is social media listening, and how do you find the right tool? Listening on social media is all about keeping a virtual ear to the ground so you’re the first to know when a customer, influencer, or reporter mentions your brand, a keyword that’s important to you, or a competitor. By staying on top of these mentions, savvy brands and agencies can put out PR fires before they start, capitalize on positive mentions and customer reviews, keep an eagle eye out for new trends, viral posts, and more.

A strong social media listening tool will help brands and agencies keep track of how the internet is talking about them. Are people mentioning them often or infrequently? Is the sentiment of these mentions generally positive, neutral, or negative? Which influencers are talking about this brand, and which influencers should be talking about this brand but aren’t yet? The best of these social media listening tools can also answer those questions about key competitors.

We opted to organize our rankings by size, since we know that a brand just starting out with listening won’t need (and might not be able to afford) the full package offered by enterprise-level tools, and that enterprise brands might opt to skip the free or low-cost sections.

We grouped social media listening tools by their entry price point: tools that were free or cost a cup of coffee to get started are in our free or low-cost category, while tools that cost a few dozen cups of coffee belong in our mid-market group, and if the tool was too pricey for companies to list the cost online, we considered them enterprise.

Many of these tools transcend categories with a mix of free, mid-market, and enterprise offerings, which is why we grouped by entry point. We’ll call out hybrid social media listening tools that could be a good fit for a large range of budgets and brands.

Once a data-driven marketer, always a data-driven marketer: here’s the full list of social media listening tools we looked at, though we narrowed it down to 12 based on feature power, customer reviews, pricing, ease of use, and more.

• Brand24
• BrandWatch
• BuzzSumo
• Google Alerts
• Keyhole
• Meltwater
• Mention
• Quid
• Nuvi
• Rival IQ
• Slack+Twitter
• Sprout Social

In case you’re wondering, here are the other tools we looked at before choosing our finalists: Awario, BrandMentions, Digimind, Falcon.io, IFTTT, Salesforce Social Studio, Sprinklr, and Zoho Social.

Don’t miss our Top Social Media Management tool reviews!

Read now

Wrapping it up

Just like with management tools, there’s no one-size-fits-all social media listening tool. We hope this list helps you find the right tool for your size, needs, and budget.

Are you hacking your way to social listening success with a homegrown method like Slack+Twitter? Or, are you more enterprising (see what we did there?) with tools like Meltwater or Sprinklr? And, is your social media listening tool integrated with your social media management or analytics tool, or a completely separate beast? We’d love to know how you’re keeping an ear to the ground, so let us know on Twitter.

This post was originally published in 2019 and has since been updated.

The post Top Social Media Listening Tool Reviews appeared first on Rival IQ.

Measure anything and everything from sentiment to post volume to the number of authors posting about brands that matter most to you in conversations across the web. We’re combing sources like Reddit, Quora, Twitter, news sites, and so much more to ensure you have the freshest data about who’s talking about your brand (or your competitors). That’s right, we’re rolling out a totally new set of features all built on Quid’s expansive social listening platform for the ultimate in social listening capabilities.

If you’re a die-hard analytics junkie but haven’t set foot in the land of listening just yet, you might be wondering what listening can do that owned analytics can’t. We’ve got you! Social listening casts an even wider net online to help you catch conversations that are happening about your brand in a ton of different places, from the front page of Reddit to an offhand comment on a blog you’ve never heard of.

Pairing these perceptions around the web with your existing social media analytics will give you the fullest picture of your brand’s health online to help you make better decisions from branding to product lines and everything in between.

And we wouldn’t be Rival IQ without a competitive lens, which is why Social Listening in Rival IQ makes it just as easy to keep an ear to the ground about conversations about your competitors as it is to monitor your own brand perceptions.

Let’s jump into this dynamic new set of social listening features!

Understand perceptions of your brand with oodles of data sources

Analyze and review data from millions of domains alongside your social media analytics in Rival IQ to help teams without a dedicated data expert keep a finger on the pulse of online brand health.

Insights in a single click

Start listening to conversations about your brand or industry directly within your Rival IQ landscape in Instant Search. We’ve got tons of AI-generated queries for you to use right out of the box based on searches we think might be relevant for you, like searches about REI and Patagonia in this outdoor retailer-focused landscape below.

Looking for a little more customization and control? Use our intuitive query builder to see brand sentiment and conversation highlights, so you can get the info you want without spending hours building a topic.

Here you can see our AI-generated query, powered by ChatGPT, for conversations about REI. Easily fine-tune or narrow your results by adding more primary terms or words to include or exclude, or scroll down a little further in our query builder to narrow your sources or omit things like coupons and autoposts.

Once you’ve got your query just the way you want it, pop into your Instant Search results page for oodles of interactive analytics about your term. See your high-level stats in the At a Glance section for info on the number of posts about your search term, the potential impressions across tons of sources around the web, the number of authors posting about your brand, and your net sentiment, which describes how positively or negatively people are talking about your brand. Don’t miss those blue sparklines to show how things are fluctuating in each of these key areas.

Ready to really dig into your stats? All of our analytics are interactive, meaning you can click on a popular term, sentiment driver, author, domain or other category to see the related posts.

