Author: Mike Henry

Your social media channels aren’t just for scrolling through your feeds. With 74% of consumers relying on social media to guide their purchasing decisions, these platforms host valuable customer experience data. Social media intelligence is a powerful tool for leveraging this data to make informed business decisions.

What is Social Media Intelligence?

Social media intelligence is the analysis of data from social media conversations to guide marketing strategy. Your brand can better connect with your audience by tracking trends in online conversations around your product and industry. 

For example, identifying negative sentiment toward your latest feature can help you spot areas for improvement. It’s also possible that your product is fine but your team is marketing it to the wrong demographic. As a result, these insights also enable effective marketing and lead generation.

Here’s a breakdown of the four key components of social media intelligence:

1. Monitoring
2. Data Collection
3. Data Analysis
4. Actionable Insights

Monitoring 

Monitoring your social media channels is the first step in identifying and analyzing audience activity. What are your target customers talking about? What are their opinions on your brand and your competitors? How do they feel about your products and services? You can answer these questions by monitoring brand mentions and keywords on platforms like Facebook, Instagram, and X (formerly Twitter).

Data Collection 

Collecting data is necessary for generating analytical insights from social media conversations. InMoment’s comprehensive social listening tool can help pull mentions of your brand and competitor, track relevant keywords, and connect data from various channels in one place. The regular, real-time data collection ensures you have a rich dataset for the analytical phase.

Data Analysis 

Analysis is at the core of social media intelligence, enabling you to capture AI-enabled insights into customer behavior. For example, you can leverage sentiment analysis algorithms to understand public opinion around your brand. You can execute similar algorithms on competitor data to identify differences in online perception.

Actionable Insights 

Actionable insights are the fruit of your analytical labor, showing you how to stay competitive and win over more customers. These insights help you take immediate and effective action for feature improvements or a better marketing campaign. The main aim is to invest in activities that increase customer loyalty and engagement.

How Does Social Media Intelligence Differ from Social Media Listening and Social Media Monitoring?

Social media intelligence, social listening, and social monitoring are used interchangeably. However, they serve different purposes for brands looking to understand online conversations.

• Social Media Intelligence is the comprehensive collection and analysis of social media data for actionable insights. It helps brands analyze customer sentiment, trends, and competitors to make data-driven business decisions.
• Social Listening is the analysis of social media conversations around your brand, product, or service. It helps businesses see what customers are talking about to identify opportunities and pain points.
• Social Media Monitoring is the tracking of brand and product mentions through keywords and hashtags. Social media monitoring enables brands to find customer queries and complaints so they can provide immediate responses.

Benefits of Social Media Intelligence

• Stronger Customer Relationships
• Lead Generation
• Staying Competitive
• Proactive Crisis Management

Social media intelligence helps unlock valuable insights into customers, prospects, and competitors. Key benefits include:

Stronger Customer Relationships

You may have the best customer feedback questionnaire for collecting structured CX data. However, the reality is that customers are more likely to be honest and open about their experiences on social media. 

Listening to their online voice ensures you better understand your customers’ expectations. You get to capture honest insights to deliver more value, which in turn helps build stronger relationships and brand loyalty.

Lead Generation

Social media intelligence provides insights that help tailor your marketing efforts to your target audience. 

For example, a fashion retailer can leverage data analysis to identify demographics expressing interest in its premium suits and dresses. The retailer can invest in targeted ad campaigns to attract these user profiles and convert them into valuable customers. This effective lead generation also helps increase your market share as your campaign draws in more prospects.

Staying Competitive 

Your competitors’ social media activity highlights opportunities to improve your own brand. Tracking competitor mentions keeps you in the loop regarding key developments and issues. You can use this information to improve on their current offerings or fulfill a need they are neglecting. 

For example, let’s say several comments and posts are complaining about the use of leather in your competitors’ handbags. You can leverage this opportunity to promote your vegan fashion items to disgruntled users. The resulting competitive edge will help you win over customers to your side.

Proactive Crisis Management

Social media intelligence provides real-time monitoring of sentiment and conversations around your brand. By identifying negative trends early, you can address issues proactively before they escalate.

For example, if you identify growing frustration about a bug in your app, you can release a prompt update to reassure customers. This practice helps build consumer trust and supports brand reputation management efforts.

How is Artificial Intelligence Used for Social Media?

• Sentiment Analysis
• Content Creation
• Customer Engagement
• Analytics and Reporting

Artificial Intelligence (AI) enables social media intelligence by automating crucial tasks and uncovering CX insights. Primary applications of AI for businesses include:

Content Creation

AI helps businesses streamline various tasks, including content creation and scheduling. Generative AI drastically reduces the time it takes to produce impactful content that engages your target audience. Meanwhile, automation enables quick and effective scheduling of posts for enhanced interactions.

InMoment’s social media management tool tracks trending keywords and topics to generate fresh, engaging content. As a result, it helps you stay relevant to your audience while saving time that you can invest in other operations.

Sentiment Analysis

AI-powered sentiment analysis highlights customer feelings towards your products, services, or brand. It categorizes comments, posts, or social media content as positive, neutral, or negative. This categorization is useful for filtering out user profiles and managing their experiences.

For example, you can quickly identify customers expressing negative sentiments to resolve their issues. Monitoring customer health and journeys regularly helps companies reduce churn by over 34% for at-risk clients. Therefore, sentiment analysis helps boost retention by keeping businesses up-to-date on customer behaviors and reactions.

Customer Engagement

Chatbots and virtual assistants improve engagement by instantly addressing customer queries. With a comprehensive knowledge base, they can even guide customers through complex processes without human intervention. 

AI-powered chatbots learn from customer questions to provide targeted responses and recommendations. InMoment’s Active Listening™ is a conversational AI agent that provides context-aware follow-up questions to engage customers. As a result, it enables detailed feedback collection to help businesses make informed decisions.

Analytics and Reporting

AI simplifies analyzing large volumes of social media data to generate actionable insights. It helps you understand content performance, trends, and demographics to make data-driven decisions.

For example, analytics can show you which type of content receives the most engagement to help you optimize marketing campaigns. Similarly, it can highlight products receiving the most attention to guide inventory decisions. Visualizing these insights and sharing them with stakeholders can help brands track the effectiveness of their social media management.

How are CX Teams Benefiting from Social Media Intelligence?

• Competitor Analysis
• Reputation Management
• Trend Analysis
• Targeted Outreach

CX teams collaborate with multiple departments to improve customer experiences. Their cross-functional nature makes them a great fit for social media intelligence. Key benefits for CX teams include:

Competitor Analysis

Social media intelligence highlights competitors’ strengths and weaknesses. This analysis empowers CX teams to identify gaps in the market and proactively address them. 

For example, CX teams in an organization can discover potential pain points by tracking competitors’ customer feedback. They can use this information to resolve issues before they affect their own customers. Additionally, they can position their brand as a more reliable alternative, helping them acquire new clients.

Reputation Management

Social networks can amplify wins and crises for brands. Therefore, staying on top of conversations and tracking customer sentiment is essential for brand reputation management. 

Analyzing comments, reviews, and brand mentions can help CX teams detect crises early and manage them before it’s too late. It also enables them to highlight their wins and demonstrate their value through testimonials. This approach builds customer trust and enhances the company’s public perception.

Trend Analysis

Social media intelligence tools track trending topics and emerging themes. This analysis provides CX teams with valuable insights into customer interests and behaviors.

For example, a fitness app’s CX team might notice a rising interest in mindfulness and meditation. This trend could guide the development of new app features or content to align with customer demands. As a result, trend analysis allows CX teams to position their company as a relevant business that understands modern customer needs.

Targeted Outreach

CX teams leverage social media intelligence to identify specific demographics for targeted outreach. Positive interactions with these groups can strengthen loyalty and turn satisfied customers into brand advocates. For example, your CX team can identify the top influencers frequently mentioning your brand and contact them for a collaboration.

Social Media Intelligence Tools

1. InMoment
2. Mentionlytics
3. Hootsuite
4. Sprout Social
5. Brandwatch
6. Sprinklr

A social media intelligence tool makes it easy to better understand customer expectations. It handles everything from social media monitoring to data analysis. Here are six of the best tools to help you choose the right one for your business needs.

InMoment

InMoment’s XI Platform software offers a comprehensive social media intelligence solution. Unlike other platforms, it lets you control how frequently you want to pull and analyze data from platforms like Facebook, Instagram, and X. This level of control is key to building rich customer experience datasets.

The XI Platform also leverages sentiment analysis to provide insights into customer feelings around your brand. This analysis helps you identify disgruntled customers so that you can work on retaining them before it’s too late. In the XI Platform, you can also track trending keywords that can help you identify the biggest impacts on your customer experience. 

The ability to track keywords and brand mentions means you can keep an eye on competitor activity. This competitive analysis empowers your CX teams to learn from their strengths and capitalize on their weaknesses. 

For example, if your competitor is going through a PR crisis due to a recent data breach, you can use this opportunity to gain a competitive edge. Your marketing teams could communicate the superiority of your data protection technology.

Finally, InMoment’s social media intelligence tool enables high-quality lead generation. The insights gained from data analysis can highlight user profiles interested in your brand or offerings. 

By targeting these profiles with effective marketing, you can convert them into valuable customers. Similarly, the tool can help you identify top influencers in your space so that you can work with them to boost your brand reputation.

Mentionlytics

Mentionlytics allows businesses to monitor and analyze conversations on social media. Key features include real-time sentiment analysis, multi-channel monitoring, and competitor comparison reports. These features help companies make data-driven decisions to stay competitive and improve customer experiences.

Hootsuite

Hootsuite is a social media intelligence platform that combines data collection and analysis. Its Listening Basics feature allows businesses to track keywords and hashtags on social media channels. CX teams using Hootsuite to manage social media can leverage the InMoment integration to monitor comments and reviews in one place. The integration helps filter out the best reviews and share them on social media to enhance online reputation.

Sprout Social

Sprout Social is a versatile platform that helps brands track and analyze social media conversations in real-time. Its standout feature is a trend-identifying tool that generates a word cloud highlighting topics relevant to the brand and industry. This trend analysis is helpful for staying competitive and managing customer interactions.

Brandwatch

Brandwatch uses advanced search options to help CX teams monitor vast amounts of social media conversations. It also enables trend analysis, influencer identification, and crisis management. It offers multilingual support to help businesses with multiple global locations manage their social media presence.

Sprinklr

Sprinklr is a social media management tool that enables businesses to track mentions, trends, and competitor activity. It uses AI algorithms to perform sentiment analysis on user-generated content. This analysis helps brands understand customer emotions and tailor their marketing strategy accordingly.

