Literally: The Sprout Social Index™ found 51% of consumers agree responding to customers on social media makes brands the most memorable. Despite popular belief, your online reputation isn’t something that’s totally beyond your control.

If you want more positive reviews and glowing praise from your customers, you need an actual reputation management strategy. In this guide, we’ll show you how to put together your own.

What is social media reputation management?

Social media reputation management refers to the process of monitoring social networks to shape and maintain a positive perception online. Along with monitoring social networks, it can include reviewing online reviews on channels like Yelp and Google Reviews. Building a social media reputation requires frequent observation because your audience’s perception of your brand fluctuates over time.

It involves posting content, responding to feedback, conducting performance audits and using social listening data to uncover how your audience views your brand. Overall, social media reputation management aims to build and nurture trustworthy, long-standing relationships with your audience.

Why do you need a social media reputation management strategy?

We get it: some businesses might be skeptical of why ratings, reviews and positive comments hold so much weight.

Because if you know that you’re doing good business, who cares what other people are saying?

And besides, it’s easier to put on blinders and ignore your haters than it is to face your critics head-on. However, consider the following trends that highlight the importance of managing social media reputation:

Consumers are increasingly dependent on third-party reviews

It’s not a stretch to say that businesses live and die based on customer feedback.

People overwhelmingly rely on reviews when it comes to purchasing decisions. A survey from BrightLocal shows 76% of consumers regularly read online reviews when browsing for local businesses. And 46% of consumers feel that online business reviews are as trustworthy as personal recommendations from friends or family.

These stats illustrate the power of reputation management. Customers view brands with more positive reviews and recommendations as genuine and credible.

There’s massive demand for customer feedback and consumers aren’t shy about delivering it. Want evidence? Look no further than the millions of users on sites like Yelp.

Or the hundreds of categories scattered around sites like G2, a peer-to-peer review site for business software.

Or the millions of reviews on Google Reviews and Trustpilot:

You can sing your own praises all day long, but consumers are on the hunt for authentic, third-party reviews for peace of mind. The more of ’em you have, the better.

Digital word-of-mouth is crucial to growing your audience

Data from The Sprout Social Index™ found 68% of consumers say they primarily follow brands on social media to stay informed about new products or services.

Like it or not, people talk. A lot. Your own customers can do some serious legwork by marketing on your behalf, granted they’re satisfied with your service.

The takeaway here? Digital word-of-mouth marketing remains powerful because more conversations around your brand on social media represent additional opportunities to win customers and followers.

Customers hold the reins when it comes to your social media reputation

This is perhaps the biggest challenge of social media reputation management. Social media is authentic and unfiltered. That’s why it’s a great place to discover products and customer feedback—people can pretty much say whatever they want, for better or worse.

As a business, this presents a distinct challenge. Just as satisfied customers are empowered to hype you up, you can’t control your worst critics. That said, you’re still responsible for what they say–responses to reviews and using feedback to improve your products and services are essential parts of your overall reputation management process.

A 5-step social media reputation management strategy for your business

Now that we’ve acknowledged how much brand reputation management matters, let’s talk about the proactive steps you can take to improve your own. The following five step strategy is fair game for businesses both big and small.

1. Determine where your online reputation currently stands

First things first: you need to figure out how people feel about your brand right now.

Are your customers happy and satisfied? Are you struggling with naysayers? Perhaps you’re somewhere in-between?

Digging into a combination of qualitative and quantitative data can help clue you in on where your reputation stands. This includes:

• Social media posts, comments and @-mentions from customers and competitors
• Online reviews and star ratings from third-party review sites
• Mentions from industry blogs or trade publications
• Feedback gathered from actual customers (think: emails, customer surveys, contact forms on your website)

The key here is to look at the ratio of positive versus negative comments. If your customer sentiment seems to err on the positive side, that’s good! If not, you have some work to do.

The health of your social media reputation can be difficult to quantify manually. That’s where a platform like Sprout Social that offers social media reputation management tools can help.

For example, our sentiment analysis features can take mentions and turn them into a meaningful, quantifiable metric that you can track.

You can use your sentiment analysis summary as a starting point which you can monitor or strive to improve. Our platform also highlights trends in your customer sentiment (think: positive versus negative and neutral comments) over time without you having to sort them out manually.

Beyond comments are those ever-so-important reviews. Creating an online review management strategy to address feedback on third-party sites will enable your brand to maintain a full view of your customers’ opinions.

Another key feature of Sprout is the ability to wrangle all of your reviews from social media and beyond in a single platform. This gives you a more comprehensive view of your social media reputation and what your customers have to say about you without having to bounce between platforms.

2. Track your company’s mentions (the good, bad and ugly)

Social media reputation management is an ongoing process.

Once you determine where your reputation stands, you need to set up your business to be able to respond to customers swiftly in the future.

This means setting up real-time notifications and listening for the following:

• Comments, tags and @-mentions of your business (e.g. @SproutSocial)
• Hashtag analytics including brand-specific hashtags (e.g. #SproutSocial or #SproutChat)
• Branded keywords (e.g. recognizing “Sprout Social” and “Sprout” as keywords across networks)

Having a pulse on these elements makes it easier to craft the appropriate best practices to follow when someone has a question, concern or reason to shout you out.

This once again highlights the benefit of using a platform like Sprout. With Sprout, you can consolidate all of your social messages and mentions in a single inbox. You can likewise share your various dashboard(s) among your teammates to cover more ground and speed up your social media response time.

Our Index data shows that 76% of consumers value how quickly a brand can respond to their needs. And over half (69%) expect responses from brands on social within 24 hours or less.

3. Be proactive and positive as you respond to your social mentions

Whether it’s a concern or a compliment, social mentions represent prime opportunities to make a positive impression on customers and improve your social media reputation.

Doing so comes down to having a strategy for social customer service. Some key tips for responding to customers include:

• Personalizing each reply rather than just using a generic one
• Always give yourself the last word by saying “thanks”
• Moving questions or concerns off of social media to avoid unnecessary conflict or back-and-forth

It might sound cheesy, but a positive, proactive attitude goes a long way in social media reputation management. This rings true whether it’s answering a customer question or simply responding to shout-outs like in the example below:

4. Take control of your company’s narrative (and make it positive)

As noted, the key challenge of social media reputation management is that online comments are pretty much a free-for-all.

Arguably the best approach to combat the negative is by encouraging your own positive praise.

And yes, there are ways to do so beyond begging (which you definitely shouldn’t do).

For example, you might consider publishing success stories and existing positive reviews from your satisfied customers. This can help highlight positive experiences to your social prospects who might not have checked out any third-party reviews yet.

Beyond customer comments, employee advocacy and mentions from your own team can also create more positive sentiment. Don’t be shy about re-posting your customers’ positive responses or shout-outs, either. This includes asking for permission to republish user-generated content to use in your future marketing.

5. Take action based on comments, criticism and analytics

Finally, consider the power of listening to what your customers have to say.

Maybe they’re glowing over your recent customer service initiatives. Perhaps they’re unhappy about recent pricing changes.

Either way, don’t just take those comments in stride. Instead, listen to such feedback and make changes to your business accordingly.

And yet again, this is where Sprout can help. Digging into your listening data, you can uncover specific terms that pop up in your customer conversations to help you understand what you’re doing right and where you can improve.

The same applies to your third-party ratings, reviews and mentions. Being a business today means having a thick skin, but it also means taking criticism where it’s due.

Based on all of the above, you can circle back to square one to understand how your reputation management efforts are paying off and whether you’re moving the needle in a positive direction.

Top social media reputation management tools

As we mentioned earlier, manually monitoring and reviewing customer feedback is time-consuming. Using a for business can make a huge difference. Here’s a quick round-up of five tools so you can find the best review management software for your brand:

Sprout Social

Choosing the best social media reputation management software will depend on your business’s unique needs, but Sprout Social integrates with many top review networks to fit various needs. These networks include Facebook Pages, Google Reviews, TripAdvisor, Yelp and Glassdoor, which are the most popular in terms of volume and reach. We also offer integrations for the app stores (Google Play and Apple App Store).

With the Reviews Overview report, view a summary of your customer feedback. It includes vital metrics like reply rate and review volume. The report is part of Sprout’s larger customer care solution. Sprout creates a seamless experience across channels by enabling users to monitor multiple conversations, all the while providing priority metrics and automated reports so you can ensure your social customer service strategy is effective and efficient.

Brand24

Brand24 is another helpful tool for social media reputation management. Users can create projects to track online conversations about your brand and industry peers. You can also explore by searching mentions by campaign, analyze sentiment and create reports.

Mention

Mention is a social media management tool that offers a variety of features you can use to manage your reputation. Mention offers the ability to track specific keywords and various filtering options so you can narrow down the @-mentions and feedback that is most relevant and meaningful for your brand.

Birdeye

Birdeye is another leading platform for social media reputation management. Birdeye collects reviews from review sites and 150+ different platforms, giving users a comprehensive view of their business’ online reputation. You can organize feedback by filtering (rating number, region, product, etc.) them into custom fields. Similar to the other social media reputation management software, it centralizes reviews in a singular platform.

Broadly

Supporting over 3,000 local businesses, Broadly is a great option for small businesses looking to maintain a positive online reputation. Users have the option to automate review requests from customers. Broadly offers the ability to monitor and respond to reviews from Google, Facebook and more within a central platform as well.

Is online reputation management a top priority for your business?

Listen: Your brand’s reputation matters.

Rather than treat it as something beyond your control, you should take steps to secure and boost your social media reputation sooner rather than later.

This means both listening and reacting to conversations related to your business. With social media management tools like Sprout Social, you can roll out a more effective and efficient strategy on social media and beyond.

And if you haven’t already, take a test-drive of Sprout’s full suite of social listening and reputation management features today by signing up for a personalized demo.

The post Social media reputation management: How to stay in good standing with your audience appeared first on Sprout Social.

Decoding those emotions and understanding how customers truly feel about your brand is what sentiment analysis is all about.

But tracking sentiment is no piece of cake.

We’re talking about analyzing thousands of conversations, brand mentions and reviews spread across multiple websites and platforms—some of them happening in real-time.

You need a sentiment analysis tool for the job.

In this post, you’ll find some of the best sentiment analysis tools to help you monitor and analyze customer sentiment around your brand.

• What is a sentiment analysis tool?
• Applications of a sentiment analysis tool
• Top 15 sentiment analysis tools to consider
• Use sentiment analysis tools to make data-driven decisions back by AI

What is a sentiment analysis tool?

A sentiment analysis tool uses artificial intelligence (AI) to analyze textual data and pick up on the emotions people are expressing, like joy, frustration or disappointment.

It leverages natural language processing (NLP) to understand the context behind social media posts, reviews and feedback—much like a human but at a much faster rate and larger scale.

Then, it calculates the average sentiment around your brand, classifying it as positive, negative or neutral. Some tools also help you monitor your competitors’ customer sentiment score.

Some sentiment analysis tools can also analyze video content and identify expressions by using facial and object recognition technology.

In the context of AI marketing, sentiment analysis tools help businesses gain insight into public perception, identify emerging trends, improve customer care and experience, and craft more targeted campaigns that resonate with buyers and drive business growth.

Applications of a sentiment analysis tool

Sentiment analysis tools are revolutionizing how businesses understand and respond to customers. Here are some specific ways brands can benefit from these tools:

• Social Listening: Keep an eye on customer opinions and reactions to brands, products, services, campaigns, events and trends on social media.
• Review Management: Analyze customer feedback across multiple platforms and respond promptly and empathetically to improve customer satisfaction.
• Competitive Analysis: Compare sentiment towards your brand with competitors to understand where you stand in terms of positioning and public perception.
• Brand Insights: Gather and interpret data on brand reputation, customer experience, and product strengths and weaknesses to develop a solid brand strategy.
• Opinion Mining: Analyze both customer and employee feedback to get a clear picture of your company’s performance and identify areas for improvement.