We know Rival IQ users are analytics nerds, which is why we’ve included effortless visuals you can easily drop into a big presentation or high-level client email. Try including a time series of volume of conversations about your brand or a word cloud with positive and negative attributes like the one above highlighting top trending products for REI as well as sentiments like “great deal” and “REI co-op cool haul.”

Let’s take the spike in conversations relating to Jeni’s Ice Cream on June 10th. As we can see in the correlated green graph, it didn’t have a huge impact on the brand’s net sentiment, but posts about the brand more than tripled.

When we dig in further, we can see that this jump in posts about Jeni’s had nothing to do with the brand’s own posting. Rather, the spike was correlated to Hollywood film director James Gunn posting a love letter on Twitter to one of the brand’s flavors, which spurred ice cream and comic book geeks around the world into conversation. Jeni’s might’ve missed this spike in posts about the brand if they were looking only at direct responses to their owned social, which is why social listening and social analytics are such a potent combo when used together.

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Best-in-class sentiment and sentiment driver analysis

Analyze millions of posts with the help of natural language processing (NLP) to understand how consumers feel about your brand and the specific conversational themes that contribute to that sentiment, so you can identify brand strengths and weaknesses. We partnered with our pals at Quid for full access to their top-of-the-line NLP and analytics in every inch of Social Listening by Rival IQ.

Want to automatically pull out behaviors and emotions your brand is generating with customers online? Pop into the Sentiment Drivers by Type panel, which will help you visualize conversations about your brand online. Let’s look at how customers and feeling about health food fave Dave’s Killer Bread, for example.

We bet you can guess green means good and bigger fonts mean more mentions. Words like “love,” “awesome,” “delicious” and “prefer” all point to a bread brand that’s seriously resonating with customers. The social media team at Dave’s might want to keep an eye on posts about the brand’s offerings being “depressing” or “not perfect,” though. Don’t miss clicking into one of the highlighted sentiments for post-level information about related conversations, making it easy to see exactly who’s talking about Dave’s being less than perfect.

You can easily toggle this word cloud into a table to see exactly how many posts there are relating to these emotions from across the web, or you can quickly toggle between attributes (words, phrases, and emojis), behavior, and emotion for a full picture of the sentiment drivers impacting your brand online.

We track net sentiment day by day so you can easily spot trends over time. In the example above, sparkling water brand Spindrift had some seriously positive conversations happening about their brand online, but took a little dip in early May.

Now, let’s dig into sentiment analysis a little more.

We don’t want to brag (much), but here’s a tidy example of how NLP can go beyond the sentiment of the post to drill into feelings specifically about your brand. In this Reddit post, a Redditor is talking a little smack about a competing brand of sparkling water, which might make it seem like the net sentiment of the post should be negative. But wait–we’re assessing sentiment based on the primary search term, which in this case is “Spindrift,” so we’re able to see that this post actually has a positive sentiment towards the brand because of the last sentence about Spindrift’s stronger flavor.

Comprehensive metrics to help you keep your finger on the pulse of your online brand health

Gearheads, this one’s for you: let’s walk you through tons of new metrics available in Social Listening.

Post volume

Use post volume (grouped here by day) to easily identify upticks in conversation about your search term. Hover over a given day to drill into the conversations that took place during that spike.

Popular Terms

Now that you have a handle on your post volume, pop into the Popular Terms table to see words and phrases that are most popular in posts about your brand.

No surprise that frequent posters about beloved Blue Bell Ice Cream are all about sharing their favorite flavors and combos like a Dr. Pepper float. This Popular Term word cloud (which is also available as a list) also makes it easy to see that fans love the brand for its Texas roots, which might be good info for the brand as they plan its next marketing push. Just like in the Sentiment Driver word cloud above, you can click on any of these terms to see posts relating to them for a deeper understanding of these conversations.

Sources and Domains

Analyzing your sentiment and key terms in conversations about your brands is important, but so is understanding where these conversations are happening across the web.

Analyze your top sources at a glance to see where people are talking about your brand or query the most. Sources aggregate websites into high-level categories like “news” and “blogs.” In this example, Twitter is alive and well for Blue Bell Ice Cream and is definitely a place the brand should be paying attention to in efforts to connect with customers.

We’re retrieving data from millions of websites, and categorized the sources into the most frequently requested source types:

• Blogs: Sites like the Mommy Blog, Kotaku, Gizmodo, Gawker, or LiveJournal
• Blog/article comments: Comments on blogs and news articles
• Forums: Sites like Reddit, parenting forums, eBay forums, BabyCenter, Gaia Online, CafeMom, or InvisionFree
• News: Sites like the New York Times or PR Newswire. News sources do not include author name or demographics.
• Professional reviews: Sites like CNET or PCWorld
• Twitter: A sample of tweets
• YouTube: A sample of videos from YouTube. Results include comments on videos.
• Other: Other selected sources around the web

If you want a little more detail, dig into Domains for more specificity about the domains and subdomains where your brand is seeing the most traction. For example, clicking on “reddit.com” will pull up comments in tons of subreddits so you can easily see where these conversations are happening.