Get Better Insights to Transform Your Customer Experience with InMoment

Your social media channels are a treasure trove of customer experiences. Unlocking this data can help you win over customers, move past competitors, and boost your bottom line. InMoment’s social media intelligence tool gives you the key to access and analyze this valuable data. Schedule a product tour today to see how it can transform social media management for your brand.

References 

WebFX. 100+ Social Media Statistics You Should Know for 2024 (https://www.webfx.com/social-media/statistics). Accessed 11/26/2024.

InMoment. InMoment Market Pulse (https://www.linkedin.com/posts/weareinmoment_b2b-customersuccess-ai-activity-7251989745914818560-haGe?utm_source=share&utm_medium=member_desktop). Accessed 11/26/2024.

Did you know that only 20% of CX teams report directly to the CEO? The other 80% of CX teams report to 15 different leadership functions, with CTO and Chief Customer Officer being the second and third most common leadership functions. 

These statistics show that there is no standard for where a CX team should live within your organization. To accurately place a CX team, you need to have a firm understanding of what CX teams do, what the customer experience goals of your organization are, and where those two overlap. 

What Is A CX Team?

A CX team is a group of customer experience professionals who work to improve customer experience by sharing customer insights throughout the organization. They analyze customer feedback, customer journeys, and more to get the most up-to-date information about the current customer experience and where it can be improved. 

Who Is On A CX Team?

The number of employees on a CX team and their respective titles will vary depending on the company. For example, a company that just established a CX team will have fewer employees than a company with an enterprise-wide CX team. 

Regardless, the core team members of a CX team are: 

• CX Managers: Oversee strategy and execution.
• Data Analysts: Dive deep into customer data to uncover actionable insights.
• Journey Designers: Map out customer interactions to identify gaps and opportunities.
• VoC Specialists: Ensure customer feedback is heard and acted upon.

What Skills Are Needed on A CX Team?

Members of a CX team need to be versatile employees who can examine different types of data. These employees must be able to research, analyze, and prevent all customer-related findings to organizational stakeholders. A recent study of CX teams said the three most common skills of employees on a CX team are: 

• Qualitative research
• Quantitative research
• Project management

What Skills Will Be Needed On A CX Team In the Future?

To keep up with ever-evolving customer expectations, CX teams will need employees who can grow and ensure that an organization can still be successful. The three skills that CX team employees need to have in the future are: 

• Data science or analytics
• Business case development
• Inclusive design/accessibility testing

These skills reflect changes in the customer experience market and what is going to needed of organizations to stay successful.

How to Build a CX Team

Building an effective CX team requires careful planning and alignment with your organization’s goals and customer needs. Follow these steps to ensure you assemble a team that will drive meaningful results: 

1. Secure leadership buy-in
2. Define the team’s purpose and goals
3. Identify the right roles and skills
4. Select the right tools and technology
5. Establish clear processes
6. Foster cross-department collaboration
7. Continuously train and develop the team
8. Measure and Optimize

1. Secure Leadership Buy-In

For a CX team to succeed, you need the full support of senior leadership. The executives must understand the importance of a CX team and be willing to provide the necessary resources. In this step, you will also decide which executive leader the CX team will report to. 

2. Define the Team’s Purpose and Goals

Before you can hire and assign roles to employees, you need to clearly define your CX team’s mission. Determine what customer challenges the team will address, how success will be measured, and how the team aligns with broader business goals. Examples of CX team goals include: 

• Increasing customer retention by improving satisfaction
• Increase customer acquisition by improving the customer journey
• Driving higher Net Promoter Scores (NPS) through targeted strategies

Clearly defined goals will guide the hiring process and set the foundation for CX success. 

3. Identify the Right Roles and Skills

With the purpose of your CX team defined, you can now begin the hiring process. Your CX team should include diverse roles that collectively address all aspects of the customer experience. Common roles on a CX team include:

• CX Manager
• Data Analyst
• Customer Journey Designer
• VoC Specialist 

In addition to technical skills, look for individuals who can perform qualitative and quantitative research, possess great communication skills, and are experienced in project management. 

4. Select the Right Tools and Technology

In order to give your CX team the best chance to succeed, you need to have the right tools at your disposal. These tools might include Voice of the Customer platform, journey mapping software, conversational intelligence, or data analytics tools. 

InMoment’s customer experience platform is an all-in-one solution that lets you collect and connect customer experience data in every format across every customer interaction. InMoment’s integrated CX approach helps organizations realize ROI in just 12 months, which is more than twice as fast as the industry average.

5. Establish Clear Processes

It is important to develop workflows to guide a CX team’s activities. For example, you will need to define how customer feedback will be collected, analyzed, and shared. You will also need to create a process for collaborating with other departments to address CX challenges across the organization. 

6. Foster Cross-Department Collaboration

CX teams don’t operate in isolation. They must collaborate with other departments, including marketing, sales, product development, and customer service. Encourage open communication and shared accountability by hosting regular meetings to align on customer-centric strategies, using collaborative tools to ensure visibility, and more. 

7. Continuously Train and Develop the Team

The customer experience market is constantly changing. It is important to invest in skill development. This can be done by attending customer experience events, training on new tools and technologies, and getting certifications in CX methodologies.  

8. Measure and Optimize Performance

Being able to measure the performance of a CX team against customer experience KPIs is crucial for the longevity of a CX team. Regularly review these metrics and gather team feedback to refine processes and improve outcomes. 

CX Team Challenges

Although they are important to the success of an organization, even the best CX teams do not come without challenges. These challenges can affect CX teams across all organizations, here are the main ones to be aware of: 

Lack of Executive Support

Over 40% of CX teams in an organization that prioritizes CX say they do not have consistent executive support. This suggests that despite the organization’s overall commitment to enhancing customer experience, there remains a significant gap in the backing and resources that these teams receive from higher management, which can ultimately hinder their effectiveness and the overall success of CX initiatives.

Inconsistent Business Case Development

A recent study found that only 22% of CX decision-makers make a business case for customer experience for every project or initiative and that only a third of them make a business case for major initiatives. 

In order CX teams to become an integral part of the organization, it is important to make business cases for all initiatives on how they will impact the customer experience at your organization. 

Misaligned Priorities

When prioritizing customer experience initiatives, most CX teams primarily concentrate on customer impact. However, almost half of CX teams often overlook three important criteria: return on investment, feasibility, and risk. To gain and maintain the support of key stakeholders within the organization, CX teams need to give more attention to these three factors.

Considering ROI is vital for justifying CX efforts to key stakeholders concerned about any initiative’s financial implications. Assessing feasibility includes evaluating the existing operational capabilities and potential barriers that could hinder the execution of the initiatives. Lastly, risk assessment is an essential component that cannot be neglected. Every initiative carries inherent risks that could impact customer satisfaction, brand reputation, or financial performance.

Lastly, risk assessment is an essential component that cannot be neglected. Every initiative carries inherent risks that could impact customer satisfaction, brand reputation, or financial performance.

By considering ROI, feasibility, and risk alongside customer impact, CX teams can enhance their strategic planning. This comprehensive approach not only helps secure the support of key stakeholders but also ensures that CX initiatives are sustainable and aligned with the broader business objectives.

Where Should CX Teams Report?

Regardless of where your CX team lives, the team must remain unbiased and have the purview to work cross-functionally to drive collaboration and break down silos. Without that organizational freedom and neutrality, the team’s efforts are already handcuffed, and the chances of CX success are greatly diminished.

While many companies have added a seat at the table for a Chief Customer Officer (CCO) or Chief Experience Officer (CXO) in recent years, we still see most CX functions report to either marketing (the CMO) or operations (the COO). There are pros and cons to each of these reporting relationships:

The Pros and Cons of Your CX Team Reporting to Marketing & the CMO: 

Pros:

• Tied More Closely to the brand promise of the organization (since CX is the fulfillment of that promise)
• Tied more closely to the communication function. Too many CX functions don’t think about the role communication plays in the overall experience, but this is where the customer expectations get set
• Part of a more holistic view of the company and the customer journey
• Marketing (or strategy) is more likely to consider the experience of the future as opposed to only today’s experience

Cons:

• May be too far removed from the actual frontline customer interactions, so it can be more difficult to implement change
• Often too closely tied to marketing’s priorities and budget
• Can marketing enforce an effective closed-loop process if that work happens elsewhere in the organization?
• Marketing is often more focused on customer acquisition and top-of-funnel activities

The Pros and Cons of Your CX Team Reporting to Operations & the COO:

Pros:

• More closely tied to frontline customer interactions
• Typically has good success with enforcing a strong closed-loop process (if staffed and funded properly)
• Operations typically focused and measured on customer retention

Cons:

• Unless digital and call centers report to the COO, the program can get too focused on in-person or physical interactions
• Can be too focused on break/fix of today’s experience and not focused on overall CX strategy, process redesign, or experience design. Programs can get very tactical
• Susceptible to budget cuts and quarterly targets, whereas CX tends to be a medium-to-long term proposition

The Pros and Cons of Your CX Team Reporting to Executives Such as the CEO:

Pros:

• Easier alignment to executive goals and buy-in
• Budget is set aside specifically for one purpose and can have less constraints
• Easier to build relationships around CX with each department to break down silos

Cons:

• Difficult to get all departments aligned to taking action as they can be seen as an outsider
• More difficult to be in synch with the day-to-day business rhythm
• Focus often on medium- or long-term initiatives while peers focus on quarterly results

CX Team Best Practices  

While the focuses and goals of CX teams can change from organization to organization, certain things will set you up for success regardless of your objectives. Here are some best practices to ensure your CX team can succeed in any environment: 

Democratize Data

Democratizing data is an important step for protecting your teams’ time and resources, and it can be performed at any stage of CX maturity! 

Invest the time needed with key stakeholders to explain the importance of customer experience, co-create dashboards, and reduce any ambiguity about CX programs. By spreading the responsibility between team members throughout your business, you will save time both now and down the line with fewer emails, more empowered colleagues, and more visibility of your hard work. 

Leverage Available Resources 

Technology alone won’t help with demonstrating a return on investment. The most effective programs have a strategic partner to help map the initial CX framework, discover those actionable insights and point out the cost savings along the way.

You need a motivated team behind yours to design the roadmap of experience management success. Best practices show that the financial impact of the CX capability is outlined in the onboarding process, tested and controlled along the way, and measured and reported quarterly.

Create CX Champions

Take time upfront to educate teammates on the importance of customer experience and ask for volunteers to champion such initiatives across various departments. The more stakeholders invested in a CX program, the more time practitioners will have to delegate responsibilities across a business.