Top 15 sentiment analysis tools to consider

Full stack sentiment analysis tools

These tools can pull information from multiple sources and employ techniques like linear regression to detect fraud and authenticate data. They also run on proprietary AI technology, which makes them powerful, flexible and scalable for all kinds of businesses.

1. Sprout Social

Sprout Social offers all-in-one social media management solutions, including AI-powered listening and granular sentiment analysis.

Monitor millions of conversations happening in your industry across multiple platforms. Sprout’s AI can detect sentiment in complex sentences and even emojis, giving you an accurate picture of how customers truly think and feel about specific topics or brands.

View the average customer sentiment around your brand and track sentiment trends over time. Filter individual messages and posts by sentiment to respond quickly and effectively.

Sprout also supports multilingual sentiment analysis, which helps you understand and resonate with a diverse, international customer base. Access a full scope of data tagged and filtered by smart category, without changing your query, whether by people, place, product or more. Furthermore, our Queries by AI Assist feature generates keyword suggestions for Listening queries that can further enhance your analysis landscape

2. InMoment (Lexalytics)

InMoment is a customer experience platform that uses Lexalytics’ AI to analyze text from multiple sources and translate it into meaningful insights.

It supports over 30 languages and dialects, and can dig deep into surveys and reviews to find the sentiment, intent, effort and emotion behind the words.

3. Medallia

Medallia’s experience management platform offers powerful listening features that can pinpoint sentiment in text, speech and even video.

The platform excels in collecting and analyzing real-time feedback from multiple sources, including social media, surveys, reviews, SMS, emails, voice conversations and more.

4. Qualtrics (Clarabridge)

Qualtrics is an experience management platform that offers Text iQ—a sentiment analysis tool that leverages advanced NLP technology to analyze unstructured data from various sources, including social media, surveys and customer support interactions.

The tool can automatically categorize feedback into themes, making it easier to identify common trends and issues. It can also assign sentiment scores to quantifies emotions and and analyze text in multiple languages.

Social media sentiment analysis tools

Focusing specifically on social media platforms, these tools are designed to analyze sentiment expressed in tweets, posts and comments. They help businesses better understand their social media presence and how their audience feels about their brand.

5. Brandwatch

Brandwatch offers a suite of tools for social media research and management. Their listening tool helps you analyze sentiment along with tracking brand mentions and conversations across various social media platforms.

Classify sentiment in messages and posts as positive, negative or neutral, track changes in sentiment over time and view the overall sentiment score on your dashboard.

6. Buffer

Buffer offers easy-to-use social media management tools that help with publishing, analyzing performance and engagement.

One of the tool’s features is tagging the sentiment in posts as ‘negative, ‘question’ or ‘order’ so brands can sort through conversations, and plan and prioritize their responses.

7. Agorapulse

Agorapulse is another social media management software that specializes in publishing and organizing your inbox.

It offers basic sentiment analysis capabilities in that it lets you add labels like “positive” and “negative” to inbox items that contain specific words, such as “happy”, “great”, “bad” or “awful.”

Add labels to messages manually or use the Inbox Assistant to automatically go through your messages and label all relevant items that contain the specified keywords.

8. Awario

Awario is a specialized brand monitoring tool that helps you track mentions across various social media platforms and identify the sentiment in each comment, post or review.

You can track sentiment over time, prevent crises from escalating by prioritizing mentions with negative sentiment, compare sentiment with competitors and analyze reactions to campaigns.

News sentiment analysis tools

These tools specialize in monitoring and analyzing sentiment in news content. They use News APIs to mine data and provide insights into how the media portrays a brand or topic.

9. Aylien (Quantexa)

Aylien uses AI to monitor, organize and analyze sentiment in news content. This makes it a valuable tool for PR and communications teams to keep an eye on trends and monitor public opinion and perception about brands and topics.

A key feature of the tool is entity-level sentiment analysis, which determines the sentiment behind each individual entity discussed in a single news piece.

10. Cision Communication Cloud

Cision is an AI-powered PR platform with robust media monitoring capabilities.

Its features include sentiment analysis of news stories pulled from over 100 million sources in 96 languages, including global, national, regional, local, print and paywalled publications.

11. Meltwater

Meltwater’s AI-powered tools help you monitor trends and public opinion about your brand. Their sentiment analysis feature breaks down the tone of news content into positive, negative or neutral using deep-learning technology.

The tool can handle 242 languages, offering detailed sentiment analysis for 218 of them. This makes it versatile and useful for tracking global news sentiment.

Text sentiment analysis tools

These tools run on proprietary AI technology but don’t have a built-in source of data tapped via direct APIs, such as through partnerships with social media or news platforms.

12. MonkeyLearn

MonkeyLearn is a simple, straightforward text analysis tool that lets you organize, label and visualize data like customer feedback, surveys and more.

The tool uses AI to detect, categorize and track sentiment over time. You can use ready-made machine learning models or build and train your own without coding. MonkeyLearn also connects easily to apps and BI tools using SQL, API and native integrations.

13. Google NLP API

Google NLP API is a text analysis tool designed to extract insights and opinions from various documents, including emails, chats and social media, through entity and sentiment analysis.

It supports multimedia content by integrating with Speech-to-Text and Vision APIs to analyze audio files and scanned documents. Plus, its Translation API can analyze sentiment across multiple languages.

14. Amazon Comprehend

Amazon’s text analysis tool goes through documents, emails, social media and customer support tickets to uncover insights. It identifies key elements such as phrases, sentiment and topics, and even lets businesses train models to classify documents.

Moreover, it helps maintain data privacy and protects sensitive information by identifying and redacting Personally Identifiable Information (PII).

15. Microsoft Azure

Azure AI Language lets you build natural language processing applications with minimal machine learning expertise. Pinpoint key terms, analyze sentiment, summarize text and develop conversational interfaces.

The platform offers multilingual models that adapt across languages. Azure also maintains strict privacy standards by using text inputs exclusively for training models.

Use sentiment analysis tools to make data-driven decisions backed by AI

AI-powered sentiment analysis tools make it incredibly easy for businesses to understand and respond effectively to customer emotions and opinions.

While there are dozens of tools out there, Sprout Social stands out with its proprietary AI and advanced sentiment analysis and listening features. Try it for yourself with a free 30-day trial and transform customer sentiment into actionable insights for your brand.

The post Top 15 sentiment analysis tools to consider in 2024 appeared first on Sprout Social.

According to The 2023 State of Social Media Report, 91% of business leaders agree that their company’s success will depend on how effectively it can use social data and insights to inform business strategy.

Putting your social interactions into context can uncover new opportunities to grow and expand. Social media monitoring tools can help you do just that.

Below, we’ve broken down some of the best social media monitoring tools out there. We’ve also included tips to help you craft a successful social media monitoring strategy.

Table of contents:

• What is social media monitoring?
• Benefits of social media monitoring
• Social media monitoring tools to use
• Tips for social media monitoring

What is social media monitoring?

Social media monitoring is the process of tracking and reacting to social engagements. These engagements include @mentions, comments, #hashtags and keywords related to your brand.

Despite the name, “monitoring” is not a passive activity. Brands should track everything from shout-outs and reviews to questions and complaints. More importantly, brands must react to all of the above. This is the distinction between social monitoring and listening.

Social media monitoring involves much more than just direct mentions and branded keywords, too. For example, a competitor call-out presents an opportunity for your brand to intervene. The same rings true for people asking for product recommendations.

The problem? These types of conversations don’t typically pop up in your notifications. This is especially true if you’re active on multiple networks. That’s why brands use social media monitoring tools to supplement their native data.

4 benefits of social media monitoring

Using data to fuel your campaigns is always a smart move. But what kind of data does social monitoring help you get? How can you use it to grow your business?

Here are some specific benefits of social media monitoring for your brand:

Maximize the ROI of your social media campaigns

Social media monitoring helps you gather valuable data to inform your future campaigns.

For example, by understanding what resonates with your audience, you can craft more engaging posts that boost brand visibility and sales—directly impacting your social media ROI.

Also, you can use this data to run more targeted ads and choose the right influencers to work with. This ensures your content reaches people who are genuinely interested in your products or services— giving you more bang for your buck.

Get insight into your industry and competitors

Social media monitoring is more than just tracking brand mentions—it’s about keeping an eye on emerging trends, industry news and what the other players are doing.

This helps you make proactive decisions like creating viral content, adopting new strategies or tools and even developing product features that give you a competitive edge.

Competitive intelligence also helps you set realistic benchmarks for your brand’s performance. What’s the engagement like for the top players in your industry? How efficient is their customer service? How frequently do they post and which channels do they use the most?

Reputation management

Social media is a great place to manage your reputation.

In fact, according to State of Social Media Report, 9 out of 10 business leaders agree that social media insights help them proactively manage crises and create effective PR strategies.

For example, you can catch negative comments or reviews about your business early on and prevent issues from escalating.

Plus, with regular customer sentiment analysis, you’re always up-to-date on how customers feel about your brand. If there are any unexpected drops, you can go back to the drawing board and take swift action to get your brand’s social media reputation back on track.

Social media monitoring also helps you deliver exceptional customer service. Research shows 69% of customers expect brands to respond within 24 hours on social. By promptly addressing queries, comments and messages, you can improve public perception of your brand.

Monitor your brand mentions on social media

Want to gauge your brand’s actual popularity? Start listening. What are customers saying about your products? Which influencers are using your hashtags? Do you have any haters spreading negative vibes about your brand?

Monitoring your brand mentions can answer all of these questions. Better yet, it can reveal valuable insights about customer sentiment, product strengths and weaknesses, competitive opportunities and even user-generated content.

15 social media monitoring tools to use

Social media monitoring tools let you track your brand’s meaningful engagements wherever and whenever they happen.

There’s no shortage of monitoring tools out there. The following list can help you hone in on a tool that makes sense for your brand based on your needs.

1. Sprout Social

Sprout Social gives you everything not only to track important interactions but also to act on them.

For starters, our platform keeps track of mentions, comments and keywords across multiple networks including Instagram, Facebook, Twitter and TikTok.

The ability to condense all of your interactions into one platform is a massive time-saver. Doing so ensures that you don’t miss any noteworthy mentions or let customer service concerns go unanswered.

For example, Sprout’s Smart Inbox provides a real-time, up-to-date list of all of your social interactions. This includes communications between leads, followers and customers.

With a collaborative inbox, you and your team can reply to mentions and call-outs without leaving the platform. These features speed up response times and allow your team to offer a consistent experience to your customers.

Beyond monitoring, Sprout’s s suite of social listening tools is equally powerful. You can track specific queries using boolean operators to zero in on conversations that matter most. We make it easier to detect call-outs and shout-outs as they happen.

And with Sprout’s social analytics, you can report on all of the above to track the progress of your social presence.

Keep track of metrics including average response times and engagement volume to ensure that you’re consistently growing and improving. Consider that the best social media monitoring tools work across multiple platforms and encourage growth wherever your team is active. That’s exactly what Sprout does.

2. Agorapulse

Agorapulse’s platform lives up to its namesake with features to help brands keep a better pulse on their social mentions.

The platform’s monitoring and listening features are designed to help brands focus on “what counts.” With countless notifications and mentions for busy brands to sift through, it’s easy to get overwhelmed.

To combat comment overload, Agorapulse allows users to set parameters to filter specific phrases and platforms out of their monitoring feeds. The platform also makes it a cinch to label and organize notable customer conversations and competitor activity. This activity includes negative competitor mentions and opportunities for your brand to intervene.

