Social Listening Must-Haves for Retailers
Retailers enthusiastically leverage social media with a growing digital brand presence on Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest and many other social platforms. Social media advertising is growing rapidly — it's expected to exceed $10 billion by 2017. New business and revenue models that provide unprecedented opportunities for retailers will emerge and mature. So, what are the must-haves for retailers to drive sustainable business value from social media investments?
Social media strategies must include social listening capabilities. The value in social media are the two-way communication opportunities, particularly in having a 24/7 channel into what your customers, prospects and other influencers are saying about your brand. Retailers also can tap into what their employees are saying, what their competitors’ customers are saying and what their shareholders are saying about their brand. However, the content posted on social media sites is nearly immeasurable and is continuously replenished, so how can retailers harvest meaningful information in such a vast amount of data?
At a minimum, all retailers must have capabilities in place to manage risk and listen for content that presents their brand in a negative light. For example, customers may be disappointed and vent on social media outlets and employees may be disgruntled and share inappropriately in this public forum. Retailers must have the ability to listen for negative content and be able to address it quickly. Many consumers consider social media a preferred customer service channel, so retailers must be able to receive and respond to those customer service messages quickly. In fact, research shows that about half of all customers will expect a response within one hour, regardless of when that service issue is posted.
Retailers also need to establish social media policies for employees to clearly communicate an employee's responsibilities as it relates to their social media activity. There are numerous examples of inappropriate online postings from employees that unfortunately travel with lightning speed around the social media universe. Retailers must have the ability to quickly identify truly damaging content and respond to it immediately before a small distraction escalates into a truly harmful incident to the brand.
Retailers should also recognize the value of social media to enhance customer and influencer engagement. Engagement can range from encouraging customers to "like" products or mention them to leverage their own social influence, utilization of social media tools to support traditional customer service interactions, and hosting brand events such as product announcements and promotions to drive social media traffic. Research has shown that the most engaged customers not only drive greater profit, but they're also a great resource for brand and product development feedback.
Effective engagement isn't something that automatically occurs when customers are active on social media. Brands must provide the content to draw customers and influencers into social media interactions with great frequency to fill the 24/7 channel. Fresh content and active discussions can provide the context for customers to participate and share a brand within their own social networks. The insights that retailers can gain from monitoring these discussions are much richer than traditional customer research mechanisms such as surveys and focus groups, and should be core to customer segmentation strategies.
Lastly, social listening is a great vehicle for real-time assessment of business execution. Customers readily post about their store, e-commerce and brand experiences. Retailers should use these posts as feedback to measure customer service for all aspects of operations, as well as a tool that can provide early results to evaluate new products, promotion success and sales trends. A key advantage of social listening metrics are their immediacy. Early identification of issues can support ongoing adjustments to campaigns to improve the success rates of those initiatives.
The opportunities presented by analyzing social media data are unprecedented. The data can be free of cost and is fully accessible; many tools are available to drive analysis. Retailers that leverage the social media opportunity will be able to use the insights gained to build and enhance customer relationships, develop more effective products and promotions, and drive improved business results in this highly competitive retail environment.
Liz Ebert is a consultant for The North Highland Company, a global consulting firm.