See which people in your business are organically gravitating toward your CX program and formalize their role as a CX champion. Empower these individuals to access the CX data anytime, anyplace to drive action.

Level-Up Your Dashboards

When you have a customer experience dashboard that is intuitive and easy to understand, stakeholders can easily circulate them within the organization. An effective dashboard is designed to guide the user, not overload the user with data. 

We recommend you follow this design structure where possible:

• Main KPI: Where are we? How has our performance changed over time?
• Main KPI & Main Segment: Who/what should we focus on?
• Sub KPIs: What is contributing to our core metric?
• High-Level Text Analytics: What overall are our customers telling us?
• Verbatim: What are our customers actually saying about their experience?
• Deep Analysis: Splitting KPIs up by pre-pop data.

To learn more about best practices and how to succeed as a CX team, download the checklist below:

How to Craft a Max-Impact CX Strategy for a Small CX Team

Having a small CX team doesn’t mean you can’t make a big difference. What it does mean is that you have to use your time wisely! Download this checklist for step-by-step instructions on how to realize four strategies designed specifically for CX teams like yours.

How to Craft a Max-Impact CX Strategy for a Small CX Team

Having a small CX team doesn’t mean you can’t make a big difference. What it does mean is that you have to use your time wisely! Download this checklist for step-by-step instructions on how to realize four strategies designed specifically for CX teams like yours.

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Customizing CX Team Organization: Considerations for Success

Regarding the reporting relationship of the CX function, one size doesn’t fit all. Every organization, leadership dynamic, employee culture, and business is different. We mentioned above that we have led CX, reporting to the CMO, reporting to the COO, and as an independent function. What we learned is that it can be successful in any of these reporting relationships, though we suggest it has a head start if it reports into the predominant power core of the organization.

Some companies are operations-led, others are sales & marketing-led, while others are product-led. Tying CX to the true cultural and power core of the company, though it brings some of the bias mentioned above, aligns it better with the core of the company.

Regardless of where your CX function reports, there are key organizational elements that must be present and the CX leader also has to have certain key skills, strengths and characteristics for it to be successful.

Improve Your CX Team with InMoment

If your customer experience (CX) team is just starting out or expanding an existing team, InMoment is the top choice for a CX partner. With over 50 years of experience across various industries and a best-in-class solution, InMoment will guide your company in the right direction. To discover how InMoment can benefit your organization, schedule a demo today!

References 

Forrester. Predictions 2025: Customer Experience. (https://www.forrester.com/report/predictions-2025-customer-experience/RES181533). Accessed 11/20/2024. 

Forrester. Customer Experience Market Insights, 2024. (https://www.forrester.com/report/customer-experience-market-insights-2024/RES181199). Accessed 11/20/2024.

Forrester. The State Of Customer Experience Teams, 2023. (https://www.forrester.com/report/the-state-of-customer-experience-teams-2023/RES180035). Accessed 11/20/2024.

Did you know that 77% of organizations cannot consistently create a consistent customer experience across channels? This often stems from poor internal communication, outdated technology, or inefficient processes. 

However, to combat this, you need to understand the end-to-end customer experience and be prepared for every path a consumer might take to become a customer or that a current customer might take when using your products or services. 

Whether you are looking to change current processes, improve old ones, or ensure that your team is aligned on the priorities of the customer experience, creating a customer journey map will be useful to your organization. 

What is Customer Journey Mapping?

A customer journey map is a visual representation of the journey a customer has with a company’s brand, products, services, and people. Customer journey maps may also be called customer interaction maps, customer corridors, or service blueprints. 

A customer journey map visualizes all touch points between the customer and the organization, from customer research on the product to first contact with the company to building customer loyalty. 

By constructing theoretical customer decision-making scenarios, companies can more easily understand the factors and product features influencing customers’ purchase decisions. With InMoment’s XI Platform, you can create a customer journey map that tracks the customer journey across different channels and gives you insight on how to optimize it. 

The Benefits of Customer Journey Mapping

Customer journey mapping allows companies to see the gaps between the desired customer experience and the one the customer receives. Creating a customer journey map can help organizations improve:

• Internal education and alignment
• Resource allocation
• Product lines
• Processes
• Customer Experience

Improved Internal Education & Alignment

Over 81% of CX practitioners agreed that customer experience journey mapping was successful at internally educating stakeholders about consumer pain points or unmet needs. This can be useful to show employees that one problem or mistake in one phase of the customer journey can hurt the customer’s overall experience. 

Furthermore, customer journey maps educate stakeholders and get them on the same page about what is most important. Almost 80% of employees who created a customer journey map at their organization say it helped generate alignment between internal teams. 

Increased Resource Allocation

Customer journey maps can help you identify problems and present a strong business case for customer experience improvement. 71% of organizations say customer journey mapping has successfully persuaded management to invest in CX efforts and fix existing customer problems. 

Improved Product Lines

Customer experience journey mapping identifies where you may be failing in the customer experience and gives you room to improve. Problems identified through customer journey mapping could be a confusing website navigation bar or a checkout process with too many steps. 

With this information, you can improve your customer experience and eliminate pain points. In fact, over 70% of organizations say that customer journey mapping has helped them improve the user experience (UX) of a product or service or has helped them gain investment to create new features. 

Improved Processes

Most professionals using customer journey maps agree that one of their benefits is identifying the need for internal optimizations. By visualizing the customer’s experience across various touchpoints, journey maps provide a clearer understanding of where internal processes may be causing delays, confusion, or frustration for both customers and employees. 

Whether it’s a lack of cross-departmental communication, inefficient workflows, or outdated technology, journey maps can expose these pain points and allow organizations to align their internal operations more effectively to improve overall efficiency.

Improved Customer Experience

All of these benefits connect to creating a customer experience that consistently meets or exceeds customer expectations. Almost 90% of customer experience professionals who use customer journey mapping report improved performance in customer experience KPIs such as 

higher customer satisfaction, lower customer churn, and improved Net Promoter Score. 

Why Customer Journey Mapping is Important

Creating a customer journey map is important because it helps visualize the customer journey. Improving the entire customer experience can be difficult when only focusing on one stage or aspect. 

Seeing all the touchpoints together, how they relate to each other, and how they help the customer move through the journey helps your organization understand how each piece of the customer experience puzzle fits together. 

5 Types of Customer Journey Maps

There are different types of journey maps for different use cases. Each is tailored to specific goals and stages of the customer experience. Different journey maps provide unique insights, whether you’re looking to understand how customers interact with your brand today, envision an ideal future state, or analyze internal processes that affect customer outcomes. Here are some of the most common types of customer journey maps and when to use them: 

Buyer’s Journey

• Purpose: To map out the process a potential customer goes through before making a purchase decision and becoming a customer. This type of journey map helps you understand what motivates a consumer at each stage, their questions, and the information they seek. 
• When to Use: This journey map is used when developing marketing and sales strategies that aim to guide prospective customers through their decision-making process. It is particularly useful for aligning teams across multiple departments, such as marketing, sales, and customer success. 
• Focus: This journey map focuses on the buyer’s thought process, motivations, pain points, and needs at each stage of the journey. It typically covers awareness, consideration, and decision. 
• Example: A SaaS company creates a buyer’s journey map to understand how potential customers discover their product, research competitors, and make decisions. The map helps the company tailor content to each stage, such as blog posts and webinars for the awareness stage, product comparisons during the consideration stage, and free trials or demos for the decision stage.

Current State

• Purpose: This map reflects the existing customer experience based on how customers interact with your products or services today. It is useful for diagnosing current inefficiencies and identifying areas for improvement. 
• When to Use: When you want to understand what is happening now, spot bottlenecks or optimize current processes. 
• Focus: Real-time customer journey analytics to understand the emotions, pain points, and touchpoints customers are experiencing at every stage. 
• Example: A retail company maps out how a customer currently shops on its e-commerce platform and identifies the complex checkout process as an area of improvement to improve the e-commerce customer experience. 

Future State

• Purpose: The future state journey map outlines the ideal customer experience you want to create. It will look different from a current state journey map because it shows how interactions could be improved. 
• When to use: This journey map is most useful when redesigning or improving current processes. 
• Focus: Future state journey maps focus on optimizing processes, streamlining interactions, and improving customers’ emotional states at each stage. 
• Example: A software company wanting to overhaul their customer support process to improve resolution times can create a future state journey map to show what the ideal process would look like. 

Day-in-the-Life

• Purpose: The day-in-the-life customer journey map takes a broader view of the customer’s life beyond their interactions with your brand. It focuses on the typical day for the customer and how your product or service fits into their life. 
• When to Use: This can help you better understand your customers and identify better ways to serve them. 
• Focus: Day-in-the-life customer journey maps focus on customer activities, goals, frustrations, and needs within their daily routine and how that intersects with your product or service. 
• Example: A fitness app company maps out the day in the life of a busy working parent to see how and when the app could help them achieve their fitness goals in their busy schedule. 

Service Blueprint

• Purpose: The service blueprint journey map extends beyond the customer journey and includes business processes and systems that enable the customer experience that aren’t usually showcased in other journey maps. It visualizes the connections between the front-stage (customer-facing) and back-stage (internal processes).
• When to Use: This can be used to improve internal processes that impact the customer experience or to optimize service delivery systems. 
• Focus: Service blueprints showcase the customer journey and the underlying business activities with equal importance. 
• Example: A provider working to improve customer experience in healthcare maps out the patient’s journey, internal systems, staff interactions, and other elements needed to deliver a quality healthcare customer experience. 

How to Create A Customer Journey Map

Creating a customer journey map is an important process that should not be taken lightly. When building your customer journey map, it is important to follow the right steps to produce the most accurate and effective map for your organization. 

When you partner with InMoment, you get access to customer experience consulting with practitioners with over 50 years of combined experience that can help you build the best customer experience journey map for your organization. 

However, if you are not using those services, here is an overview of how to create a customer journey map from scratch: 

Step 1: Outline Your Objectives

Why do you want to create a customer experience journey map? Are you trying to improve a specific touchpoint, understand customer pain points, or increase the lead-to-customer conversion rate? Creating a customer journey map is a detailed process that often involves collaboration from multiple departments, so outlining what you hope to learn as a result of the customer journey map will make sure the efforts are well spent. 

Step 2: Create Customer Personas 

Next, you will want to develop detailed customer personas that represent different segments of your customer base. You might have already created these as part of your customer experience strategy. These personas should include important customer information such as demographics, needs, behaviors, goals, and challenges. 