These features highlight the fast-paced, high-stakes nature of social media monitoring and why tools matter so much.

3. RivalIQ

Perhaps not surprisingly, RivalIQ’s platform focuses on competitive analysis to help brands keep an eye on their business rivals.

Monitoring and benchmarking features allow brands to understand their share of voice and how they’re growing versus their competitors.

The most notable features of RivalIQ are the platform’s variety of real-time alerts. For example, the platform can identify when a competitor has changed their social media bio as soon as it happens. Recent features include the ability to also see when a competitor boosts an organic post as an ad.

These alerts can give you a head start on understanding your competitors’ positioning, promotions and campaigns.

4. Mention

Mention is yet another monitoring tool that lives up to its namesake as a powerful @mention tracker.

For brands and agencies alike, the platform claims to monitor over one billion sources for relevant mentions and comments. With so many conversations to sift through, the platform offers plenty of filtering options to help brands “eliminate noise.”

Likewise, the platform’s alerts can keep brands in the loop. Additional features of the platform include identifying spikes in mention volume. These instances can help brands identify a potential social media crisis or PR opportunity sooner rather than later.

5. Keyhole

Keyhole’s monitoring abilities are primarily focused on helping brands find influencers to work with.

Automated keyword and hashtag searches uncover influencers posting about topics relevant to brands. The platform also uses hashtag analytics to highlight influential accounts, posts and conversations around any given topic.

6. HubSpot

If you’re already using HubSpot as your CRM, consider how the platform can double as your social media monitoring tool of choice.

HubSpot’s features aren’t radically different from most tools on our list. The platform tracks interactions, engagements and content performance.

Coupled with HubSpot’s sales CRM, the tool highlights the correlation between top-performing content and social interactions with sales. For example, you can see if customers interacted with a certain piece of content or a team member via social. This goes hand in hand with understanding your social media ROI and the impact of your social team.

7. Brand24

Brand24’s media monitoring features include sentiment analysis and instant notifications for all of your social mentions. The platform can also detect trending hashtags that relate to your brand.

A notable feature of the platform is its mention feed that detects spikes in activity. The platform’s “summary” feed also makes it easy to track your brand’s PR efforts from week to week.

8. Atribus

Atribus is a consumer intelligence tool with an emphasis on social media monitoring. Helping brands uncover “unmet needs,” the platform digs deep into customer conversations and data.

Specifically, the platform highlights common complaints within any given industry through sentiment analysis. This provides opportunities for competing brands to identify pain points and intervene. Atribus is capable of automatically classifying mentions into complaints versus inquiries, too.

9. Zoho Social

If you’re using Zoho as a CRM, the platform’s complimentary social media monitoring features are incredibly useful.

Beyond the standard monitoring features we’ve talked about, the platform lets you build a custom listening dashboard. From hashtags to specific platforms or media outlets, this gives you a comprehensive understanding of your PR and social presence at a glance.

10. Awario

Awario’s monitoring features are also similar to many of the platforms mentioned above.

That said, Awario Leads is a noteworthy addition to the platform’s regular monitoring and listening capabilities.

In short, Awario can identify specific instances of people asking for recommendations for a particular industry. This again shows how monitoring is an active process that can help you win more business.

11. Cyfe

Cyfe is an analytics platform that lets you create custom dashboards to monitor key social media metrics from one centralized location.

Track followers, engagement, reach, top posts and more on Facebook, X (Twitter), Instagram, YouTube and LinkedIn. Cyfe is particularly helpful for observing trends and patterns across your social media KPIs over time.

Using Cyfe’s dashboard also makes reporting a breeze. You can easily present all your social media metrics to team members, clients or managers.

Plus, most metrics are presented in the form of data visualizations like colorful charts. This helps you make sense of the data and understand the overall performance of your brand.

12. Sendible

Sendible is a powerful social media management tool that lets users track analytics, generate reports, and design, schedule and publish content across multiple social media networks without leaving the platform.

You can keep tabs on brand mentions and industry keywords, and even respond to comments on multiple platforms from within Sendible.

The tool is built with agencies in mind, so if you’re monitoring the social presence of multiple client accounts, you can create a separate dashboard for each one. They also offer white-label solutions for those looking for customized software aligned with their brand.

13. Brandwatch

Brandwatch is a social media analytics platform known for its advanced social monitoring capabilities, including sentiment analysis and trend tracking.

The tool integrates with all popular apps and networks, and can gather data from millions of sources. It can also perform deep, granular analyses of social conversations and create custom dashboards to help you measure performance.

You can also use Brandwatch’s AI smart alerts to take swift action in response to unusual trends, such as spikes or drops in brand mentions.

14. Meltwater

Meltwater provides a holistic approach to brand monitoring—it combines social media, news and blog tracking. In fact, it even uses AI to find brand mentions in podcasts.

The platform lets you search for unlimited keywords and queries, dig into industry trends, scour historical analytics and even generate reports to uncover the meaning behind all that data. You can also leverage sentiment analysis to understand how customers feel about your brand.

Another cool feature Meltwater offers is visual analytics searching to analyze image/video content shared on platforms like Reddit, blogs, forums and news sites.

15. YouScan

YouScan specializes in visual content analysis—it uses AI to scan social media for images and videos that include brand mentions, logos and relevant scenes. This lets you uncover brand-related content that might be missed by traditional text-only social monitoring tools.

The platform also analyzes sentiment in visual content and puts it into context to help brands better understand how they’re perceived on social media. It’s a valuable tool for brands focused on visual branding and those interested in tapping into user-generated content.

4 tips for social media monitoring

Tracking metrics and mentions on social will only get you so far. The tools above offer plenty of other powerful features to help position your brand for success.

Follow the tips below to make the most of your social media monitoring efforts:

1. Monitor relevant keywords for your brand

Instead of just tracking brand mentions, keep tabs on specific keywords related to your brand and industry. This could include product names, features, popular hashtags, common industry phrases and even competitor names.

For example, a fitness app might monitor keywords like “workout”, “fitness tips” or “healthy living.” This could help them identify trends in the fitness sphere, such as a rising interest in at-home workouts. They could use that info to create more relevant content and features.

2. Monitor across different channels

Your audience is spread across various social media platforms, like Facebook, Instagram, X, LinkedIn, Reddit and others. And every channel has its unique dynamics.

You need to monitor your online reputation, customer sentiment and key metrics on every platform your audience is active on to create targeted strategies for each one.

For example, you might find engagement is low on Instagram but great on LinkedIn. Digging deeper might reveal you’re just posting at the wrong time on Instagram.

Luckily, most social media monitoring tools let you track insights across multiple channels from one dashboard. Sprout Social, for example, lets you create consolidated reports and get a birds-eye view of your overall social media performance.

3. Monitor customer sentiment

Understanding how people feel about your brand is just as important as knowing what they’re saying. Sentiment analysis involves studying the tone and emotions behind all the comments, reviews and mentions—so you know exactly what customers are thinking.

Customer sentiment can be positive, negative or neutral. Some tools like Sprout Social give you a sentiment score to help you quantify that metric. Use it to adjust your strategy to improve customer satisfaction and overall perception of your brand.

4. Monitor your competitors

Don’t just monitor your own brand. Use these tools to keep an eye on your competitors and their strategies. What kind of content are they posting? Is their brand getting more mentions than yours? What’s the customer sentiment like?

Sprout gives you visual reports to help you monitor your competition and benchmark performance across various channels:

Tracking your competitors’ campaigns, publishing behavior, engagement rates, interactions, response timings and other strategies helps you learn from them, anticipate their moves and capitalize on any gaps in their strategy.

Competitive analysis also helps you differentiate yourself from the crowd. What unique value do you bring to the table? Is there anything that your product offers that theirs is missing? Focus your energy on highlighting those areas in your promotions and campaigns.

Use social media monitoring to build better campaigns

Stepping up your social monitoring should be a top priority regardless of your industry.

The closer you track what people are saying about your brand, the better you can serve your target audience.

Likewise, you can form more meaningful relationships with your followers and customers. That’s because you’re already clued into their wants, needs and pain points.

Doing so means having the right social media monitoring tools at your fingertips. Try a tool like Sprout Social to align your publishing and customer service strategy with your monitoring insights in one place.

The post 15 social media monitoring tools you need in 2024 appeared first on Sprout Social.

Marketers need shortcuts. Managing different networks is demanding and it’s no surprise putting your social media channels on autopilot seems like a tempting offer. Especially for your Facebook marketing strategy—the platform giant with almost 3 billion monthly users.

But is it as good as it sounds? Could automation be more than just a passing trend?

Below we’ve combed through the fine details of Facebook automation and suggested ten tools to help you get started.

What is Facebook automation & how does it work?

Facebook automation involves using tools to manage and streamline Facebook activities, automating tasks such as:

• Leaving comments on statuses, images or pages
• Liking and sharing statuses, images or pages across your account(s)
• Inviting friends to specific pages or events en masse
• Accepting or rejecting all pending friend requests

But here’s the truth about social media automation: not everything can go on autopilot. It exists to make things easier and not to replace your personal touch.

Instead, strike a balance.

Use automation to manage routine tasks, but keep your brand’s personality alive through authentic engagement. Respond personally to complex queries and comments and share unique, humanized content that reflects your brand’s voice.

Remember, your audience values real connections. They want to interact with a brand that listens and responds genuinely, not just automated responses. Use automation smartly to enhance your presence by reducing repetitive tasks and leaving more room to make real human connections.

Benefits of Facebook automation

While social media marketers manage more responsibilities today, core tasks like scheduling posts remain the same. Automation tools are necessary to keep up with the pace of social and reduce the energy spent on these routine tasks. Here are the potential benefits of using Facebook automation:

• Boosts efficiency and productivity: While liking posts and leaving relevant comments are key to a well-functioning social presence, they’re not always considered the most important marketing tactics. Facebook automation takes care of routine messages and comments so you can focus your attention on more high-value tasks like promoting content or conducting outreach.
• Always on brand engagement: The idea of automated responses is appealing to marketers who want their business to be “on” 24/7. In The 2023 Sprout Social Index ™, 51% of consumers said that the most memorable brands responded to customers.

Automation enables you to respond to questions, comments and inquiries in a timely manner, regardless of industry or time zone, to increase engagement, reliability and customer satisfaction.

• Helps maintain a consistent presence: Batch content creation and auto-posting tools keep the ideas flowing and the updates steady. It’s much easier to stay on track when low-impact tasks, like posting, happen in the background. A consistent posting schedule keeps your brand top of mind and your audience engaged.
• Gives better targeting insights: When you automate Facebook tasks, you’re able to gather and analyze KPIs such as audience behavior, what content they interact with, etc. more easily. And since there is a lesser chance of human error, you get deeper and more precise insight. This allows you to deliver better personalized content, offers and deals to your customers and followers.

How to use Facebook automation for your brand

Think of Facebook automation, whether for chatbot marketing or customer care, as a skilled sous-chef in your brand’s social media kitchen. This prep work enables you to focus on creating the perfect dish for your audience. Let’s break down how Facebook automation improves three key areas.

Facebook publishing automation

Facebook publishing automation is like setting up a smart, self-operating calendar for your posts. It lets you schedule Facebook posts in advance to make sure your page stays active, even when you’re not available.

You pick the time and content and the automation does the posting. It’s great for maintaining consistency in your posting schedule.

But it’s not just about quantity—quality matters. Mix in live, timely posts to keep your feed dynamic and engaging. This way, you strike the right balance between automated efficiency and authentic, real-time interaction.

Facebook response automation

Facebook response automation chatbots instantly reply to common questions—think “opening hours” or “location queries.” This feature keeps your audience engaged and shows them you’re responsive whenever they need you.

The key is to identify which inquiries or comments need human attention and which ones chatbots can handle.

