The saying goes, «The customer is always right.»
Truly, the success of your brand relies on their positive feedback.
This is why customer advocates, those who passionately support your brand, hold significant value in driving sales.
Where can you find these enthusiastic supporters? Hint: Pay attention.
We’ll show you how to leverage social listening to enhance customer advocacy, with six inspiring examples.
Bonus: Explore the most effective ways to gather insights from your audience, competitors, industry, and favorite brands in our comprehensive guide to advanced social listening.
What is customer advocacy?
Customer advocacy involves nurturing relationships with your most loyal customers so that they will promote and recommend your brand to others.
Why? Because consumers trust the opinions of other consumers more than a brand’s marketing efforts.
By turning more customers into advocates, you can increase brand awareness and maintain a positive reputation.
The key to achieving this is through social media listening (keep reading).
In 2024, social media platforms are primary channels for consumers to share their opinions and influence others.
By implementing a social media listening strategy and utilizing the right tools, brands can monitor and analyze relevant conversations such as consumer feedback, brand mentions, competitor references, industry trends, and more.
The outcome? Creating products and a customer experience that consumers naturally endorse.
And this is just the beginning. Here are several ways in which social listening and customer advocacy intertwine:
Uncovering customer and prospect insights
Your audience will communicate their needs and desires to you, the key is to listen attentively.
Through social listening, you can gather and treat these conversations as real-time customer feedback, ranging from positive to negative to suggestions for improvement.
For example, Notion’s social media team acknowledged customer feedback on font sizes and indicated it would be considered for product enhancement.
By addressing customer feedback, you can enhance your offering and strengthen relationships with your customers, resulting in mutual benefits.
Identifying and engaging brand advocates
Imagine social listening as a fast pass at an amusement park, except in this case, it helps you identify individuals who frequently engage with or mention your brand, products, or services.
Whether it’s a glowing review or a TikTok video praising your latest product, advanced tools can help you sift through the noise to connect with customer advocates and engage them in meaningful interactions.
Brands like Knix utilize user-generated content (UGC) to diversify their feed of marketing posts, showcasing authentic content that serves as a trust signal for potential customers and cultivates a new wave of brand advocates.
Tip: If you spot an influencer expressing admiration for your brand, collaborating with individuals who already appreciate your products can lead to authentic and impactful partnerships.
Developing customer-centric strategies based on listening insights
Social listening not only reveals the volume of customer feedback and pain points but also provides valuable insight into how your existing processes can address these issues effectively.
If you notice an influx of feedback or support requests exceeding your team’s capacity, it’s a sign to enhance your customer experience.
For instance, tech companies like Slack involve customers in their product development journey, allowing them to provide feedback and suggestions for improvement.
Through your social listening findings, you can determine how best to tailor your strategies to align with customer needs, implement feedback mechanisms, and enhance relationship management.
By prioritizing customer-centric strategies, you are on the path to becoming a brand that advocates naturally endorse.
Access brand mentions, trending topics, and sentiment analysis easily. Elevate your social strategy with the insights that matter most.
Measuring the reach and sentiment of brand mentions
If there’s a sudden shift in brand sentiment, whether positive or negative, your social team will be the first to notice.
Social media listening tools like Hootsuite Listening provide enhanced sentiment analysis to reveal how consumers truly feel and the prevalence of those sentiments.
Choosing the right tool not only alerts you to changes but also equips you with real-time insights to address the root cause swiftly.
Your existing and potential customer advocates eagerly await to be discovered, listened to, and engaged with through Hootsuite.
Even better, every Hootsuite plan offers all the tools you need to begin this journey.
Utilize Listening Basics to explore trending hashtags, brands, and events globally, or delve deeper for personalized insights related to your brand.
You can monitor discussions about your brand, top competitors, and products with up to two keywords tracking any content within the last seven days.
Additionally, Quick Search enables you to analyze key metrics, top themes, and specific results related to your search terms, such as popular posts and sentiment breakdowns.
If you’re ready to level up your social listening, our advanced listening features provide sentiment trends over time, influencer identification, audience demographics, and more. Interested in a free demo? Schedule one now.
Curious to see social listening strategies in action? Here are six brands leveraging social media listening to amplify customer advocacy.
1. Marlow
Monitoring online conversations related to your brand and industry proves to be a potent marketing technique.
For instance, Marlow, a menstrual brand, swooped in to address widespread tampon concerns circulating on the internet.
By swiftly reassuring their customers about tampon safety and showcasing positive brand reviews, Marlow effectively showcased their brand and garnered loyal supporters.
2. Grubhub
When it comes to customer experience, Grubhub means business.
Amidst the pandemic, food delivery became a crucial service, raising concerns about driver safety, hygiene protocols, and pricing.
Through social listening, Grubhub proactively sought to understand how they could ensure customer safety, offer cost-effective solutions, and maintain a competitive edge within the market.
They also leveraged social listening to transform a meme created from their «Belly Dance» TV ad into a viral sensation, engaging customers and converting negative sentiment into a positive, brand-enhancing experience.
3. Haus Labs
Beauty brands face a challenge in showcasing the authenticity of their products amidst filters and professional photoshoots.
Haus Labs, Lady Gaga’s brand, breaks the mold by incorporating user-generated content that authentically praises their makeup products.
Featuring a macro-influencer’s positive feedback can lead to a genuine, enduring partnership—a strategy worth emulating.
4. HelloFresh
HelloFresh exemplifies how social listening can be the secret ingredient for successful brand advocacy.
Prior to adopting social listening, the HelloFresh team spent extensive hours manually monitoring data and potentially missing crucial brand mentions that were not directly tagged.
By integrating social listening into their strategy, HelloFresh could monitor brand reputation, analyze customer feedback, and evaluate the performance of their marketing initiatives effectively.
As a result, HelloFresh identified over 400% more monthly brand mentions, never missing an opportunity to engage with their audience and address their concerns.
5. Spotify
Spotify takes social listening seriously, dedicating an entire account and website to address customer concerns and queries.
By actively monitoring tagged and untagged mentions, Spotify ensures that they can provide timely support to their users and maintain a positive brand image.
6. Cargolux
When Cargolux Airlines embarked on a unique mission to transport beluga whales from China to Iceland alongside Sea Life Trust, they used social listening to measure the campaign’s impact.
As a result, Cargolux observed a 20% increase in global brand mentions, tailored their messaging based on feedback for maximum engagement, and experienced a 42% spike in mentions in their target market, the UK.
By staying attuned to the social media buzz and actively engaging with their audience, Cargolux maximized the impact of their unique campaign, driving brand advocacy and awareness.
In summary, to become a brand that customers enthusiastically endorse, you must demonstrate a deep understanding of their needs. This leads to establishing strong relationships, meeting their expectations, and becoming their preferred brand.
Luckily, you now have the tools and insights to embark on your social listening journey and nurture a loyal base of customer advocates.
Your final task?
Uncover unique insights that propel your brand forward with Hootsuite Listening. Start managing all your social profiles in one place with a free 30-day trial.
Enhance your social media strategy with Hootsuite, the all-in-one social media tool. Stay ahead, grow your presence, and outshine the competition.
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