Step 3: Map Out the Stages of the Customer Journey

This is one of the most important steps in creating an effective customer journey map. You will outline the stages and touchpoints customers will experience in this stage. Typical stages of the customer journey include awareness, consideration, and purchase. Some business models might include retention and advocacy after the purchase stage. 

Touchpoints refer to the places where your customers interact with your business. These could include the website, customer support portal, social media, and more. Outlining the high-level view of the customer journey will make it easier to examine specific sections of your … 

Step 4: Identify Customer Goals and Actions

You need to identify what the customer is trying to achieve at each stage of the customer journey. For example, in the awareness stage, they may be trying to gather information and create a shortlist. In the consideration stage, they want to see what product or service makes the most sense. 

Once you have identified these goals, outline the steps the customer will take to meet those goals, such as conducting online searches, reading customer reviews, or contacting your team directly. When you have the goals and actions outlined, you can position your organization to be prepared to meet customer needs. 

Step 5: Understand Customer Sentiment

While customer sentiment is usually a metric reserved for consumers who have already become customers, it can be useful in creating a customer journey map. Customer sentiment is how a customer feels about a brand’s products or services. It can be useful in customer journey mapping to see how customers feel about your brand at every stage of their journey. 

For example, suppose you discover that consumers didn’t like the email they received after downloading a document from your website. In that case, you can remove or change the email to prevent further customers from abandoning their journey. 

InMoment’s XI Platform makes sentiment analysis easy with best-in-class natural language processing (NLP) that categorizes, sorts and tracks customer sentiment. 

Step 6:  Visualize the Journey Map

Once you have completed all these steps, you can visualize the customer journey map. Create a visual representation of the journey using a customer journey map template. Your journey map should clearly show the stages, touchpoints, goals, emotions, and pain points a customer might experience. 

Step 7: Gather Internal Feedback 

After putting it all together in a visual form, share the journey map with internal teams not involved in the customer journey mapping process. You can even share it with existing loyal customers. Sharing the customer journey map in these groups will help you verify its accuracy and identify anything that needs to be fixed. 

Step 8: Track Customer Journeys

Once your map is complete, tracking real customer journeys is essential to see how they align with your assumptions. Use analytics tools, customer feedback, and data from CRM systems to monitor how customers interact with your brand across touchpoints. 

By tracking these journeys, you can identify patterns, measure the success of any implemented changes, and spot potential gaps in the customer experience that may not have been visible in the initial mapping process.  

Step 9: Use the Customer Journey Map to Drive Action

A customer journey map is only as good as the insights that come from it. Use your customer experience journey mapping to help inform your strategies and initiatives across departments. 

For example, you may notice that customers are more likely to convert when they receive a discount on their first purchase or that a specific landing page in a campaign has a bounce rate. These metrics can help you drive transformative action within your organization. 

Step 10: Share Wins

​​Once you start seeing the impact of your customer journey improvements, it’s important to celebrate and share these successes. Sharing results reinforces the value of journey mapping and motivates continued investment in customer experience initiatives. Document these improvements so they can serve as benchmarks for future efforts and inspire a customer-centric culture within your organization.

Challenges of Customer Journey Mapping

Some challenges associated with customer journey maps may deter some businesses from using them. However, these challenges can be avoided with the right customer journey mapping platform and a team invested in customer experience success. Regardless, here are some challenges of customer journey mapping to be aware of: 

Delayed ROI 

Although the use of customer journey mapping is growing, few organizations have had them in use for extended periods. Only 34% of organizations have three or more years of experience developing customer experience journey maps, and 83% struggle to identify and prioritize customer experience efforts. 

Effort of Integration

In a recent study, organizations that use customer journey mapping solutions said that the number one thing their provider needs to improve is the ease with which data sources are integrated. This means that these organizations may be spending too much time setting up their customer journey mapping platform or not setting it up completely and are missing out on important data that could be used to provide business insights. 

Quality of Integration 

Similarly, the organizations referenced above said the second most important thing for providers to fix is the quality of integrations with voice of the customer platforms, content management repositories, or other existing systems. 

Journey Measurement 

Another common challenge among organizations that utilize customer journey maps is the ability to measure the different phases of the customer journey and analyze their impact on business performance.

Journey Validation and Testing

When organizations create and use customer journey maps, they want to be able to validate and test them. Customer journey map testing and validation refers to the process of evaluating and verifying the accuracy and effectiveness of a customer journey map by actively testing real-world scenarios and gathering feedback. 

The goal is to ensure that the journey map reflects actual customer behaviors, experiences, and pain points and that the proposed changes or optimizations will deliver the intended improvements. However, this was ranked in the top five biggest areas of improvement for customer journey mapping solutions. 

Customer Journey Map Best Practices

As you go through the process of creating a customer experience journey map, you want to focus on how you are doing it as much as why you are doing it. When you build a journey map correctly, it can immediately be useful to you and your organization. If not, it will take time to fix, which will delay the benefits you will realize from using it. Here are some best practices to keep in mind when creating a customer journey map: 

1. Use Quantitative and Qualitative Data 

It can be easy to build a customer journey map based on the trackable actions a customer takes throughout their customer journey. However, this does not show what they felt at each stage or how they felt about certain touch points. You must combine insights from qualitative systems such as CRM systems, web analytics, and customer feedback tools and quantitative data such as surveys, interviews, and focus groups to correctly map the customer journey. 

InMoment helps you combine structured and unstructured data for the most accurate customer understanding by building an omnichannel customer experience that combines data from multiple sources and can help you build the most accurate journey map available. 

2. Align with Business Goals

In order to get executive support, you will need to connect your customer journey map to business goals. For example, it might be a marketing goal to increase conversion rates, but if you can say something like “increasing conversion rates by half of a percent will result in a 20% increase in revenue,” you will be more likely to secure executive support. 

3. Involve Frontline Employees

When creating customer journey maps, they are usually a cross-departmental effort across marketing, sales, customer support, etc. However, the frontline employees are often left out of it even though they deal with the customer more frequently than any other department. Consider sending out an employee survey or meeting with employees to understand their view of the customer journey and the customer experience. 

4. Leverage AI Customer Journey Insights 

AI customer journey insights can be used to reveal hidden pain points, optimize touchpoints, and improve the customer journey flow. These insights allow your business to proactively respond to customer needs and streamline processes. 

InMoment’s Strategic Insights team will use AI Journey Insights to identify the significant touchpoints in your customer feedback data. Our team helps you contextualize these findings by categorizing insights based on where they fit in the customer journey, understanding the underlying sentiment, and how insights can be implemented. 

Customer Journey Map Examples

When creating a customer journey map, it may benefit your team to look at customer journey mapping examples. These examples can provide valuable insights into how different organizations across different industries have mapped their unique customer journeys. 

Visualizing these examples can help your team understand how to structure the journey map, integrate data, and highlight customer pain points. Furthermore, studying a range of examples allows you to adapt best practices and innovative techniques to fit your specific customer base, whether focusing on B2B or B2C journeys. This exploration not only aids in the visual aspect but also helps pinpoint gaps in your current mapping approach that might otherwise go unnoticed.

Customer Journey Map Template 

Get a free customer journey map template and begin outlining experiences and important touchpoints.

Customer Experience Journey Mapping with InMoment

InMoment’s customer experience platform gives you all the tools you need to create and use an effective customer journey map to improve your organization’s CX and financial performance. Check out InMoment’s XI Platform to see how you can uncover customer insights in every form of customer feedback to create a more efficient customer journey!

References 

​​Khoros. Must-know customer service statistics of 2024. (https://khoros.com/blog/must-know-customer-service-statistics). Accessed 10/8/2024. 

Nielsen Norman Group. Journey-Mapping Impact: Research Findings. (https://www.nngroup.com/articles/journey-mapping-impact/). Accessed 10/8/2024. 

Hanover Research. How To Use Customer Journey Mapping and Improve Customer Experience. (https://www.hanoverresearch.com/insights-blog/corporate/customer-journey-mapping/). Accessed 10/8/2024. 

Gartner. Gartner Says Most Customer Experience Programs are not Delivering on the Promise of Improving Differentiation and Helping Brands Better Compete. (https://www.gartner.com/en/newsroom/press-releases/gartner-says-most-customer-experience-programs-are-not-deliverin). Accessed 10/23/2024. 

Forrester. Key Trends In Customer Journey Mapping Platforms. (https://www.forrester.com/report/key-trends-in-customer-journey-mapping-platforms/RES179422). Accessed 10/10/2024.

With 64% of Internet users discovering brands via social media, getting your marketing on point is essential. From simple reviews to detailed threads, there is a lot of online activity from individuals worldwide. Some of this activity could be relevant to your brand and industry. It could be an Instagram Story featuring your product or a post complaining about your recent update. Tracking these conversations with a social listening tool helps improve marketing efforts.

What to Look For in A Social Listening Tool? 

1. Sentiment Analysis
2. Competitor Analysis
3. Multi-Platform Coverage
4. Keyword and Hashtag Tracking
5. Analytics and Reporting
6. Content Creation and Scheduling
7. CRM Integration

A social listening tool lets you tap into online conversations around your business. You can think of it as your eyes and ears on social media with the information it provides. From brand mentions to product discussions, you gain insight into customer sentiment to help make informed decisions.

The right social media listening tool will help you analyze customer behavior and competitors to stay ahead of the pack. Key features to look for include:

Sentiment Analysis

Identifying and monitoring the sentiment behind social media activity helps understand customer satisfaction. A good social listening tool leverages sentiment analysis to categorize your mentions as positive, neutral, or negative. This classification of public opinion gives you insight into your brand reputation.

Sentiment analysis also helps with effective customer service. For example, if you’re a pet food retailer, this analysis can highlight complaints about food quality. You can filter out all the negative mentions, allowing you to respond to them right away. This is crucial since responding to customer feedback within 24-48 hours boosts retention by 8.5%.

Therefore, sentiment analysis helps you understand your customers better to improve your chances of retaining them.

Competitor Analysis

You can’t have an edge over your competitors without identifying and analyzing them. What are their most popular offerings? What is the current public opinion around them? Is there an opportunity for you to differentiate or capitalize? A robust social listening tool should help you answer these questions.

Analyzing your competitors’ social media activity helps you keep up and move ahead. It enables you to identify their strengths and weaknesses. You can also find strategic opportunities to promote your brand.

For example, if you learn that your pet food competitor is receiving online criticism for late product deliveries, you can use that to your advantage. You can leverage social media campaigns and reviews to highlight how you never compromise on delivery times. This will help you emerge as a viable alternative to your competitors.