Quick, routine questions are perfect for bots. They offer instant help and keep your audience happy with speedy responses. But complex or sensitive topics? That’s your cue to step in. These moments need your brand’s personalized attention.

Blending automation with human interaction creates a responsive and authentic experience for your audience.

Facebook ads automation

Your Facebook advertising strategy benefits from automation too. With Facebook ads automation, you set the parameters for your target audience and budget, then let the algorithm do its magic.

It analyzes data and adjusts targeting, bidding and placement in real-time. This means your ads are always in the right place at the right time while staying within budget.

The best part? You’re still in charge. Regular check-ins and a clear understanding of your objectives ensure you maintain control over the brand message and overall campaign direction.

10 Facebook automation tools to use in 2024

So where do you even start with Facebook automation? Tools make it easier and there are plenty to choose from, including:

1. Sprout Social

At Sprout, we understand the importance of combining a holistic social media strategy with automation and AI. Our tool inherits your manual tasks in publishing, listening, analytics and customer care so your team can focus on the strategic decisions that require human insight and creativity.

Data fragmentation across multiple tools also causes communication breakdowns, resulting in a disjointed customer experience and potential loss of crucial customer information. That’s what we’ve eliminated with Sprout’s Facebook integration. Publishing features, response management, approval workflows, reputation control and even scheduling posts across multiple pages and accounts—everything comes under one roof.

Tool-switching also leads to reduced efficiency and increased response times due to constant shifts between different platforms. Sprout gives you a unified inbox to simplify your workflow so you can view all your customer interactions across your other social channels as well in a single source of truth. This ensures you never miss a time-sensitive comment or message and have a holistic view of your social process.

Our AI Assist tool generates options for your post text and tone. Create posts in bulk to speed up content creation and never fall behind schedule.

Sprout’s Optimal Send Times in Compose also identifies the best send times for posting content on a specific day.

This helping hand eliminates guesswork by offering a list of suggested times based on engagement factors, enabling you to optimize your content’s reach.

Then, Sprout brings it together with detailed Facebook analytics that provide insights into post, page and tag performance.

Track these metrics to see how your social strategy measures up against quarterly goals and pivot accordingly.

Dive deeper with competitive Facebook insights on fan growth and top posts from other pages for a comparative overview of how your presence is doing. Identify content gaps and opportunities to capture specific audiences.

A combination of all these features allows you to automate your social media marketing from start to finish and your social media marketing from start to finish and focus your efforts on creative and strategic tasks that build your brand and engagement with customers.

2. Meta for Business

Meta for Business is a native Facebook and Instagram automation tool.

Features like automated responses based on pre-set keywords and phrases make it convenient for businesses to engage with their audience without constantly monitoring their social media pages. Plus, connected scheduling for posts across both platforms saves time and effort in content distribution.

What makes Meta for Business stand out is its Advantage+ feature, which uses machine learning to optimize sales campaigns and target the most likely converters within your advertising budget.

Say goodbye to manual ad targeting and hello to a smarter, more efficient way of reaching potential customers.

3. Loomly

Loomly’s Facebook automation features are quite straightforward and make it easy to schedule and publish your posts with minimal effort.

Loomly also has approval workflows to keep your team in sync. Complementary features like commenting systems, version logs and post mockups ensure everyone approves content before it goes live.

Beyond that, Loomly also offers audience targeting and post ideas. These features work together to ensure you create content your audience enjoys. Plus, advanced analytics make pivoting your strategy that much easier.

4. Tailwind

Tailwind is primarily a Pinterest and Instagram automation tool that now extends to Facebook as well. It uses generative AI tools called Ghostwriter and Tailwind Create to generate copy and design that matches your brand.

With automation and scheduling capabilities, Tailwind takes care of posting for you at the best times for maximum engagement from your audience.

Tailwind also has a powerful hashtag finder that pinpoints popular and hyper-relevant hashtags to ensure posts receive the visibility they deserve.

Plus, with one calendar for all your social networks, streamline and organize your content across platforms to maintain a consistent brand image.

5. NapoleonCat

NapoleanCat incorporates automation at several levels.

The tool includes an AI assistant that helps with content ideation and creates engaging post captions.

NapoleonCat also recognizes how important responsiveness is and has built-in features to automatically reply to simple questions and comments and redirect issues to relevant consultants.

Overall, NapoleonCat is a conversational tool that simplifies managing social media for businesses.

6. Agorapulse

Another tool for Facebook automation is Agorapulse.

This platform offers a variety of features that streamline your workflow and have a special focus on protecting your brand’s reputation on Facebook.

Features like automatically assigning, hiding, labeling and deleting content make social media monitoring simple and fast. Like other Facebook automation tools, Agorapulse has a Writing Assistant to help improve your content.

And for those messy inbox situations, the Inbox Assistant steps in to organize and manage your incoming messages. It detects questions and assigns them to the right person, saving you time and hassle.

7. IFTTT

IFTTT is a handy tool for automating tasks on Facebook. You’ll find it user-friendly, especially if you’re not tech-savvy. It connects different apps and services (like Sprout!), so you can create custom ‘recipes.’ Sync posts, manage content and trigger actions based on your page’s activity on Facebook.

IFTTT is a bit of a generalist tool, so you need to play around with it to find the recipes that are useful for you. Plus, you need to connect different apps and workflows to squeeze the most value out of it.

8. Planly

Planly is a scheduling and automation tool that streamlines content ideation and planning for businesses and creators on Facebook.

With its intuitive interface, Planly makes it easy to create and schedule posts in advance. Then, view and manage all your content in one convenient calendar.

Planly includes features for sending auto-responses and keeping your audience engaged with pre-written comments on Facebook, although the number of auto-responses is limited.

An integrated hashtag research tool and audience insights boost content optimization. These features save time with planning and maintaining consistency with your posts on the world’s largest social media platform.

9. BuzzSumo

BuzzSumo specializes in content research, analysis and monitoring.

Find trending topics, track brand and competitor performance and identify influential content creators and publications from one platform.

While Buzzsumo doesn’t offer a wide breadth of Facebook automation features, it makes up for it by providing an in-depth analysis of your page’s performance. From monitoring engagement metrics to identifying top-performing content, Buzzsumo offers valuable insights to guide future posts.

10. CoSchedule

Plan, organize and execute marketing strategies with CoSchedule.

Features include content calendar management, social media scheduling, project workflow coordination and campaign analytics. AI Social and Project Assistants speed up content ideation and generation to make sure you’re never stuck for ideas.

A highlight of CoSchedule’s automation features is its ReQueue function, which automatically republishes your evergreen content on social media and adjusts the schedule according to when your audience is most active. Automating repeating promotions like Motivation Monday also supports brand consistency and frees up time for more creative tasks.

Overall, CoSchedule is a valuable tool for streamlining and optimizing your social content efforts on Facebook and beyond.

How can your brand use Facebook automation?

As a social platform, Facebook is nowhere near a thing of the past. Your audience is very much there and very much active.

Through scheduling, analytics and content suggestions, Facebook automation tools speed up the process without sacrificing creativity.

See how Sprout compares to other social media management platforms and how it can amplify your brand’s presence across social networks.

The post Facebook automation: The ultimate guide for your brand appeared first on Sprout Social.

Consumers have to weigh many options any time they make a purchase. So it pays for your brand and products to stand out against the competition.

But what does make your offerings stand out? And how can you be “the only choice” against your competitors? This is where a competitive analysis for your products comes in. It’s the best way to understand how to outpace your competitors, and where you may be falling behind.

All of the information you need is at your fingertips—you just need the right tools to access it. We’ll walk you through how to do a competitive product analysis today to inspire your offerings and brand positioning for tomorrow.

• What is a competitive product analysis?
• How does a product competitive analysis help businesses?
• How do you analyze competitor products?
• What to look for during a competitor product analysis

What is a competitive product analysis?

A competitive product analysis is the process of researching and analyzing your competitors’ products to determine how prolific they are in the market, gaps they leave and what threats they pose to your products.

This process enables you to:

• Determine what features competitor products have
• What your target market likes and dislikes about competitor products
• What products your competitors are not offering that you can offer

This process can be done for any type of product, including physical products (toys, games, tools, appliances, etc.), digital products (digital tools like Sprout Social or applications), experiences (museums, bars or restaurants) and services (cleaning services or moving services).

Conducting a product-focused competitive analysis should be done when you’re creating or considering new offerings, but also to optimize and improve upon what you already offer.

How does a product competitive analysis help businesses?

It’s competitive out there. And the process of a product competitive analysis helps businesses gather competitive intelligence to stay ahead of the competition and differentiate themselves in the market.

Here are a few actionable ways a product analysis of your competitors’ offerings is integral to your business.

Establish your unique selling propositions (USPs)

Establishing your USPs is a crucial piece of setting your offer apart from competitors’.

Conducting a competitive analysis will help you determine what differentiates your products, which will help you set them apart in marketing materials and beyond.

This could be as simple as differentiating your product by price point or feature. For example, AllBirds and Nike both offer sneakers. But what differentiates AllBirds is their core focus on extra comfort and sustainability, which is a big part of their message and brand.

While Nike differentiates their shoes and products by focusing on sports, activewear and performance—like this video highlighting how their product performs in cold, winter conditions.

Increase market share by filling gaps and solving pain points

Gaps left by your competitors provide space for you to fill with your product offerings. A competitive product analysis can tell you where your competitors are lacking and opportunity for you to step in.

Similarly, analyzing conversations customers are having about your competitors can surface pain points they face thanks with their offerings.

Gain market intelligence

Understanding how people feel about your brand and products vs. your competitors also helps you determine the biggest threats to your business. It reveals if you’re falling behind the competition, and what people prefer about other brands. The truth may hurt, but it’s vital information that you can use to improve your business.

It’s also helpful when your competitors launch new products. Examine how people react to their new products or services. Where are the shortcomings? What do people love that you can use to inspire your product development? 

Add new features

Product analysis isn’t just about looking at what products and features your competitors do have—it’s also identifying what they lack.

Analyzing gaps left by your competitors’ products gives you a major advantage. It helps you identify where there are gaps to fill, and opportunities you can take advantage of by offering a new or updated product that solves pain points your competitors’ customers face.

Inform marketing campaigns

There’s much more of a through-line between product analysis and marketing than meets the eye.

Once you know where you have an advantage when it comes to products or product features, this is valuable information to highlight in marketing campaigns—whether you’re marketing the launch of a new product, updates to an old one or just creating new campaigns that highlight what sets you apart.

Learn from competitor mistakes

The digital space is a goldmine of product feedback—about you and your competitors. Just as you learn from negative feedback about your products or services, you can learn from negative feedback on your competitors’ too.

Negative feedback on your competitors’ social channels or reviews surfaces pain points your target audience finds with their products. And this presents opportunities for you to fix those pain points in your offerings to stay ahead.

Similarly, examining positive reviews of your products alongside the negative feedback against competitors can further inform what sets your products apart.

How do you analyze competitor products?

You can manually sift through individual competitor reviews and the comments section on their social media posts. But that’s an unrealistically time-consuming process.

An effective competitor analysis needs to balance out manual research with automated tools to help you remain agile. Here are a few competitor analysis tools and sources that will help you keep an eye on the competition frequently and efficiently.

Social media listening

To get an up-close look at what your target audience is saying about your competitors’ products (and yours), you need to be a fly on the digital wall—which social media listening enables you to do.

With social listening, you “listen” in the digital space to filter out mentions of your competitors’ products, brand name and keywords—even if your competitors, and you for that matter, aren’t tagged.

With Sprout, you can also use sentiment analysis to compare how people feel about your brand and products vs. your competitors’.

If you want to try social listening for product analysis, competitor analysis and deeper social media insights, reach out to us for a demo.

