Leverage Your Brand: Social Listening
Building relationships with customers, preventing crises, and creating current, trendy social media posts are key tactics that public relations professionals use to help build a positive reputation for brands. Companies use social listening to help leverage their brand over competitors and spread brand awareness. Social listening is an easy yet impactful tactic to add to any public relations campaign. Understandably, you may have questions about what social listening is and how to use it. Let’s talk about how social listening can improve your next campaign.
What is Social Listening?
Social listening focuses not only on the analytics of social media, but also on the mood of the people, and how they feel about the brand or company. This is often also known as social media sentiment: figuring out what about the brand sparks people’s attention, what makes the brand special, and what makes them talk about your brand. When thinking about these key metrics, we can better understand our publics and can come up with a plan on the spot to create trendy and current content.
Why Use Social Listening
As public relations professionals, we understand that the climate of social media can change in a moment's time. If we fail to social listen, we may miss a potential crisis that we could have prevented. When we social listen, it allows us to stay relevant and see how the brand is being perceived online. It is important that we keep brands present on key media platforms such as Instagram, Facebook (Meta), Twitter, LinkedIn, and TikTok. Not only will this help increase our audience base, but it will also positively grow the brand reputation, especially if we are actively listening and responding to audience needs and questions.
Leveraging Social Listening
TikTok is the newest social media platform that has gained lots of attention, especially in the past year. Individuals and companies have been testing out ways in which they can use the platform for their benefit. One example of a brand that has mastered social listening and engaging with its users is Windows. TikToker Emily Zugay, also known as “the logo designer with no graphic design experience,” created a logo for Windows using her face as a part of the design. Windows had been paying attention to their socials and made a smart move by temporarily changing their TikTok profile picture to the new logo Emily designed and even changed the logo in some of their stores. This quickly went viral all over TikTok, which in turn boosted brand awareness. In the comments of Emily’s video, many people mentioned how they loved that Windows uplifted a smaller creator and how they now were going to buy a Windows product because of this viral video.
Social listening is one of the key factors to help us create better social content. It will help us understand our audience on a more in-depth level, and will allow us to best prepare for and prevent crises. Social listening helps increase brand awareness, builds a positive reputation, and enables us to leverage the brand. I challenge you to incorporate social listening in your next campaign!
About Alexis
Alexis Carpenter is a Junior Standing studying Advertising and Public Relations with a minor in Marketing. She loves coming up with creative, out-of-the-box ideas when it comes to APR. Alexis has not had an internship, but last summer started a virtual brand segment in NJ. Using her APR skills she promoted the business using billboard advertisements, and Instagram/Facebook ads. While also using leadership skills lead the team to success by creating an efficient high profit business. Last summer she continued to expand the business by help opening a second restaurant to grow revenue. This is Alexis’ first year involved in GrandPR and has accepted the position as Media Coordinator. Alexis is excited to grow and develop her skills in the public relations world.