Multi-Platform Coverage

Online conversations happen across multiple platforms. From long threads on X (formerly Twitter) to an Instagram influencer’s comments, online interactions are multi-platform. As a result, social listening tools must cover multiple social media platforms to ensure you don’t miss out on valuable data.

Keyword and Hashtag Tracking

Keywords and hashtags enable you to track mentions of your brand and offerings on social media. They help cut through the noise and hone in on relevant conversations in your niche. 

Searching #petfood or #petcare on Instagram, for example, will help you uncover trending topics if your business is in that space. It can also help discover recurring complaints about products in your niche, enabling proactive issue resolution.

Analytics and Reporting

Effective social listening tools should offer analytics and reporting features that transform raw data into actionable insights. Analytics can show engagement trends and campaign performance. It also provides insight into how sentiment shifts over time so that brands can inform strategy.

Reporting tools allow you to present these insights to stakeholders in a clear manner. This guides businesses toward strategic decisions based on measurable data.

CRM Integration

Integrating social listening data with customer relationship management (CRM) software helps you build rich customer profiles. 

For example, a fashion retailer can leverage social media activity to identify its most valuable customers. These customers engage heavily with the brand’s social media content and recommend it to their networks. On the flip side, identifying disgruntled customers can help you focus on retaining them.

Best Social Listening Tool for Improving Customer Experience

A good social listening tool can help you make the most of your social media presence. Let’s look at some of the best tools in the market to help you enhance your social media management efforts.

InMoment

InMoment is your one-stop shop for tracking relevant conversations around your brand and analyzing them for informed decisions. It enables you to stay ahead of potential issues and proactively manage customer experiences.

With sentiment analysis and keyword tracking, InMoment helps you improve customer experience through a rich understanding of user personas. It helps you learn which features resonate the most or where you might need improvements. 

The software’s advanced monitoring tools also give you an edge by providing competitor insights that you can leverage. For example, if a competitor experiences a data breach, your CX and marketing teams can reinforce your brand’s commitment to security. This helps you appear as a trusted alternative to prospects.

Speaking of prospects, InMoment’s ability to track industry-relevant mentions is valuable for lead generation. Unlike other platforms, its XI Spotlight Tool lets you control how frequently you want to pull and analyze data from platforms like Instagram, X, and Facebook. This regular, real-time data analysis gives you the most accurate decision-making insights.

Social Listening Tools for Brand Awareness

1. Hootsuite
2. Meltwater
3. Sprout Social
4. Brandwatch
5. Mentionlytics
6. AgoraPulse
7. Keyhole
8. Brand24
9. Buffer
10. YouScan
11. Digimind
12. BuzzSumo
13. TweetDeck

Hootsuite features social listening tools that use keywords and hashtags to track brand mentions. Its dashboard provides a centralized platform where you can easily monitor and respond to relevant social media activity. 

Key features include Streams and Insights, which support keyword monitoring and competitor analysis. Brands using Hootsuite to manage social media can leverage its integration with InMoment to cultivate a positive online reputation,

2. Meltwater

Meltwater is social listening software designed to help businesses manage their online presence. It aggregates data from various sources, like social media, blogs, and forums. As a result, brands can monitor public sentiment and benchmark themselves against competitors. 

Key features include real-time sentiment analysis, historical data tracking, and influencer identification. Real-time alerts help businesses respond quickly to important events or potential crises. Additionally, Meltwater’s reporting tools help stakeholders visualize social media engagement.

3. Sprout Social

Sprout Social is a flexible tool that offers a wide range of features for social listening, analytics, and customer care. The platform allows users to track customer conversations on specific topics by creating custom queries. This makes it easier to stay informed about brand-related discussions.

A standout feature is the trend-identifying tool, which generates a word cloud to highlight frequently used terms in online conversations. This offers a quick snapshot of prominent topics to guide brands toward informed decisions.

4. Brandwatch

Brandwatch leverages social listening to gather relevant online interactions in one place. It pulls brand mentions from over 100 million sources to help businesses analyze historical and real-time conversations. 

Key features include a digital library for storing visual content and Focus Panels for digging deeper into demographics and behavior. It also offers multilingual support, which is ideal for businesses operating in multiple countries.

5. Mentionlytics

Mentionlytics leverages AI to provide real-time tracking of brand mentions, keywords, and hashtags across major social media platforms. Its robust reporting helps users make informed decisions for proactive engagement strategies. The tool also includes sentiment analysis in over 100 languages and competitor analysis to help brands keep up.

6. AgoraPulse

Agorapulse centralizes all social media conversations to ensure you don’t miss out on key insights. Its Professional plan offers advanced brand monitoring, analytics reporting, and publishing capabilities across platforms like YouTube, Facebook, and Instagram. It also helps with content organization by letting you label key posts and customer feedback for easy access.

7. Keyhole

Keyhole is a social listening tool that tracks brand mentions across platforms like TikTok, Instagram, Facebook, X, and LinkedIn. Its Team plan provides in-depth TikTok analytics, including competitor insights and data-driven recommendations. These recommendations cover optimal hashtags, video effects, and posting times for engagement. Keyhole’s tool is valuable for managing brand interactions on TikTok, where viral content can make a huge impact.

8. Brand24

Brand24’s tools measure brand awareness and reach, tracking conversations from 25 million online sources to provide insights into consumer sentiment. This information helps you identify what resonates with customers and any potential risks to your reputation.

9. Buffer

Buffer’s platform includes scheduling and publishing features for effective campaign planning. It integrates well with social media platforms like Facebook, X, Instagram, and TikTok.

Additionally, Buffer’s analytics tools help monitor team performance by measuring engagement and audience behavior. However, the analytical and reporting features are available only on paid plans.

10. YouScan

YouScan is a social listening tool that leverages AI-powered image recognition to offer visual insights into consumer profiles. The platform’s capabilities allow for an in-depth understanding of brand sentiment and upcoming trends. This helps you tailor marketing strategies effectively. It also detects potential reputation threats in real-time to enable proactive management.

11. Digimind

Digimind provides competitive intelligence by turning social and online data into actionable insights. Its brand reputation dashboard helps in planning and analyzing marketing strategies effectively. As a result of its extensive data collection features, Digimind is a good fit for professionals who are well-versed in data analytics.

12. BuzzSumo

BuzzSumo is a comprehensive tool for content discovery and research. It helps users track trending topics and popular content across social media. With its monitoring features, brands can set up alerts for specific businesses, topics, and keywords to stay in the loop.

13. TweetDeck

TweetDeck is a free tool for tracking tweets around specific topics or breaking news. It also allows users to filter tweets from curated lists, which helps with monitoring relevant X (formerly Twitter) accounts. Its specific nature makes it ideal for individuals seeking a free method of narrowing down relevant X conversations. However, businesses might find it too limited for their purposes.

How Do Social Listening Tools Work?

Social listening tools provide access to online conversations around your business. These conversations could include comments, video reviews, or threads. Any piece of content mentioning your brand or product can offer key insights to you.

The software achieves this by searching for specific keywords, phrases, and hashtags on social media platforms. This results in a vast amount of data that is then analyzed for patterns, sentiment, and engagement metrics. 

Centralizing these insights in a dashboard allows brands to assess public opinion in real time. This method of feedback collection informs marketing strategies by identifying emerging trends and discussions. 

How to Use Social Listening Tools

You can leverage social listening tools to enhance brand reputation and deliver positive experiences. Popular applications of this technology include:

• Brand Awareness: You learn how often and where your brand is mentioned to understand its reach and popularity. This information helps you optimize your marketing efforts to ensure you hit the right notes with the right people.
• Customer Experience: The ability to track feedback and customer sentiment enables prompt issue resolution. As a result, you can enhance customer loyalty by adopting a proactive approach to customer service.
• Competitor Analysis: Analyze competitor mentions to learn from their strengths and weaknesses. You can also identify opportunities for positioning yourself as a better alternative, which helps generate leads.
• Product Development: Identify product-related feedback to gain insights into what customers want or areas needing improvement. It also helps identify popular feature requests that you might not have noticed through traditional feedback collection.
• Crisis Management: Negative reviews spread like wildfire on the Internet. With a social listening tool, you can detect potential issues early and respond right away to minimize the negative impact.

How to Create A Social Listening Strategy

1. Identify your goals
2. Select relevant keywords
3. Benchmark social media performance
4. Analyze data
5. Take action 

The right social listening strategy for your business depends on your goals and needs. The following steps provide a general blueprint for tracking and acting on online sentiment.

Identify Your Goals

Start by identifying your main goals. For example, if you want to improve customer service, you would want to track keywords related to service quality or product satisfaction. For competitor analysis, focus on tracking mentions of competitors’ products or issues.

Select Relevant Keywords

Speaking of keywords, it’s essential to choose the right ones to collect relevant data. Keywords can include your brand name, products, or industry terms. For competitor analysis, it would be helpful to search terms related to the competitor and their service.

Benchmark Social Media Performance

Once you have established your goals and keywords, you can start making the most of your social media presence. Establish benchmarks to gauge the success of your social listening efforts. Common metrics include sentiment scores, the volume of brand mentions, and the share of voice (SOV) compared to competitors. 

Analyze Data

Consistent analysis is key to spotting trends and improving key metrics. If certain features are frequently mentioned, look for patterns in sentiment to understand if you need to make changes. A social listening platform like InMoment’s XI Spotlight Tool can help by analyzing large volumes of data to unearth actionable insights for you.

Take Action 

Finally, with the insights in place, you can start taking the right actions to boost customer satisfaction. For example, if your analysis reveals a preference for certain features or products, it would be smart to prioritize them for now. Follow up with customers after implementing the changes to create a feedback loop for consistently excellent service.

What Can Social Listening Enable CX Leaders and Marketing Managers to Do?

Social listening empowers CX leaders and marketing managers to process customer sentiment for business gains. By monitoring real-time conversations, they can quickly identify and address customer concerns. This provides valuable data for enhancing the overall customer experience.

Social listening also enables them to track brand mentions. Did a social media influencer recently mention their brand? What are people saying about their products? Is there an opportunity to collaborate with popular individuals for brand promotion? Social listening answers these questions by highlighting trends and content that resonates so you can adjust strategies accordingly.

With insights from social listening, CX leaders can benchmark against competitors. They have access to relevant data that helps refine products and create targeted campaigns. As a result, they are better able to create campaigns that resonate with their audience and encourage stronger customer engagement.

Can Social Listening Help You Find Leads?

Yes, absolutely! Social listening can be an impactful lead-generation tool if you use the right software and techniques.