Schedule a Demo

Online reviews

Reviews written about your competitors are a valuable resource when it comes to competitive product analysis. You likely already have a system for managing online reviews for your business and product—add analyzing competitors’ review into the mix.

Dig into reviews, good and bad, about your competitors and their products—on their site, Google reviews, official review sites (TripAdvisor for experiences, Yelp for the food industry or G2 for tech products and software), Reddit and any other sources you can think of.

Digging into what people love, or dislike, about your competitors’ products and offerings can unearth opportunities and inspire new products or adjustments to existing ones.

Social media monitoring

Any social media pro knows that customer feedback and questions don’t just come in through reviews. They also show up in the social comments section every single day.

Use your social media monitoring tools to keep track of what people are saying about your products and your competitors’—it’s the perfect way to outpace them, and constantly be improving your offerings at the same time.

It’s best to formally track this type of feedback so you don’t have to dig through hundreds of comments to resurface feedback later. With a tool like Sprout’s Smart Inbox, you’re able to manage mentions of your brand—even when you’re not tagged—with keywords and incoming messages across all of your channels in one central hub.

And use Tags to keep track of product feedback by creating a special label like, “Product Feedback: Positive” and “Product Feedback: Negative” so you can easily surface these insights.

Try competitor products for yourself

This is one of the more hands-on methods. Trying a competitor’s products for yourself is one of the best ways to get an up-close understanding of their product—from functionality and areas of frustration you experience to design triumphs and shortcomings.

Pairing firsthand experience with feedback you see from customers is a powerful way to get a 360-degree assessment of the situation, and how yours might stack up against it.

Third-party research

Competitive research is certainly a large task, especially within industries with saturated markets. You can always employ third-party research to learn more about your competitors, their products and how people feel about them. For example, hiring an outside company to survey your target market. This is a great way to get in-depth, direct information about how your target market feels about your industry, competitors and what they love or hate in a product.

What to look for during a competitor product analysis

We’ve covered the “how” and “why” behind product competitive analysis methods. Now let’s get into what you actually want to track.

Think about some of the end goals we’ve mentioned for a competitive product analysis. For example, it helps you stay ahead of your competitors by identifying opportunities, finding gaps and weaknesses and unearthing differentiators for your products.

Here are some elements to look for as you conduct your analysis, and to inform competitive benchmarks.

1. Aesthetic or design of your products or services

This can refer to the physical or digital attributes of a product, or the experience of a more experiential-based product (think museums, theme parks, etc.)

How do the physical attributes or appearance of your competitors’ products or services stack up to yours? How do the two compare?

For example, let’s say you have a beauty brand. If you find that consumers love the packaging offered by your competitors’ products, it may be time for a packaging refresh.

Here are a few broad physical attributed to track and explore:

• What’s the packaging for your competitors’ products?
• What do consumers love, or hate, about the look of your competitors’ products?
• Are there certain colors or sizes your competitors don’t offer that you can?
• What are the physical attributes of your competitors’ products? How do they compare to yours?
• What effect does their design or choice of color have on the experience of using their product?

Pro tip: Social listening is a great way to surface keywords people often use to describe your competitors or their products and packaging. Sprout’s word cloud, for example, helps surface commonly-used keywords around these attributes to help you filter and prioritize feedback.

2. Pricing model

Sometimes the greatest differentiators aren’t so much about the products themselves, but rather their pricing.

How many times have consumers chosen your product, or your competitors’ products, because they were at a better price level or offered different price options?

During your competitive product analysis , consider these questions:

• How do your competitors’ prices compare to yours?
• For software or services, do they offer a free version?
• Do they offer flexible pricing, or pay-later plans?
• What do they claim their most popular pricing plans are?
• If they’re subscription-based, how often are people charged? What are the pricing tiers?

3. Utility

Look at the functionality of your competitors’ products, or try them out for yourself. This will help you understand how they outpace your offering, or how they fall behind.

Consider:

• What problems do your competitors’ products solve?
• What gaps do they leave?
• What customer pain points are your competitor’s products solving, or creating?

4. Product quality

A product is only as good as its quality. And your audience loyalty hinges on this, too.

A major way to pull ahead of the competition is by clearly offering a higher-quality product.

As you conduct your research, while you look through reviews or try your competition’s products for yourself, pay attention to:

• How easy is the product to use and learn? Is it intuitive?
• How high quality is it? Does it easily break?
• Is it durable?
• Does it scratch easily?
• For software, is it vulnerable to crashing or slow processing?

 5. Customer service

The quality of the customer service you provide has the power to set you apart from your competitors—or send you falling behind them.

It doesn’t matter how great a product is—if customers can’t get the help they need from a customer service team, the experience with the product and brand is soured.

During you competitive product analysis, evaluate the quality of customer service your competitors offer. Consider:

• Are there common customer complaints? What are the themes?
• What do people love about your competitors’ customer service?
• Are their customer care responses personalized? Or impersonal and sloppy?
• What is the tone of their customer service voice?
• How helpful are their agents? How often do they appear to miss messages?
• Is their engagement proactive? That is, do they engage with and celebrate positive comments, as well as questions or complaints?

Through this process, you’ll have a better idea of where they stand out against you, or where they fall behind.

Leverage social media and AI to conduct an in-depth competitive product analysis

Gone are the days where product analysis always required a lengthy process, customer interviews or focus groups.

Everything you need to know about your competitors’ products and yours is at your disposal—you just need to know how to mine it.

Leverage the billions of conversations across social media to gain a better understanding of how people feel about your competitors’ products. And use that information to inspire your own, and understand how to outpace other brands.

With the power of social media platforms and AI tools, unearthing these insights is automatic, immediate and a breeze. Try Sprout Social free for 30 days, or request a personalized demo of our social listening solution.

The post How to conduct a competitive product analysis, and why you should appeared first on Sprout Social.

But when it comes to social media, data collection is complex. Teams who struggle to share meaningful insights usually don’t a) have enough data, b) have a way to turn a massive volume of raw data into actionable business intelligence (BI) or c) understand how their efforts fit into the big picture.

Can you visualize a time when you received a social team report that only contained one-off metrics (like follower count and impressions) with no throughline to business goals? Or when a report included so many numbers it was impossible to decipher, leaving your head spinning as you tried to process all the metrics and what they mean?

Data-driven marketing is about more than asking every team to submit regular dashboards or spreadsheets with KPI updates. It’s about empowering your team to mine impactful performance and audience insights. This will require investing in training, the right tools and refining your data collection process. But by harnessing the wealth of social data available, you will tap into an insights goldmine for every part of your organization.

At Sprout, we believe in the power of social data to transform every part of an organization—whether that’s using insights to change customer care processes, revamp your hiring plan or create new product lines.

Alicia Johnston

Senior Director of Content and Campaigns, Sprout Social

In this article, we explain how you can find and use social data that enables you to outpace the competition, improve your content strategy, iterate on new product development and build more impactful, long-term campaigns. We also examine common data-driven social media marketing challenges and how you can overcome them.

What is data-driven marketing?

Data-driven marketing is when you inform your business strategy with marketing BI (examples: social content performance data, social listening insights, website analytics, email marketing metrics and more). The strategy can apply to functions within and outside of marketing, including customer care, product development and growth.

Social media intelligence is a critical input for building an effective data-driven marketing strategy. With it, you can predict future audience behavior, gain unfiltered insight into the success of your campaigns and product launches, drive revenue gains and make your team the linchpin for making key business decisions.

The advantages of data-driven marketing

According to The Sprout Social Index™, many marketers already connect the value of social to business goals. Over half of brands (60%) quantify the value of engagement on social in terms of revenue impact, 57% use it to track conversions and sales directly resulting from social efforts and 51% use it to optimize their product development or marketing strategy.

Likewise, The 2023 State of Social Report found that virtually all business leaders believe social media data and insights have a profound positive impact on top business priorities—including building brand reputation and loyalty, improving competitive positioning and gaining more customer knowledge.

Here are ways you can use social media to fuel your data-driven marketing strategy, with expert recommendations from Sprout leaders and other brands.

A clearer view of your audience

To build comprehensive buyer personas, you need to understand your audiences’ pain points and challenges. Your target audience is talking about your brand (or at least your industry) on social right now.  By tapping into social media listening tools, you can understand what rising trends they care about, products they love, why a competitor is performing well or poorly, why a campaign is resonating and how an audience is responding to a conference or event.

Listening also tracks touchpoints on your customers’ digital customer journey, so you can better understand how consumers interact with you online. For example, many social teams underestimate how much of the social chatter surrounding their brand is pre-purchase (acquisition) and post-purchase (retention).

One company guessed their acquisition and retention conversations made up 0-5% of their social buzz. However, when their agency started using tags to categorize their social activity, they found acquisition alone made up at least 5%—but sometimes 70% in one month. By investigating this data, your team can develop creative ways to remove roadblocks and incentivize purchases, and align social with your sales funnel.

More targeted, relevant content

Trend cycles have never moved faster, making it difficult to tell what will resonate with audiences and what will flop. For example, Team Sprout uses our AI-powered Listening solution to vet topics before we develop content—both for one-off posts and long-term campaigns.

According to Johnston, “Social listening data helps us validate whether trends we’re seeing on our feeds and from customers are resonating with a wider audience, and uncover additional conversation themes and subtopics to dig into. This means we can create more relevant, high-performing content. It helps us respond promptly to trends.”

Social insights also help us create more compelling evergreen content. From our social profiles to our blog, we enrich our content with Listening data that supports our thought leadership, empowers our sales team and helps us relate to our audience more effectively.

To pressure test our insights, we use the Post Performance Report to analyze content down to the individual post level. The report provides a unified view of post performance across networks, so we can see which messages performed the best and on which platforms. This analysis reinforces us to test our strategy and pivot effectively if needed. Listening and analytics data work in tandem to help us iterate on our content.

Better competitive intelligence

Listening also makes it easy for Sprout to access all conversations about/around our brand and the social media industry as a whole. We use listening data to answer questions like:

• How does our brand image compare to our competitors?
• What are our competitors’ sentiment trends?
• How much social volume does our PR efforts and thought leadership content generate? What about our competitors?

Our Competitive Analysis Topic Tempate aggregates and presents this data so we can see how our engagements, sentiment and overall volume compare. With that intel, we orient our strategy to fill industry white space and find our unique footing in the market.

Proactive crisis management

A single negative customer experience can turn into a full-blown crisis if not addressed appropriately. Social listening data enables our social team to keep a constant pulse on our brand health and sentiment. We track data trends related to our share of voice, conversation volume and positive sentiment ratio. This allows us to swiftly respond to customer care inquiries and manage would-be crises with grace.

Refined product development

At Sprout, we’re always making updates to our platform based on customer feedback. For example, we expedited the launch of Dark Mode after the social team noticed a lot of social conversations and inbound questions about it in our comments and messages. They were able to use Listening and qualitative data to inform the need for the new product feature.

Remember: When people talk about your brand, your product or their pain points, they usually don’t tag you. Listening helps us stay vigilant and tuned into all the conversations that can help us improve our offerings.

More efficient spending

By taking a data-driven approach to social media strategy development, brands are able to invest where it counts—both in their organic and paid initiatives. As many marketing leaders are expected to do more with less budget, the pressure is on to deliver results.

With social media data, you can demonstrate how key metrics like brand awareness, engagements and traffic correlated with an increase in sales. For example, when Figo Pet Insurance began investing in their social video strategy, they used real-time data to refine their approach and determine which videos to amplify with paid budget. Their efforts resulted in audience growth, multiple viral videos and revenue-driving ads.

The challenges of data-driven marketing

Many brands don’t have a clear roadmap to developing a data-driven approach to social media—or marketing in general. If your team is still struggling to translate metrics to meaningful decisions and strategic plans, here are some of the things that could be holding you back.