Just like everywhere else in Social Listening, we also include post previews, potential impressions, and sentiment analysis on these posts so you can gauge what’s happening in the conversation with just one click.

Authors

Pop up to the At a Glance panel for an estimate of the total number of authors posting about your brand, or use the Authors panel to see the people posting most frequently about your brand online and where they’re posting. We also aggregate sentiment by author so you can see with one click whether a popular author is generally singing your praises or throwing shade.

In this luxury car query, we can see top authors who have posted more than 100 times in just the last 30 days about BMWs, as well as the sites where these authors are seeing the most traction for their posts. With brands working so hard to manage relationships online these days, this panel can be a great place to keep an eye on your current stable of influencers or to source new ones.

Hashtags

Savvy social media marketers know hashtags are more than just a Twitter thing at this point, which is why we have a dedicated table about the most popular hashtags used in posts about your search query.

The Blue Bell Ice Cream team can see at a glance here that some of the most popular posts about their brand across the web involve conversations about new flavors, which is a surefire nudge for their product that they should keep developing creative tastes for customers instead of resting on their laurels. Just like in other areas of Social Listening, you can click on any of these hashtags for a snapshot of related posts, potential impressions, and their sentiment.

People Mentioned and Brands Mentioned

Keeping an ear to the ground can be hugely helpful for finding new influencers for your brand or even other brands to partner with.

In this Blue Bell Ice Cream example, the brand can use the People Mentioned table to identify folks who are mentioned most frequently in posts about Blue Bell, and can click into each row for more detail and sample posts.

Now, let’s look at a competitor example. Posts about Ben & Jerry’s most often include references to these brands, suggesting that frequent commenters have junk food on the brain. We’re not saying the world needs a Flamin’ Hot Cheetos/Ben & Jerry’s collab, but we’re also *not* saying that.

Monitor *everything* from competitors to campaigns to industry trends

Never miss a trending topic or a sentiment shift from your competitors with easy-to-use search and always-on alerting.

Virtually unlimited ad-hoc searches for competitive clarity

There’s nothing worse than hitting your daily limit in an important work tool right before a big presentation or budget showdown, which is why we’re thrilled to offer unlimited Instant Search. Explore any topic, any brand, or any campaign as many times as you want each day, so you never need to worry about limiting your research.

Save searches for easy reference and comparison

If you’re ready to narrow your monitoring or want to keep track of topics you search regularly, save queries so you can come back to them.

Creating a Saved Search also makes it easy to compare and contrast brands or ideas that are most relevant to your business. In the example above, we can see that Burt’s Bees is dominating in share of voice compared to Neutrogena and Aveeno in the last 30 days, while the brand’s net sentiment is a little more in line with competitors. Think of this view as your at-a-glance dashboard for high-level metrics like posts and net sentiment so you know how your key brands and competitors are doing across the web.

Receive alerts on volume spikes so you can respond quickly

Be aware of large increases in conversations and the sentiment drivers related to the spike about your saved search, so you never miss a chance to respond on behalf of your brand.

We’ll deliver key stats about changes in post volume and notable search terms directly to your inbox to help you stay on top of conversations about the topics that matter to you. You decide the topics you want alerts about, as well as the frequency of the alerts and the recipients, making it easy to loop in the right people at the right time.

Drill into specific conversations

Zoom into the specific posts that contributed to a particular insight such as a key topic, sentiment, or other insight, so you can understand the full context of the conversation.

Hover over any spike in your post volume or sentiment for a preview of related posts from a variety of sources like Reddit or news sites. When we dig in on this BMW Instant Search, we can see a sample of conversations happening across the web about the brand, including a Reddit conversation about electric cars for sale in Europe and a profile on a popular car blog about the luxury BMW 7 series.

You can also get a ballpark for your potential impressions and an indication of whether posts about your primary term are positive, negative, or neutral. We can bet BMW is already paying a lot of attention to what’s happening in the luxury electric car market, but even just this sample of posts is a good reminder of where the brand should be focusing its innovation and marketing attention.

How to get Social Listening in Rival IQ

We’re thrilled to announce that Social Listening is now available in Rival IQ starting today. This suite of features is baked right into the new Engage and Engage Pro plans we launched on June 21st, and anyone who starts a free 14-day trial will also be able to listen in on conversations happening around the web.

For current customers, Social Listening is now live in Rival IQ, either as a trial through July 31st or included in your plan. After that date, upgrade to a plan that includes Social Listening for full access.

Engage plans start at $349/month and include 2 Saved Searches plus all the features detailed here, including Instant Search, advanced sentiment analysis, alerts, and more. For those in need of even more competitive insight, Engage Pro plans start at $559/month and include all of the above plus 10 Saved Searches.

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Wrapping it up: Social Listening

We hope you’re as stoked as we are about this amazing new suite of features. We can’t wait to see all the different ways you’ll use Social Listening to keep an ear to the ground, make smarter business decisions, and of course augment your competitive social media analytics in Rival IQ.

If you’d like to share your excitement or request a feature you’d like to see in Rival IQ, don’t be afraid to hit us up on Twitter.

The post Announcing Social Listening in Rival IQ appeared first on Rival IQ.