Monitoring keywords relevant to your products, services, or industry helps you identify user profiles that would be a good fit for your business. For example, if a user mentions in a post that they’re looking for software similar to yours, your team has an opportunity to reach out. By offering recommendations or support, you can position yourself as a business they can trust.

Social listening also lets you track competitor mentions. This analysis gives you a chance to attract customers who may be dissatisfied with other brands. Creating content around a specific feature in your software that a user can’t find anywhere else will boost your likelihood of converting them.

You can implement this strategic approach with a social listening platform like InMoment. Unlike other tools, InMoment’s XI Spotlight lets you control how frequently you pull data and analyzes it for you. It performs the analytical heavy lifting so that you can focus on effective actions for acquiring more customers.

How to Measure Social Listening

• Mentions
• Sentiment Analysis
• Engagement Metrics
• Share of Voice
• Geographic Insights
• Trend Analysis
• Business Metrics

You can measure the effectiveness of social listening efforts by tracking various metrics that reflect audience interaction and sentiment. Key metrics to track include:

Mentions

Track how often your brand, product, or related industry topics are mentioned on social media. This metric helps assess brand awareness and reach. InMoment’s social listening tools can streamline this process by monitoring relevant keywords and terms.

Sentiment Analysis

Analyze the tone of these mentions to understand how audiences feel about your brand. You can categorize mentions as positive, negative, or neutral. This information is key for brand reputation management efforts as it highlights the dominant public feeling towards you.

Engagement Metrics

Monitor the number of likes, shares, and comments to assess engagement levels with your brand. Likes reflect the lowest level of engagement and suggest overall approval of your content. Comments provide more context and highlight individuals taking a deeper interest in your brand. It also helps identify specific demographics that interact the most with your brand.

Share of Voice

Measure your brand’s presence relative to competitors. This metric helps you understand your position in the market and how often you’re mentioned compared to others. 

By tracking engagement metrics, InMoment’s competitive analysis tools can highlight if your target audience engages with you more than your competition. You can use this information to identify areas for improvement in your marketing campaigns.

Geographic Insights

Identify regional variations in brand perception. Measuring this metric provides insight into location-specific strategies and regional customer sentiment. For example, it helps you focus on regions exhibiting greater overall dissatisfaction.

Trend Analysis

Analyze shifts in customer sentiment or recurring themes over time. This metric helps you spot emerging trends and anticipate changing customer preferences. 

For example, if a relevant issue becomes a hot topic of discussion online, you can leverage it to generate interest in your brand. InMoment’s social media monitoring tools help you stay on top of trends by tracking relevant keywords and hashtags.

Business Metrics

Assess the business impact of social listening efforts. Tracking metrics like customer growth, regional sales, and conversion rate helps you confirm the value of your social media strategy. It also highlights room for improvement, enabling you to tweak processes and adapt.

Frequently Asked Questions

Social listening provides real-time data on your brand, customers, and competitors. It’s a powerful tool for gaining industry insights to consistently improve your business. If you are curious to learn more, here are answers to some of the most common questions:

What is Social Listening?

Social listening is the process of tracking relevant keywords, topics, and conversations across your social media channels. It helps you monitor brand mentions and customer sentiment to determine public opinion around your business. You can leverage this technique to keep tabs on customer behavior, analyze competitors, and generate leads.

What’s the Difference Between Social Listening and Social Monitoring?

Social media monitoring is a reactive strategy that looks at comments and conversations directly related to your brand. It provides an opportunity to respond to feedback on your specific business or product to retain and satisfy customers.

Social listening is a proactive approach that takes monitoring a step further. It tracks all the conversations relevant to your industry, including those around your competitors, to understand customer sentiment and expectations. It helps you keep up with potential issues and trends to provide better overall customer experiences.

For example, monitoring tells you that a customer is complaining about your product quality on a Facebook post. Listening tells you why this particular complaint is popular nowadays and how you can address it better than your competition.

How Can Social Media Listening Increase Customer Advocacy?

Social media listening increases customer advocacy by showing customers that you care. It provides a proactive approach to resolving issues and fulfilling expectations. For example, listening enables you to add trendy features or address potential issues before they arise. 

These actions enhance satisfaction and convert customers into loyal advocates for your brand. You can monitor their advocacy by tracking the volume of mentions you get from them on social media channels.

Learn More About InMoment’s Social Listening Tool

Social media listening enables you to stay in touch with customer sentiment. It unlocks opportunities for improvement and moving ahead of your competition. With InMoment’s social listening tool, you can track every piece of relevant content online to stay on top of trends, potential risks, and customer preferences. Take a product tour today to see if it’s the right fit for your brand monitoring needs!

References 

Smart Insights. Global social media statistics research summary May 2024 (https://www.smartinsights.com/social-media-marketing/social-media-strategy/new-global-social-media-research). Accessed 11/06/2024.

InMoment. InMoment Market Pulse (https://www.linkedin.com/posts/weareinmoment_b2b-customersuccess-ai-activity-7251989745914818560-haGe?utm_source=share&utm_medium=member_desktop). Accessed 11/06/2024.

Did you know that U.S. companies could save over $35 billion annually by satisfying existing customers? Understanding why customers want to leave can help you retain them and reduce acquisition costs. But, how do you identify customers at risk of leaving? You could guess based on their activity, but that would be ineffective. Instead, you need to leverage churn prediction to learn why customers may leave and what you can do about it.

What is Churn Prediction?

Churn prediction detects which customers are likely to discontinue business with you. This churn could occur as a canceled subscription or product abandonment. There are several types of churn you can predict, including:

• Customer churn is the most familiar type of churn. Customer churn focuses on the specific decline in the number of customers instead of revenue alone.
• Revenue churn represents the loss of revenue due to customers downgrading their plans or leaving the business altogether.
• Active churn is when customers cancel their service and communicate their decision to the business.
• Passive churn occurs when customers don’t explicitly cancel their service. However, they haven’t attempted to renew it either. For example, a subscription that ends without renewal or communication from the subscriber.
• Voluntary churn is when customers actively decide to stop using a service or product. This decision can be due to dissatisfaction, finding a better alternative, or changing requirements.
• Involuntary churn occurs against the customer’s will. It’s usually a result of payment issues, like credit card expirations or insufficient funds. It doesn’t represent a problem with customer satisfaction, but it indicates that you could improve your payment processor or methods.

Why is Customer Churn Prediction Important?

Predicting churn in any form is key to customer retention and satisfaction. It is important for businesses because:

• It helps retain customers. Acquiring new customers is more expensive than retaining current ones. Proactively monitoring customer health can help businesses cut churn by over 34% for at-risk clients.
• It informs effective marketing strategy. Churn prediction helps you tailor your marketing efforts to re-engage customers at risk of leaving. For example, you can send gift cards to at-risk customers after their next purchase.
• It enhances customer satisfaction. Modelling churn helps you understand why customers want to leave. It provides rich insight into specific pain points. This will help you better understand and serve customers.
• It supports long-term growth. Lowering the churn rate contributes to a stronger, more loyal customer base. This creates a foundation for sustainable growth, enabling you to fulfill key business goals.
• It provides a competitive advantage. With insights into customer behavior, you can act faster and smarter than competitors. With effective customer experience management, you can re-engage customers who might otherwise be lost to your competition.

A good example of the importance of reducing customer churn comes from nib New Zealand. Through its partnership with InMoment, nib rolled out a closed-loop feedback process to improve the customer experience. InMoment’s churn propensity modeling was crucial to identifying and retaining customers showing signs of dissatisfaction. As a result, nib improved its NPS and reduced churn by 6% within six months of rolling out the program. To learn more, download the full story below!

How to Predict Customer Churn?

To predict customer churn, you need to know how to model it. A data scientist can achieve this by building a machine learning prediction model trained on a dataset. This dataset includes the target variable you want to predict (customer churn) and features that describe customer profiles.

InMoment’s data analysis capabilities give you the power to automatically sort through your customer feedback data and detect sentiments such as intent to churn. Using these insights, you can create actionable customer segments based on customer behavior data. 

Here are the key steps for using data analysis to predict churn:

1. Collect and Prepare Data
2. Select and Train a Model
3. Analyze Predictive Patterns
4. Take Proactive Action

Collect and Prepare Data

Consider diverse data sources that capture customer interactions and behaviors. This can include CRM data, social media, call center logs, service requests, and chat messages. 

Pulling unstructured data from different sources helps you build a comprehensive dataset covering every touchpoint in the customer journey.

The next step is to clean and preprocess the data to ensure consistency. This includes removing duplicate entries and standardizing formats. For example, different sources may record customer names in different formats. Standardizing the format will help ensure clarity.

Identifying the most relevant features for churn prediction helps improve model accuracy. For example, someone’s name isn’t a good indicator of whether they will churn. However, their transaction frequency or last purchase date are stronger indicators. Including these features would help you prepare high-quality data for reliable predictions.

Select and Train a Model

Select a machine learning model that best fits your data and business goals. Logistic regression algorithms are ideal as they can predict a binary outcome (churn or not) based on volumes of historical data.

The next step is to feed the labeled data to the model to train it. During the training phase, the model detects patterns in customer activity to understand why churn happens. For example, low engagement or transaction frequency will likely be true for most churn cases.

Training is an iterative process. Evaluate the model’s performance on test data to see how well it predicts churn. A data scientist might also tweak the model or choose additional features to improve predictive power.

The last step is to validate the model with new data to ensure it generalizes well. This will help confirm the model’s ability to forecast new churn cases accurately.

Analyze Predictive Patterns

A trained model can reveal predictive patterns leading to customer churn. For example, a drop in purchase frequency, low engagement with customer support, or consistently negative feedback indicates churn likelihood.

Begin by analyzing key indicators within your model’s output. Look at variables like purchase recency, CSAT (customer satisfaction score), and interaction frequency. This will help identify common attributes among churned customers. Identifying these patterns helps you understand the specific reasons customers might leave.

A good practice is to break down these patterns by customer segments. For example, younger customers might churn due to a lack of personalization. High-value customers might leave because of pricing concerns. Categorizing insights by customer segments helps create targeted retention strategies for each demographic.

Take Proactive Action

This step involves acting on the churn predictions to engage at-risk customers before it’s too late.

Proactive actions can include personalized outreach addressing specific concerns. For example, you can send them special offers or product recommendations to reignite their interest. High-value customers might benefit from loyalty rewards or exclusive access to new features. These steps will help make customers feel valued and appreciated.

If certain offers or messages reduce churn, incorporate these strategies into a long-term retention plan. Acting on churn predictions highlights your commitment to customer satisfaction. The resulting customer loyalty is key to stronger relationships and business growth.