Collecting data

Marketing data collection has a reputation for not providing CEOs and other leaders with enough concrete information that matters to overall business goals (like revenue and customer acquisition). With Google finally phasing out of cookies and third-party data, marketing teams are under even greater pressure to find new ways of capturing critical insights. Manually collecting this data is time-consuming, tedious and ineffective, restricting teams’ ability to measure their impact.

Fragmented tech stacks

When data is siloed across multiple systems, this leads to data quality and integrity issues. Having team members switch between many different platforms for functions like social media management, customer care, content performance and sales data is not only inefficient, it also disrupts the customer journey and makes it difficult to have a cross-channel view of your audience.

Analysis

If the tools you use for data collection and analysis are cumbersome or complex, you might become over-reliant on an analytics team or person to pull relevant intel. When data isn’t accessible across teams, the result is opportunity cost. What creative work could your teams do if they had more time back? How could teams across the company use that data to iterate on customer outreach, product development, customer care and more?

5 tips to develop a more data-driven marketing organization

Here are five actionable ways you can overcome those challenges and build a data-driven marketing organization that fully harnesses the potential of social insights.

Identify and clarify the data you want to track

The first step toward creating a data-driven culture is to define which metrics matter to you, your department and the rest of the organization. While these metrics will vary company to company, revisit your business’ goals, learn to speak the language of your CFO, and find the balance between brand and performance marketing to effectively outline them. Share the metrics you’re measuring with your team and across leadership.

Invest in team development

Once you know which metrics matter most, invest in training and resources to ensure everyone across your team is data literate, understands how to do basic analysis and prioritizes data collection with the highest impact. According to The State of the Social Media Industry report, 93% of brands say that social data is expected to become a major source of business intelligence for their company in the next three years. All teams—but especially social teams—need to be ready to analyze and contextualize data to extract meaningful insights. 

Look for opportunities to centralize data in your tech stack

Nix point solutions in favor of platforms that integrate with your most critical systems, like your CRM, BI tools, marketing automation platforms and social media management solution. Find ways you can consolidate data, making it easier to measure key performance results and improve the customer experience.

For example, with Sprout’s Tableau integration, you can visualize data from multiple marketing channels in one place, giving you a more complete view of your customers and how they interact with your brand across the buyer’s journey.

Automate analysis wherever you can

To overcome the time-consuming nature of data analysis, automate wherever you can. Use AI to surface social data across your entire organization faster and make it easier for your teams to identify trends or potential crises before they crest. This is a chance to wipe the slate clean and radically rewire data collection processes or tasks that aren’t serving your employees.

Queries by AI Assist uses Sprout Social’s integration with OpenAI to generate keyword suggestions for Listening queries, expediting your social listening efforts. This helps your team fine tune Listening results, and deliver more insightful outputs—while making time for more creative work.

Establish reporting rituals

Create a regular cadence and format for sharing data across marketing, with other departments and with leadership. Data is only valuable when it’s consumed.

By using a social media management platform like Sprout, your team can view and share presentation-ready reports in our analytics suite. Reports like the Paid vs. Organic report visualize performance on individual platforms and reveal ways to improve future strategy and tactics.

Use social media insights to become a data-driven marketing leader

When you have a data-driven strategy, you’ll never have to ask your team to “show you the data” again. Data-driven marketing is the key to future-proofing your business and helping it grow.

Social media data is the missing link to understanding your audience and competitors, refining your content strategy and product development, and making better investments. But first you need powerful tools to capture it.

The right social media management platform drives revenue, boosts team efficiency and enables a data-driven focus that helps you outperform the competition. Use our social media management buyer’s guide to choose the right platform for maximum impact.

The post Data-driven marketing: What it is and strategies for using it appeared first on Sprout Social.

Social listening serves as a powerful competitive analysis tool, extracting targeted brand insights from widespread online conversations across social networks. You get real-time insights into consumer behavior, emerging trends and competitors’ activities, which you can use to promptly pivot strategies and stay ahead of the game.

Let’s dive deeper into how social listening gives you an edge when used for market research.

The competitive advantage of using social listening for marketing research

Social listening empowers you with real-world insights extracted from raw, unfiltered brand-related online chatter for a birds’ eye-view of the competitive landscape. These insights help you refine marketing strategies to optimize your return on investment (ROI). They also help you uncover whitespace opportunities to innovate and expand on product, pricing and geographic expansion strategies.

Competitive research also gives you insight into macro consumer trends such as the influence of elevated consumer prices on overall spending habits and brand preferences. Or, how to better target Gen Z, a demographic known for its high purchasing power and unique consumer behavior.

Competitive intelligence is especially critical in social media marketing because of the nature of social. As new platforms, features and trends emerge, social teams must keep competitive market research on their radar to prep for 2024.

Competitive listening gives social teams swift, comprehensive insights simultaneously from across social platforms, review sites and customer forums—at a fraction of the cost and time traditional research methods take. You’re able to overcome flux in platform algorithms and face continuously evolving consumer behavior. You also understand how your competitors are navigating these shifts and adapting their strategies to meet them.

Analyze sentiment in thousands of brand conversations to address customer needs more productively and ensure the competition doesn’t affect your market share.

Pairing cross-departmental knowledge with social listening for deeper insights

Social listening data gives you a deep understanding of your business environment not just for marketing but also other key areas such as product enhancement, finding growth opportunities and informing customer care.

Per The State of Social Media Report, 95% of business executives agree companies must rely more heavily on social media data to inform business decisions outside of marketing.

There is a reason behind this. As the latest Sprout Social Index ™ revealed, 68% of customers follow brands on social to stay informed about new products or services. They ask questions, talk to each other and discuss product and service alternatives. This is a wealth of customer-driven information waiting to be harnessed.

That’s why pairing cross-departmental knowledge with social listening insights is a win-win.

Social competitor analysis tools enable you to combine internal knowledge and social media intelligence to bridge disparities between how you think your audience perceives your brand and their actual sentiment. These insights, paired with data from your own CRM, product research and sales data, give you an even clearer picture of how to grow market share.

Building materials pioneer, James Hardie®, uses social listening for competitive research to do just this. They engage in audience and trend analysis, research product sentiment, identify industry influencers and conduct competitor comparisons to build holistic brand strategies beyond marketing.

“Not only is it good from a brand health and marketing angle, it’s also important information we can pass on to our sales teams and product teams. We can find trends and common themes that come up in conversations. We can identify not only our own brand advocates but brand advocates for our competition,” says Bridget Kulla, Senior Digital Marketing Manager at James Hardie.

Here’s a quick look at how you can combine insights from various departments with social listening.

Identify patterns and correlations

Look for patterns and overlaps between your internal knowledge and what social listening data reveals. This exercise will help you identify competitors that weren’t even on your radar before, enabling a more in-depth understanding of your market.

Integrate social listening workflows

Work with department leaders across the organization to educate all team members on the power of what social listening can do and where social insights can plug into their workflows.

Track listening data by topics

Marketing, sales and product teams each focus on different aspects of your brand experience. By narrowing your social media listening focus on data that is truly relevant to your goals, you can get insights from thousands of social conversations without getting overwhelmed.

Sprout’s Listening solution enables this kind of detailed competitive research analysis to facilitate cross-departmental collaboration. Our competitive listening capabilities help you identify keywords and hashtags in competitor-related conversations, revealing common topics in your industry.

Users can create Groups to analyze multiple competitors in one view and create separate Competitive Analysis Listening Templates to analyze data by product names. This is especially useful for large brands with multiple product lines.

Our integrated, AI-driven Query Builder provides customization options for your listening allowing you to include or exclude keywords. Here’s a quick video of the tool in action cutting through the noise in social listening.

How to champion your social listening findings across your organization

A key part of social media competitive analysis is ensuring you can build a collective narrative from all your research. This is necessary to champion your social listening research as a resource for decision-making to drive your business forward.

To get cross-organizational buy-in for listening insights, you also need to break down data silos and make sure your findings are digestible and actionable, especially for exec audiences.

Sprout Listening’s competitive analysis templates and reports with pre-designed topic templates help you achieve this. These templates give your teams access to unfiltered data from millions of social conversions to build winning brand strategies. And, they consolidate all your competitive research data into a unified source to facilitate swift collaboration across departments.

The template provides a comprehensive side-by-side comparison of key metrics, including total engagement, potential impressions, brand sentiment and share of voice. This allows for a straightforward analysis of your brand’s performance in comparison to competitors. These metrics also offer an in-depth understanding of which brand is leading the conversation and how your target audience perceives you versus the competition.

Use the templates to:

Find insights by network

Gain valuable insights into your content performance on different platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, and X (formerly known as Twitter) through network-specific performance and engagement reports. These reports give you a comparative view of which networks your competitors are heavily investing in, which in turn can inform your platform strategy or highlight a content gap you can fill for your audience.

Also use Sprout’s Custom Reports to share relevant insights across departments. These reports help your teams combine cross-network competitor engagement and listening data for a holistic view.

Spot top industry and competitor trends

Discover prominent trends and topics within your industry and extract insights on a number of factors such as competitors, content types, message styles and audience sentiment. Utilize keyword filters to refine your search and choose a date range to examine both long-term and short-term competitive trends.

For example, listening data can reveal an upward trend in consumer demand for products that are ethically sourced and environmentally friendly, which can influence your overall brand strategy and differentiate you from the crowd.

Assess detailed content performance and engagement data across Facebook, X and Instagram based on the uniqueness of each social network. For instance, content that excels on Instagram may not perform as well on Facebook due to differences in format and user behavior.

Identify areas of growth

Analyze feedback about your product and service to proactively address customer concerns and identify areas for improvement and growth. Also analyze competitor feedback and use those findings to refine your own ad messaging and develop more targeted selling propositions. This approach enables you to differentiate your brand while staying vigilant on competitor performance.

Integrate findings across your tech stack

Further strengthen the value of your competitive analysis by integrating your competitive research across your company’s tech stack. With Sprout’s Tableau Business Intelligence (BI) Connector, you can aggregate insights from multiple systems into rich data visualizations of key metrics throughout your customer journey. Track social engagements, average response rates for social customer care initiatives and your competitive share of voice.

You can also customize visuals and gain an immersive view by mapping social engagements and conversion rates to sales data.

Put your competitive marketing research to use for a better 2024

Use social listening to conduct a thorough SWOT (strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, threats) analysis for yourself and your key competitors. This approach to competitive market research will provide you with actionable insights to navigate successfully through 2024 and beyond.

From analyzing your competitors’ pricing strategies and value props to assessing gaps in your content strategy, use Sprout’s listening templates and reports to identify opportunities and differentiate your brand from competitors.

Request a demo to deep dive into insights that matter.

The post Why competitive research will become more important for social teams in 2024 appeared first on Sprout Social.

However, there still needs to be a human element to your Instagram strategy. Instagram automation can alleviate some of the repetitive tasks while allowing your social mean more time to develop creative campaigns. To help you find the right balance, we’ve put together a guide discussing what Instagram automation is, what can be automated and several tools to help you get started.

Let’s dig in.

What is Instagram automation?

Instagram automation refers to the use of third-party software to manage your account, carry out tasks and/or interact with users without a human present.

Simply put, Instagram automation tools can be put into two buckets:

1. Services that effectively “take control” of your front-facing interactions with users such as likes and comments
2. Tools that automate Instagram behind the scenes, taking care of tasks such as publishing, reporting and analytics

But does Instagram automation make your business look lazy? We say no—but only if you do it right. As with any other tool or strategy, there are pros and cons to weigh in how your team will implement automation.

Here are some pros and cons to help you decide if you want to start automating certain tasks on Instagram.

