Turning conversations into insights with social listening

There are millions of conversations happening each and every day among the 4.9 billion people using social media. The average person (hello, that’s me!) spends about 145 minutes on social media every day. And an astounding 90% of users follow at least one brand on social media.

These numbers illustrate a powerful shift in buyer behavior towards a more digitized relationship with brands, and indicate the importance of brand’s social media presence to establish brand awareness, capture demand, and maintain loyalty.

It’s a fair assumption that a number of these people are engaged in conversations about your brand and the products, services, and overall experience you provide. These conversations happen at every stage of the buyer journey and customer lifecycle. Social media has become a powerful channel to find, compare, and make decisions about what you buy.

Just how powerful? 41% of respondents have discovered a new product on social media in the last three months, according to HubSpot’s Top Consumer Trends of 2023.

Customers take to social media to find solutions to a problem they’re experiencing, see what your customers are saying about your product, vent about a negative experience using your product, suggest features on their waitlist, or even recommend competitor solutions to peers.

At the least, you want to know about these conversations. It’s likely you want to be a part of them. This is where social listening comes into the picture.

Social listening is the tracking of conversations and mentions related to your brand and products, and then analyzing them for insights into what actions you can take to improve your brand reputation and products. It opens the door to real, raw, and often unfiltered feedback from both existing and potential customers, a live indicator of how they feel about your product.

Nearly 60% of businesses have a social media listening system in place and are monitoring social media for keyword mentions, with more than 82% viewing it as a key planning element in their strategy planning according to a survey from SocialMediaToday and Meltwater.

As a product marketer, it’s every bit as important to make social listening part of your strategy planning. Social listening helps you uncover valuable insights about customer sentiment, preferences, pain points, and experience with your product in real-time. These insights can then be leveraged in five ways:

Build a relationship with potential buyers.
Understand your ideal user profile.
Inform the product roadmap.
Fuel your competitive intel program.
Stay on top of market trends.

Let’s take a closer look at each of these applications…

Build a relationship with potential buyers

Your buyers are savvy and online. With countless solutions available, social media becomes a channel for them to explore and discover the best solution that will solve their challenge and deliver results.

User reviews become critical in informing the purchase decisions of 41% of businesses, providing an unbiased source of insight into product quality and ease of use, reports Gartner in their 2023 Global Software Buying Trends Report.

Use social listening to engage your buyers throughout the buyer journey. When mapping out your buyer journey, identify the right channels and messages so your brand can remain top of mind for the buyer long before they even reach out to engage or book a demo.

The buyer journey has truly become digital-first, and buyers are taking control of that journey and increasingly turning to peers for product recommendations. Your job is to stay on top of what those peers are saying about your product and take action to influence positive sentiment and thus, positive social feedback.

Understand your ideal user profile

Social media can help you get to know which of your end users are your power users. It’s a window into their life, their daily habits, and how the product makes their life easier (or not). Your power users may be active on social media.

These are the people who truly love and heavily use your product. They are likely to, on their own, share learnings, tips, and tricks with peers and other users. Your product may come up in these online conversations. Pay attention to how they describe your product (this can inform your product messaging) and how they ‘pitch’ the product to their peers.

That’s just scratching the surface! You can engage and build a relationship with these power users, forging a bond that can lead to future referrals, user-generated content, or potential partnership.

Potential customers look up to these power users and respect their opinions. These influencers, if you will, are influencing the buying journey, likely at awareness, consideration, evaluation, and decision stages.

Inform the product roadmap

Social listening is a powerful mechanism to obtain insights about product perception. Pay attention to the words they use to describe your product with their peers, how they describe their experience, and how they summarize the product to a peer. Analyze these insights to identify opportunities for product improvement and discover what your customers are most excited about.

I like to scroll through feedback each month and screenshot comments, posts, or comments that I want to come back to or share with Product to inform ongoing product improvements and possibly the product roadmap.

Chances are, your customers are going to social media to vent about a negative product experience, so make social listening part of your crisis management strategy.

While crisis management may not fall under the typical roles and responsibilities of a product marketer, as a PMM, you should take initiative to understand how social listening and your social presence helps manage a crisis triggered by a negative product experience.

With these insights, test your messaging to take control of the narrative, build rapport with your audience, and monitor in real-time how customers are reacting to your solution to the issue.

Fuel your competitive intel program

Social listening turns conversations into insights about your competitors. According to the 2023 Sprout Social Index, 90% of marketers agree social insights differentiate their brands in the market for a competitive edge.

As product marketers, we should tune into social channels to understand how our target audience is talking about the competition. Notice what they like, what they’re unhappy about, and what their overall sentiment is. These insights help you understand where your organization can differentiate in your messaging and help crystalize your value proposition.

Stay on top of market trends

Social listening can help you identify market trends - larger shifts in your industry that can present opportunities for future changes to your business strategy and growth for your organization. These trends often reveal changing customer pain points, evolving buyer needs, or refocused organizational priorities.

Use social listening to not only spot trends but also contribute to the conversation—connecting the dots between the trend and your solution so you can help your target audience see there is a better way.

In conclusion: Embrace the new reality

It’s a whole new world for buyers and sellers alike. Social media dominants. Conversations are online and are community and user-led. Social media listening transforms the way product marketers engage with customers and prospects alike in this new world, offering a deeper understanding of their needs and behaviors.

Combined with qualitative insights, this creates an ongoing feedback loop that centers the voice of the customer and brings real-time insights into your organization to inform everything from product messaging to the roadmap.

Before you go…

We’ve only scratched the surface of social listening strategies you can implement as a product marketer to turn conversations into insights. We want to hear how YOU are applying social listening.

Tag Product Marketing Alliance on LinkedIn to share your tips and tricks, or visit Community-Led Alliance to join the community-led growth collective.