What Are the Challenges of Predicting Customer Churn?

1. Inaccurate Model Predictions 
2. Identifying the Right Features
3. Collecting High-Quality Data
4. Data Integration
5. Changing Customer Behaviors
6. Transforming Insights into Action

Predicting customer churn is valuable for customer retention. However, it can be tricky to navigate. Some common challenges businesses face include:

Inaccurate Model Predictions

Accurate model predictions require careful data analysis and calibration. Without proper testing and validation, a model is likely to produce inaccurate predictions. For example, if it overfits the training data, it won’t be able to make accurate predictions on new data. Regular testing and refinement are time-consuming but crucial for improving model accuracy.

Identifying the Right Features

Selecting the right features is important for building an effective churn prediction model. Irrelevant features can add noise to the dataset and confuse the model. Similarly, overlooking impactful features makes it difficult to understand the true drivers of churn. Data scientists often need to experiment with different features to identify the ones most relevant to churn.

Collecting High-Quality Data

Data quality is a key component in churn prediction. Incomplete or low-quality data can skew results and lead to unreliable predictions. 

Data Integration

One of the biggest challenges is integrating large volumes of customer data from various sources. A CX platform like InMoment can help by collecting and connecting every piece of valuable data in one place. This effective integration helps build cohesive, model-ready datasets for churn prediction. 

Changing Customer Behaviors

Customer needs and behaviors evolve. As a result, attributes responsible for churn last year might not necessarily be relevant today. Businesses must regularly update their models based on customer behavior analysis to reflect changing customer expectations. The continuous monitoring and adjustment require considerable time and effort.

Transforming Insights into Action

Once you identify at-risk customers, you must act on the predictive insights to re-engage customers. This might include personalized offers, targeted communication, or enhanced customer support. Creating these strategies and making them effective can be challenging.

What Are the Benefits of Predicting Customer Churn?

Predicting customer churn is a worthy investment despite the challenges. Businesses can expect to realize the following benefits:

• It reduces customer acquisition costs. Acquiring new customers is difficult and costly. Identifying at-risk customers early enables businesses to re-engage them with tailored incentives. As a result, you spend less on acquiring new clients to help your business thrive.
• It improves customer relationships. Predictive insights highlight what matters to your customers. This information helps you refine retention strategies to keep clients on board. For example, offering proactive customer support or loyalty rewards helps retain customers by showing them you care.
• It provides stronger customer insights. Patterns in churn data provide insight into customer satisfaction. It helps you understand different customer segments better. These insights help improve messaging and engagement efforts for both retention and acquisition. 
• It enables business growth and stability. Repeat customers spend 67% more than new clients. As a result, retaining more customers helps maintain a stable revenue stream. This contributes to consistent business growth and innovation.
• It provides a competitive advantage. At-risk customers are considering alternative businesses. Churn prediction improves your chances of retaining them and maintaining your competitive edge. It also informs strategies that better meet customer needs, reducing their chances of choosing competitors.

How to Choose Churn Prediction Software?

The right churn prediction software does the predictive heavy lifting so that you can focus on improving customer relationships. Key features to look for include:

Data Integration

Building a comprehensive dataset involves pulling customer data from diverse sources. These sources can include CRM systems, customer feedback questionnaires, and social media. The right software should be adept at integrating every single data point for effective model training.

InMoment simplifies this process by connecting customer signals from each relevant source into a single place for analysis. The accuracy and reliability of its data integration help produce complete datasets.

Advanced Text Analytics

Your churn prediction platform should be able to analyze customer feedback. This helps uncover customer sentiment and identify churn indicators.

InMoment’s text analysis software helps you proactively uncover what a customer intends to do next. It leverages advanced AI to process feedback and highlight customer intent. The intent appears as a complaint, praise, suggestion, inquiry, purchase, will return, comparison, requested help, recommend, not recommend, and churn. Instead of a simple binary outcome, you get more context into the customer’s expectations!

Customizable Alerts

Look for tools that enable you to set alerts for at-risk customers. These customer experience automation features make it easier to respond to customers quickly, improving your chances of retaining them.

Competitor Analysis

The right tool should offer competitor insights to help you understand churn in the market context. For example, do customers have a better alternative in mind? If so, what can you offer them to sway them away from the competition?

InMoment’s competitor analysis software helps you stay up-to-date on your competition. Besides identifying competitors, it lets you see how you rank against them. You can also set alerts for performance changes. This helps identify opportunities to fulfill customer needs better for retention.

Actionable Reporting

A good platform helps you visualize predictive insights. Dashboards and competitive reports make it easier for teams to understand and respond to churn patterns.

With InMoment’s reporting capabilities, you can easily build customizable reports and share them across your organization. It enables you to prioritize features that will improve your chances of engaging at-risk customers.

How InMoment Can Help with Churn Prediction and Reduce Customer Churn

Churn prediction is key to improving relationships, reducing acquisition costs, and increasing profits. InMoment offers a comprehensive approach to churn prediction that enables businesses to take proactive steps for customer retention. It processes volumes of unstructured data with the help of machine learning and text analysis to accurately identify churn drivers. Take a look at our text analytics solutions today and see how they can help reduce churn rates!

References 

Semrush. 65 Customer Retention Statistics You Need to Know in 2024 (https://www.semrush.com/blog/customer-retention-stats). Accessed 11/07/2024.

InMoment. InMoment Market Pulse (https://www.linkedin.com/posts/weareinmoment_b2b-customersuccess-ai-activity-7251989745914818560-haGe?utm_source=share&utm_medium=member_desktop). Accessed 11/07/2024.

Did you know consumers ranked social media in the top five most preferred channels for customer support? Furthermore, more than 80% of consumers expect a response from businesses on social media within two business days. With these customer expectations in mind, having a robust social media monitoring strategy that helps you stay connected with your customers has never been more important for maintaining a positive customer experience. 

What is Social Media Monitoring?

Social media monitoring is the practice of actively tracking, analyzing, and responding to online mentions of a brand, product, or topic across social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and LinkedIn. Social media monitoring is part of comprehensive social media management. 

When an organization is tuned in to social media conversations, it gives them insights that influence everything from customer service protocols to marketing strategies and product updates. 

Social Media Monitoring vs Social Listening

• Social media monitoring is reactive to certain mentions, reviews, or posts made by customers. Social media monitoring is the base that social listening is built on. 
• Social listening is a proactive strategy that uses social media data to uncover customer insights and make broader business decisions. 

While often used together in conversation, social media monitoring differs greatly from social listening. Both involve tracking online conversations, however, social media monitoring focuses on immediate action and responding in real-time, making it useful for handling customer inquiries or managing problems as they happen. 

Conversely, social listening identifies larger trends and themes through audience analysis, competitive intelligence, and customer sentiment tracking. This helps organizations understand the bigger picture behind consumer behavior and market performance. 

Why Is Social Media Monitoring Important

Social media monitoring is important because 88% of consumers expect a response from an organization on social media within two business days. Furthermore, 76% of consumers are frustrated when they do not get personalized communication from a business. By leveraging tools to monitor social media, you can improve your response time with customers and offer them a more personalized experience. 

Benefits of Social Media Monitoring

When brands consistently track and analyze social media mentions, they can use those findings to assist their brand reputation management efforts, improve the customer experience, and capitalize on market insights. Here are some other key benefits of social media monitoring:

• Enhanced brand awareness
• Improved customer engagement
• Effective crisis management
• Competitive Analysis
• Informed Market Research

Enhanced Brand Awareness

Social media monitoring allows brands to gauge their visibility across channels and understand how their audience perceives them. By tracking your brand mentions specifically, you can assess the reach and tone of conversations you are part of. This helps you stay connected with how consumers view your brand. This level of awareness ensures that your brand can strategically build and maintain a positive image. In fact, 83% of marketers say their social media monitoring efforts have increased their brand exposure. 

Improved Customer Engagement

Properly responding to customer questions, complaints, or compliments can significantly impact customer loyalty. Social media monitoring enables your organization to identify and engage with your audience at crucial moments, such as when a customer leaves a bad review after a negative shopping experience. A quick response time shows that your brand is attentive and responsive and builds stronger customer relationships. 

Effective Crisis Management

Social media monitoring can be the difference between a quickly resolved emergency and a crisis that destroys your brand image. With social media monitoring tools, your organization can identify emerging problems and spikes in mentions, such as a viral post of a customer detailing poor customer service they experienced with your brand. When you can identify these issues early, you can address them before they escalate. 

Social media monitoring also makes it easy to communicate with your entire customer base in a crisis. A pre-planned crisis management strategy can make crisis management easier through social media monitoring tools.

Competitive Analysis

Social media monitoring tools do not only monitor mentions of your organization. They can also monitor chosen keywords such as product names, industry buzzwords, or names of your competitors. By monitoring industry-related conversations, you gain insight into competitors’ strategies, market gaps, and your current brand equity. This information is invaluable for helping your brand stand out in the market. 

Informed Market Research

As mentioned earlier, social media monitoring is the foundation of social listening. That means that social media monitoring can be the filtering system for what is explored more in-depth with social listening. By tracking which topics are being mentioned frequently, you can identify this as a trend that can be further explored with social listening tools. 

Who Should Use Social Media Monitoring

Social media monitoring can be useful to any CX teams or similar groups within your organization that rely on customer sentiment, engagement, and overall brand presence. For these teams, social media monitoring can improve strategies and influence business objectives. Here is a closer look at who can benefit from using social media monitoring:

1. Marketing and Brand Managers
2. Customer Service Teams
3. PR Professionals
4. Sales Teams
5. Product Development Teams

1. Marketing and Brand Managers

Marketing teams can use social media monitoring tools to understand the reach, sentiment, and engagement around campaigns and brand mentions. Using this insight, they can change their messaging, identify successful content, and maintain brand consistency across social platforms. 

2. Customer Service Teams

Social media is now in the top five most preferred channels for customer service. Customer service teams that monitor social media channels can promptly address inquiries, resolve issues, and manage complaints. 

3. Public Relations (PR) Professionals

PR teams must maintain a positive public image and handle any issues before they develop into a crisis. Social media monitoring helps them stay attuned to public opinion and track the success of PR campaigns. By catching negative mentions early, PR teams can proactively address concerns, manage rumors, and prevent reputation damage.

4. Sales Teams

Social media monitoring can help sales teams identify leads and better understand customer needs and preferences. Monitoring industry trends and tracking potential customers’ pain points can give sales teams an edge in personalizing pitches and addressing the most relevant concerns. This data-driven approach can improve the quality of their outreach and boost conversion rates.