Pros:

• Save time on smaller, tedious tasks. Growing an Instagram presence organically definitely requires a combination of time and strategizing. Instagram automation tools can pick up some of the slack trimming, down time spent on tedious tasks.
• Grow your follower count faster. Automation undoubtedly helps you boost your follower count. Simply spending time on the platform and interacting with accounts in any way, shape or form will set you up for more engagement by default.
• Uncover important insights about your audience. There’s no doubt that automation tools help you learn more about your target audience. From breaking down what hashtags people use to suggesting accounts to follow, bots encourage you to take a deeper dive into your audience’s preferences.

Cons:

• Instagram isn’t a fan of automation “hacks.” Instagram has a history of taking action against  tools that they consider spammy. The platform wants its users to engage authentically and organically, so Instagram put together limits and penalties for tactics they see as potentially gaming their algorithm. More on this in the next section.
• Poor automation looks spammy. People can spot a bot at a glance. Automating likes and comments is a recipe for a potential social media crisis. Brand accounts should emphasize human interactions and avoid anything that looks spammy.
• Potentially miss out on important customer interactions. The more you automate on Instagram, the fewer opportunities you have to interact with followers and customers. You can’t provide personalized service with purely automated interactions. Instead, only automate aspects of your Instagram account that encourage you to spend more time with your followers.

Is Instagram automation allowed?

As we’ve discussed, there are pros and cons, but those are subjective. Let’s talk about legalities—or at least, what abides by Instagram’s Community Guidelines—so your account doesn’t get penalized.

The short answer is yes, Instagram automation is allowed. The long answer is that certain types of automation cheapen the experience and make your business look bad online. And some types of automation can even get your account banned.

First, let’s talk about the good kinds of automation—the kinds of automation that can assist your social team and improve your strategy.

What can be automated on Instagram?

If you’re interested in using automation to your advantage, here are a few tasks on Instagram that you can get some robot help with.

• Likes: Set up a bot with a group of hashtags so the bot can like posts you say are relevant to your brand.
• Comments: Similarly, a bot can also leave social media comments—on your posts and others. Sprout Social’s Saved Replies and Asset Library are a perfect example of this.
• Follows and unfollows: Follow and unfollow relevant and irrelevant accounts, respectively. This can help you grow your own follower count.
• Direct messages: Send and respond to DMs with the help of a bot. You can even set bots up to send messages to people who comment on your posts with a trigger word.
• Scheduling and publishing: Scheduling Instagram posts is a form of automation—an essential form that every social media team needs.
• Reporting: Automation tools can also help you monitor your Instagram analytics with insights and reports showcasing your performance.

Things you need to be wary of are engaging too much too quickly—faster than a human typically could—or Instagram could put a limit on your account. Buying likes and followers is also frowned upon. And you’ll want to avoid working with bots and tools that don’t have access to Instagram’s API as they’re not considered legitimate Instagram partners.

9 Instagram automation tools to streamline your work

Want to get started with basic—and allowed—Instagram automation? These nine tools can help give you a head start.

1. Sprout Social

Sprout Social is an all-in-one social media management tool that helps with a number of automation aspects and making Instagram management as seamless as possible for your team. Sprout can assist with a number of tasks, like publishing, response management, productivity tools and analytics. Through automation and other Sprout features, your team can effectively plan, post and manage your Instagram campaigns.

Instagram automations available:

• Scheduling and publishing
• Auto-responders and suggested replies in DMs
• Hashtag discovery
• Sourcing UGC

2. SocialPilot

SocialPilot is an Instagram automation and analytics tool that helps brands streamline their Instagram strategies. Access features that help you publish content, engage with your audience, view analytics and more. This software allows you to schedule up to 500 posts at once, whether on Instagram or another platform. And the option to save evergreen content and responses for frequent reuse helps social teams respond faster.

Instagram automations available:

• Scheduling and publishing
• AI caption generation
• Reporting
• Watermarking

3. Kicksta

Kicksta is an AI-based tool dedicated to helping Instagram users grow their followers. Its AI tool focuses on leaving authentic comments and engagement on other Instagram accounts in order to help you grow your following—without buying followers. You provide the guidelines for who to engage with based on a list of competitors, brands and influencers with similar audiences, then Kicksta does the hard work.

Instagram automations available:

• Comments
• Likes

4. Nitreo

Nitreo is another Instagram automation tool focused on helping brands get more followers on Instagram. Nitreo’s tool also engages with real accounts, helping you to keep up Instagram engagement and remain an authentic online presence without ending up with thousands of bot (or bought) followers.

Instagram automations available:

• Comments
• Likes
• Story views
• Profile visits

5. Tailwind

Tailwind is an Instagram automation tool that focuses more on scheduling and publishing—but takes a unique approach. This tool is only available for Instagram and Pinterest, ensuring its services are catered to specific needs in the market.

Instagram automations available:

• Post idea generation
• Copy generation
• Graphic and design generation
• Hashtag discovery
• Publishing and scheduling

6. NapoleonCat

NapoleonCat is a social media management tool focused on helping brands engage with and support their online customers. Get this tool’s help with moderating and responding to comments and messages, scheduling out your content in advance and generating useful analytics reports.

Instagram automations available:

• Scheduling and publishing
• Comment moderation
• Auto-responses for both comments and DMs
• Reporting

7. Inflact

Inflact provides an entire suite of tools that can be used for Instagram automation. From interacting with other accounts to publishing content, Inflact offers an intuitive dashboard for accessing all of its useful features.

Instagram automations available:

• Send bulk DMs
• Follow and unfollow
• Likes
• Hashtag discovery
• Scheduling and publishing

8. Iconosquare

Iconosquare is another option for social media managers looking for a range of features dedicated to Instagram automation. Use this tool for scheduling, monitoring analytics, social listening and more.

Instagram automations available:

• Scheduling and publishing
• Reporting
• Unread comment/mention discovery

9. OnlySocial

OnlySocial is another useful option for Instagram automation and management. One of its top features in regards to automations is the ability to create Instagram messenger chatbots so that followers can message you and easily get helped by a customer service or sales chatbot.

Instagram automations available:

• Scheduling and publishing
• RSS feed auto-publishing
• Instagram messaging chatbot
• Reporting

Are you using Instagram automation the right way?

There’s plenty to automate on Instagram, granted you let a human take the reins.

If you’re looking to speed up your Instagram growth via automation, your head is in the right place. After all, marketers should always look to add tools to their toolbox in order to engage with more customers.

To learn more about how Sprout Social can help with your Instagram automation journey, request a free demo.

The post Instagram automation: Strategy and tools to do it right appeared first on Sprout Social.

Social media has democratized access to medical information and empowered patients to take charge of their health. But it also has negative consequences. Like increasing the spread of misinformation and excluding healthcare workers from vital conversations with their patients. It has pushed some hospital systems, professional societies and pharmaceutical companies into an unflattering limelight, as patient and provider criticisms go viral. Risks like this have caused healthcare organizations to recoil, and grow cautious of being present on social channels.

The reality is that the future of the healthcare industry will be a hybrid of online and offline experiences. People will use social media networks to look up health information, find care providers, search for employment and receive updates from their healthcare team and hospital systems. They expect you to show up on social—and social data can provide value for your company, too.

By using social listening tools, you can keep an eye on trending conversations in your community, stay ahead of crises and receive real-time patient feedback that helps you improve your care. Keep reading for examples of social listening for healthcare in action.

The benefits of social listening in healthcare

The sheer volume of social content published hourly makes it tough for healthcare companies to find their patients, providers and community members. Social listening enables you to cut through the noise, hone in on relevant conversations and share valuable timely insights with your leadership team.

Here are specific ways teams can use listening to monitor and analyze audience conversations in an efficient, centralized manner, featuring advice from Sprout Social experts.

Proactive crisis management

The best things a social team can do when it comes to responding to an impending crisis are: already have a crisis plan in place and catch minor crises before they spiral out of control. According to Jill Florence, Director of Enterprise Sales at Sprout Social, “Unfortunately, PR crises are common for healthcare systems and other healthcare organizations. Many have gone through a challenging event themselves, or have seen it happen to other companies and they’re afraid of it happening to them. Whether it’s a patient who had a negative experience, a violent threat or mishandling patient data, leaders want to know about it in real-time.”

Of course, crises can be external, too. Katherine Van Allen, a Senior Solutions Engineer at Sprout, adds, “Healthcare organizations can also use listening to pay attention to government decisions, relevant current events and specific bills and or lobbying conversations that will impact care units beyond the marketing team.”

By including Sprout Social tools like Listening Spike Alerts in your crisis plan, you will be alerted to shifts in conversations around topics like your hospitals, facilities or supply chain, plus trending news. These alerts will help your team stay on top of current events, and be the first to know if a crisis is about to unfold. As Florence explains, “You don’t want to be in a situation where the CEO is the one informing you about a situation, and you’re just reacting. Getting listening alerts right away is critical to proactively managing crises, and leading the charge at your organization.”

Real-time patient and clinician feedback

While receiving feedback from patients and clinicians on social might seem daunting, it’s the best way to source unfiltered intel. By intercepting this feedback, the social team accesses voice of customer knowledge that can help improve multiple aspects of your organization.

With social listening insights on hand, it’s possible to understand the needs, opinions and feelings of patients, physicians and community members. And understanding them translates to better content, care, and recruitment and retention strategies. As Van Allen puts it, “The [healthcare organizations] who use social listening make more informed decisions about their content strategy.”

By making brand health a part of your listening strategy, you can consistently monitor audience sentiment on social. A platform like Sprout enables you to visualize overall sentiment trends and zero-in on key audience pain points. With this presentation-ready business intelligence, you’re empowered to share audience feedback—like how patients feel about your current wait times and the care they receive, to how physicians would describe your culture—with the rest of your organization.

“Comparative” intelligence

In the healthcare industry, it’s common to consider other healthcare systems and companies “comparators” rather than competitors. While you might not consider other organizations your direct competition, you can still use them as a barometer to measure your performance—from patient care and satisfaction to talent recruitment and culture.

Van Allen describes, “Use listening to understand your share of voice and how people are talking about comparators. Ask yourself: What kinds of specialties, hiring conversations and patient feedback are they getting? How does that compare to us?”

This is especially helpful amid an industry-wide staffing shortage and quickly evolving patient expectations. “The hiring landscape is so competitive that customers need to understand why other companies are being chosen over them,” says Florence. Social listening delivers key learnings that can help you reach (and exceed) care benchmarks on social and beyond, and rethink how your company approaches hiring and workplace culture overall.

Sprout’s Competitive Analysis report aggregates social data from your comparators, including impressions, engagements, sentiment and overall share of voice. You can dig deeper into specific audience feedback in the Conversation and Messages tabs.

5 examples of social listening for healthcare in action

We researched examples of ways real healthcare companies use social listening to increase patient satisfaction and engagement, while balancing growing needs around hiring and patient care standards. Here’s what we found:

1. Guide expansion

As hospital systems and other healthcare organizations expand, real-time audience feedback gleaned from social listening empowers marketing teams to provide a strategic vision.

Florence cites a specific example of a hospital system she worked with that used customer feedback from social listening to guide expansion. “They were completely maxed out. They didn’t have large enough facilities or enough clinicians to accommodate their community, and they felt the backlash on social. Customers complained about long wait times, poor physician care and overall bad experiences. As their company increased capacity, the social team was on the front lines. They managed customer pain points and kept decision makers abreast, while using that feedback to influence expansion in a way that maintained positive brand reputation long-term.”

2. Provide audiences with relevant content

Social listening insights give you a window into issues that matter to your patients, community members and physicians, and enable you to craft an audience-centric content strategy.

Van Allen describes how organizations can use listening to adapt their messaging to meet the needs of their audience. “We see healthcare organizations use social listening to research trending conversations and industry topics, and use that intel to inform their content strategy. For example, a hospital system could create a Listening topic about going “back to school” and surface that parents within their community want more tips to prepare for cold, flu and RSV season.”

3. Route audience intel to the right department

At some healthcare organizations, multiple social marketing teams work together—each representing a different department (e.g., cardiology, dermatology, oncology, etc.). Using a robust and intuitive platform like Sprout makes it possible for these teams to share social listening insights with one another, and facilitate stronger communication and cross-team collaboration.

Florence adds, “Using Sprout’s custom Listening reports lets healthcare marketers generate and share insights with other functions.” By creating department-specific Listening topics, social marketers at healthcare organizations—like hospital systems—can find the specific insights they need to reach their unique goals, like increasing cardiology patient satisfaction. Sprout’s centralized platform houses all of this data in one place, making it possible for marketing teams to work in harmony.

4. Track awareness campaigns

Healthcare organizations can use social listening to gauge how effective promotional campaigns for emerging research and timely initiatives are.

For example, a medical society specializing in cardiology ran a major awareness campaign centered around American Heart Month. To measure the performance and impact of their work, they created a listening query around their organization name and the branded campaign hashtag. By analyzing this Listening data, they were able to identify key strengths and weaknesses of the campaign, resulting in valuable strategy refinements for upcoming initiatives.

You can also use listening data to find advocates who were vocal during a past campaign, and tap them for future partnerships.

5. Increase share of voice

Listening is a valuable tool for healthcare organizations who want to improve their credibility and rise up to the level of other comparators.

In one instance, a children’s hospital looking to raise its national ranking through strategic media opportunities created a competitive listening topic to track its share of voice against higher-ranking hospitals. While analyzing the Listening data, they identified opportunities for submission-based awards and event sponsorships that might help bolster their reputation. They also established new competitive benchmarks for engagements and impressions.

In healthcare, you hope that people never need certain services (especially emergency/urgent care). But you do want to be top of mind, in the moment, when they do.

Social listening shows your audience you care

Your audience expects healthcare brands like yours to be present on social media. Despite its reputational and compliance risks, social offers a wide variety of insights that enable you to manage crises effectively, gather real-time patient and provider feedback, and stay on par with your comparators.

Finding value in social as a healthcare organization requires tools that capture actionable insights and mine value from social to drive exceptional patient and provider experiences.

Want to start turning social data into elevated patient care? Request a demo of Sprout Social’s Listening solution today.

The post The power of social listening for healthcare organizations appeared first on Sprout Social.

• 60% of customers will switch to a competitor after a negative experience.
• 73% of customers want companies to recognize their unique needs and expectations.
• 52% of customers expect an answer within an hour of posting on a brand’s digital page.

As a business, you need to figure out how to deliver great customer experiences while keeping up with these changing demands.

Part of that equation is understanding how customers think and feel about your brand. That’s what sentiment analysis is all about.

In this post, you’ll learn what customer sentiment analysis is, why it matters and how to do it right. We’ve also included helpful tips and tools to get you started on the right foot.

Table of Contents

• What is customer sentiment analysis?
• Why do you need to analyze customer sentiment?
• How to measure customer sentiment
• Best tools for customer sentiment analysis
• How to improve customer sentiment

What is customer sentiment analysis?

Customer sentiment analysis is a facet of AI marketing that involves understanding how customers think and feel about your products, services or business.

When a customer leaves a review, comments on your posts or shares a photo with your product, they’re expressing an emotion—such as joy, frustration or disappointment.

As a brand, your job is to decipher that emotion, paint an accurate picture of the customer experience and then use that insight to improve future experiences.

Why do you need to analyze customer sentiment?

Sentiment analysis is an integral part of delivering an exceptional AI customer experience. It helps you understand the nuances of emotion that drive satisfaction, loyalty and advocacy.

Here are five ways analyzing customer sentiment can help your business:

Monitor overall customer satisfaction

Happy customers leave good reviews. Unhappy customers leave bad reviews.

Sounds easy, right? But it’s not that simple. Sometimes, you need to read between the lines.

For example, if your app’s review section is quiet after a new update, sentiment analysis might reveal users are unimpressed, not overjoyed.

By capturing the emotional undertones in customer feedback and conversations, businesses can gauge satisfaction levels with greater accuracy.

Improve customer experience

Sentiment analysis offers actionable insights that can help you craft experiences tailored to the emotional needs of your customers.

For example, you might identify that customers find your landing page confusing. Writing clearer copy and fixing the design can help you improve user experience on your website and generate more sign ups for your business.

Understanding customer sentiment also lets you create targeted campaigns around topics customers feel strongly about and respond to feedback more empathetically, which improves their overall experience with your brand.

Gain real-time consumer insights

Sentiment analysis can help you capture instant feedback during product launches and campaigns. This allows you to react promptly, preventing issues from snowballing.

For example, let’s say a video game company drops a new game and monitors social media and gaming forums for player reactions. Within hours, they detect a pattern of complaints about a difficult level, which is causing players to lose interest.

Acting on these real-time insights, the company releases a patch to adjust the difficulty settings and posts tips for navigating the challenging sections. By doing so, they prevent early negative reviews from damaging the game’s reputation.

Build brand loyalty

Understanding what makes your customers tick helps you turn moderately satisfied buyers into loyal advocates of your business. Here’s how.

By identifying emotional triggers, you can create targeted campaigns around topics they feel strongly about, respond more effectively to feedback and keep delighting customers at every step of the journey.

Not only will customers have a great experience with your brand, they’ll appreciate you going the extra mile to exceed their expectations and bring them joy. As a result, you’ll reduce churn and keep them coming back for more.

Identify product and service gaps

Monitoring customer sentiment can highlight areas of your product or service that may need improvement or innovation.

For example, you might notice complaints on social media about the poor battery life of your tech product. You could roll out an update to fix the issue and potentially avert a drop in sales. Better yet, you could focus on improving the battery of your future products.

How to measure customer sentiment

You know sentiment analysis is important, but how do you actually do it? How do you measure the general emotion surrounding your brand?

It might sound complicated, but it’s really not. You just need to gather the right data and organize it in a way that makes it easier to interpret and act upon.

Which factors contribute to customer sentiment?

Before we get to the steps, let’s find out what type of data you need to measure customer sentiment about your brand. Here are some factors that affect sentiment:

• Customer reviews: Online reviews of your company, products and services contain various emotions expressed via text and/or visuals. They can be positive, negative or neutral, and these nuances are often picked up by AI sentiment analysis tools. Managing these reviews with productive solutions can help your brand improve trust among customers and lower the negative impact of online criticism.

• Brand reputation: On social media, every like, comment or post shapes your brand’s public perception. A viral post can make you popular, while a critical tweet can spark backlash. It’s an up-to-date snapshot of how much people like or dislike your brand.
• News: Whether it’s an award, a product recall or a CEO’s statement, news can significantly impact how customers perceive a brand.
• Marketing initiatives: When your campaigns resonate, they lift positive sentiment; when they miss the mark, they can confuse or even alienate your audience.
• Cognitive dissonance: When customers’ experiences don’t align with their expectations, it creates discomfort known as cognitive dissonance. This psychological phenomenon can lead to negative sentiment if not addressed.
• Competitive landscape: Customers always compare, and so your standing in the market—your prices, quality, innovation—all contribute to how they feel about your brand in the context of your competition.

These drivers can all influence how customers feel about a brand, and it’s important to track them all in order to get a complete picture of customer sentiment.

3 steps to analyze customer sentiment

Now you know what to look for. But how do you go about analyzing this data? Follow the three steps below for a systematic and organized approach to conducting sentiment analysis:

Step 1: Gather the data

First, you need raw material to work with—that means collecting brand-related information from every corner where your customers might express their thoughts.

This could range from online reviews and social media posts to customer support tickets and survey responses. Gathering diverse data sources gives you a well-rounded view of customer sentiment, not just isolated snapshots.

Step 2: Process the data

Next, you’ll need to sift through the data and prepare it for analysis.

This is where sentiment analysis tools can help. AI-powered algorithms can sort positive from negative, and suss out those tricky neutral comments.

This step involves decoding the tone and intent behind words, which requires sophisticated technology, like natural language processing (NLP), to capture subtleties and context.

Step 3: Visualize the data

Finally, you’ve got to make sense of all this information. Data visualization tools can transform your findings into charts, graphs and heat maps that highlight sentiment trends.

This step is crucial because it translates complex data into a format that’s easy for teams to understand and use, turning insights into action points for improving customer experience.

Best tools for customer sentiment analysis

Measuring customer sentiment can be tricky as it’s not exactly a quantifiable metric.

Thankfully, there are some powerful sentiment analysis tools out there to help you navigate the complexities in gauging customer experience and extracting actionable insights.

Here are three sentiment analysis tools you can use:

Sprout Social

Sprout Social is an all-in-one social media management platform that offers sentiment analysis as part of its AI-powered social listening capabilities.

Refine your strategy by exploring customers’ feelings, thoughts and opinions on specific topics, competitors, products and more. Sprout gives you a visual score summarizing the average sentiment around your brand as well as a graph tracking sentiment trends over time.

Lexalytics

Lexalytics is a text analytics platform that helps you analyze sentiment by examining customer feedback across multiple channels. It evaluates the tone and emotion in the text to determine the sentiment behind customer opinions.

MeaningCloud

MeaningCloud offers sentiment analysis by processing multilingual content from various channels. It breaks down feedback into sentiments associated with specific topics or attributes of your products and services.

How to improve customer sentiment

Analyzing sentiment is just the beginning. You also need to know how to make customers fall in love with your brand.

Improving customer sentiment requires a strategic approach to evaluating customer experience and taking advantage of AI customer service tools. Here’s what to do:

Define the scope

Before you can improve sentiment, you need to know where to listen. Are your customers voicing their opinions on X (formerly Twitter), reviewing on Google or asking questions on live chat?

Pinpoint these channels and decide if there are specific regions or languages that need attention. For instance, if your product is hitting a new market, you’ll want to tune into that area’s local review sites and social platforms.

Defining the scope provides a targeted area for your efforts so you don’t cast too wide a net and dilute your impact.

Monitor the sentiment

Next, use sentiment analysis tools to continuously monitor these channels.

By tracking sentiment over time, you can spot trends and understand how customers are reacting to every little change.

For example, if sentiment dips every time you release a software update, there’s a clue to improve your change management process.

Identify the topics or themes

Leverage AI to dig into the feedback to find what’s really stirring up emotions. Is it your stellar customer service, or perhaps shipping delays are causing grief?

Identifying these topics helps you know where to double down and where to pivot. For example, if multiple customers express frustration over a specific product feature, that’s a clear signal you need to make improvements.

Create a strategy

Finally, develop a strategy based on these insights. Allocate your resources where they’ll make the biggest difference. Maybe it’s time to staff up your customer service team or invest in an AI chatbot to provide instant responses.

Also, determine the best channels for customer interaction—perhaps your audience engages more on Instagram than email—and tailor your approach accordingly.

Remember to train your team so they understand the importance of sentiment and how to nurture positive experiences at every touchpoint.

Using sentiment analysis to improve customer experience

What your customers think about your business directly influences its growth and success. Instead of just reading reviews, you need to dive deeper and understand the nuances of emotion to accurately monitor sentiment around your brand.

With customer sentiment analysis, you can get inside your customers’ minds, leverage emotional triggers and craft experiences that delight them at every step.

Sprout Social’s listening lets you track customer sentiment, conversations, behavior and trends across multiple social media platforms with the power of AI and machine learning.

Interested in learning more? Schedule a personalized demo and learn how to drive real business growth with Sprout’s platform.

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