5. Product Development Teams

Social media is a valuable source of customer feedback. Users frequently share experiences, pain points, and feature requests. Product teams can analyze this feedback to improve products, add new features, or create new offerings that align with customer needs. Social media monitoring provides real-world insights that complement other sources of product data.

Key Metrics for Social Media Monitoring

Social media monitoring is more than scanning through unstructured data. There are quantifiable metrics that can help you track the status and progress of your social media monitoring efforts. Here are some essential metrics to focus on: 

• Brand Mentions
• Customer Sentiment
• Share of Voice
• Engagement Metrics
• Topic and Keyword Trends

Brand Mentions

In order to understand your brand visibility and relevance, it is crucial to monitor the number and context of brand mentions. Tracking when, where, and how often people mention your brand gives insight into your reach and presence across social platforms. By analyzing both direct and indirect mentions (variations of your brand name or common misspellings), you can be sure that you are capturing the full scope of brand-related conversations. 

Additional Tip: You should also monitor the brand mentions for your top competitors. Monitoring competitor mentions gives you insight into the conversations they are a part of. This can be a great advantage for your organization as you can identify your competitors strengths and weaknesses as they are reported on by customers or third-party organizations. 

InMoment’s platform gives you the ability to track your competitors’ mentions as well as compare your organization beside them. When you identify and track competitors with InMoment, you can also see how you both compare for industry-related keywords. 

Customer Sentiment 

Customer sentiment analysis measures the emotional tone behind social media mentions. This metric provides insight into how people feel about your brand and whether the sentiment changes over time. 

Engagement Metrics

Engagement metrics, including likes, comments, shares, and retweets, reveal how actively users interact with your content. Tracking engagement metrics on posts mentioning your brand helps you identify which content types and topics resonate most with your audience. 

Topic and Keyword Trends

Staying on top of relevant topics, keywords, and hashtags in your industry helps you tap into conversations that matter most to your audience. By monitoring trending topics, you can align your content with current interests, join popular discussions, and ensure your messaging remains relevant. 

Tools for Social Media Monitoring

Selecting the right social media monitoring tool can streamline the process of tracking brand mentions, analyzing customer behavior, and staying responsive to your audience. Here are some popular tools for social media monitoring: 

1. InMoment
2. Sprout Social
3. Mention
4. Brandwatch
5. Agorapulse

1. InMoment

InMoment includes a comprehensive social media management tool through a Hootsuite partnership. This tool includes monitoring, scheduling, and analytics capabilities that allows brands to track keywords, hashtags, and brand mentions across multiple platforms in real time. 

Its analytics dashboard also allows users to gauge engagement, sentiment, and campaign performance. It is an all-in-one solution for businesses that want to manage content and monitoring from a single platform.

2. Sprout Social

Sprout Social is known for its robust analytics and customer engagement tools. It enables brands to monitor mentions and keywords, assess audience sentiment, and manage interactions through a unified inbox. Sprout Social’s reporting features provide valuable insights into brand health, competitive positioning, and audience engagement trends, making it particularly useful for teams focused on data-driven strategies.

3. Mention

Mention offers a straightforward, user-friendly solution for tracking brand mentions, competitor analysis, and sentiment. With Mention, users can set up custom alerts for keywords and topics and receive real-time updates, helping brands stay proactive in responding to mentions and trends. This tool is ideal for small to medium-sized businesses that want efficient monitoring without complex features.

4. Brandwatch

Brandwatch specializes in social listening and analytics, providing powerful tools for analyzing customer sentiment and market trends. Its AI-powered analytics offer in-depth insights into brand perception and competitor activity. Brandwatch is well-suited for businesses that need advanced data analytics, sentiment analysis, and trend tracking to stay competitive in their industry.

5. Agorapulse

Agorapulse combines social media management with monitoring, allowing brands to track mentions and keywords while scheduling content and engaging with their audience. Its social inbox is ideal for teams that manage multiple accounts, as it centralizes interactions from various platforms. Agorapulse’s analytics reports also help users evaluate engagement and sentiment, making it a practical choice for mid-sized businesses looking for a mix of functionality.

Key Features for Social Media Monitoring Platforms

Social media monitoring tools can vary in functionality based on the use cases for which they are built. However, there are certain core features that every effective social media monitoring tool will have. Here are some of the most popular features to look out for as you choose a social media monitoring tool: 

Real-Time Alerts

Ensure your chosen tool can deliver real-time notifications for brand mentions and tracked keywords. This improves your response time and is especially useful for time-sensitive situations such as handling customer complaints and spotting trending topics. 

Through InMoment’s platform, you can respond to customers quickly by setting up customizable alerts for reviews and social media mentions. Also, you can manage the workload by assigning specific tasks to team members in the platform. 

Sentiment Analysis

Understanding the tone of social media mentions can help you gauge overall customer sentiment and track how it changes over time. Sentiment analysis provides insights into whether conversations around your brand are positive, negative, or neutral. 

InMoment’s sentiment analysis is driven by award-winning text analysis software that gives you the most accurate reporting and lets you dive deeper into intent, perceived effort, and emotion hidden in feedback so you can craft the best response. 

Cross-Platform integration

With social conversations happening on multiple platforms, it is important to have a tool that pulls data from all relevant social networks to capture a comprehensive view of your brand’s digital presence. You want to choose a tool that integrates with all major platforms, such as Facebook, X (formerly Twitter), Instagram, and LinkedIn, as well as review sites such as Google and Yelp. 

If your team uses other platforms, such as a CRM, marketing automation software, or customer support tool, look for social media monitoring tools that can integrate seamlessly to consolidate data and streamline workflows.

Competitive Analysis

Understanding what’s happening with competitors provides valuable context for your brand’s performance and helps identify gaps or opportunities within your industry. Monitoring competitors’ social media presence, engagement levels, and customer sentiment lets you stay ahead and make more strategic decisions.

Choose tools that allow you to set up competitor tracking with customizable comparisons, share-of-voice analysis, and benchmarking features. Some tools can also analyze competitors’ content to reveal which topics and formats resonate most with their audience. 

Reporting and Analytics

Detailed, customizable reporting and analytics simplify tracking performance over time, measuring campaign success, and sharing insights with key stakeholders. Strong reporting features make it easier to turn social media data into actionable insights that support strategic decision-making.

How to Implement A Social Media Monitoring Strategy

Implementing an effective social media monitoring strategy requires a structured approach to make sure your organization is tracking the right data to make the best decisions. Here are the key steps to setting up a successful social media monitoring strategy: 

1. Define Your Goals
2. Identify Key Metrics
3. Choose the Right Tools
4. Set Up Alerts and Track Keywords
5. Establish a Response Protocol
6. Analyze and Report

Step 1: Define Your Goals

Start by identifying your main objectives. Whether it’s improving customer service, managing brand reputation, tracking competitors, or gauging campaign performance, knowing your goals will help you focus on the most relevant metrics and guide your monitoring efforts effectively.

Step 2: Identify Key Metrics

Based on your goals, choose the key metrics to track, such as brand mentions, sentiment, engagement, or share of voice. You may want to consider choosing social media metrics that can correspond with KPIs in customer experience. Defining the best metrics to track first will help you better track success over time. 

Step 3: Choose the Right Tools

Once you have outlined goals and defined the most important metrics for your team, select a social media monitoring tool that aligns with your needs, team size, and budget. Look for features that will support your specific goals, like real-time alerts, sentiment analysis, competitor tracking, and customizable dashboards.

Step 4: Set Up Alerts and Track Keywords

Configure alerts for brand mentions, industry-related keywords, competitors, and any hashtags relevant to your brand. Real-time alerts help you stay responsive to important developments and engage promptly with customers and followers.

Step 5: Establish a Response Protocol

Create a protocol for responding to different mentions, such as positive feedback, complaints, or potential crises. Define who will respond to each type of interaction, the preferred tone and style, and a timeline for response. Having a clear plan helps teams remain consistent and proactive in customer interactions.

Step 6: Analyze and Report on Insights

Review the data regularly to assess performance, monitor sentiment trends, and identify recurring issues or customer preferences. Share insights with relevant teams, such as marketing, product development, and customer support, to inform decision-making across the organization.

Common Challenges in Social Media Monitoring

While social media monitoring is an extremely important part of efforts to improve customer experience in your organization, it comes with its own set of challenges. Here is a look at some common obstacles and practical solutions to overcome them:

Information Overload

• Problem: Social media platforms generate an overwhelming amount of data daily, and trying to monitor every mention can be exhausting and counterproductive.
• Solution: Focus on the metrics and keywords that align directly with your goals. Set up filters to prioritize mentions based on relevance, sentiment, or source, and consider creating tiered alerts that notify you only of high-priority mentions. Using tools with AI-powered analytics can also help in sorting and analyzing large volumes of data effectively.

Detecting Nuanced Sentiment

• Problem: Automated sentiment analysis often struggles to detect sarcasm, humor, or subtle tones, leading to inaccurate readings of customer sentiment.
• Solution: Consider using monitoring tools with advanced AI capabilities or natural language processing (NLP) to improve sentiment accuracy. For high-stakes conversations, rely on manual review or human oversight to ensure nuanced messages are correctly understood.

Cross-Platform Consistency

• Problem: Different social media platforms vary in user demographics, content style, and engagement norms, making it difficult to maintain consistent monitoring across channels.
• Solution: Use a tool that integrates multiple platforms into one dashboard, making it easier to monitor and compare across channels. Create platform-specific monitoring criteria to adapt to the nuances of each social network, ensuring that your approach is relevant and effective.

Start Social Media Monitoring with InMoment

InMoment’s social media monitoring solution through Hootsuite, paired with an award-winning customer experience platform, gives organizations all the tools they need to create a consistent customer experience that keeps customers coming back. See what InMoment can do for you by scheduling a demo today!

References 

HubSpot. 2024 HubSpot State of Service. (https://offers.hubspot.com/state-of-customer-service). Accessed 11/4/2024. 

Mckinsey & Company. The value of getting personalization right—or wrong—is multiplying. (https://www.mckinsey.com/capabilities/growth-marketing-and-sales/our-insights/the-value-of-getting-personalization-right-or-wrong-is-multiplying). Accessed 11/4/2024. 

Social Media Examiner. 2024 Social Media Marketing Industry Report. (https://www.socialmediaexaminer.com/social-media-marketing-industry-report-2024/). Accessed 11/4/2024. 

Sprout Social. Sprout Social Index Report 2023. (https://sproutsocial.com/insights/index/). Accessed 11/4/2024.