For ecommerce brands, social media is a vast database rich in valuable insights. This data can be used to improve your marketing campaigns and even products and services. Businesses extract this data through social listening, the process of monitoring your brand mentions, tags, hashtags, and selected keywords on social networks. 

As you can imagine, however, there can be a lot of noise on social media. That’s why it helps to identify priority social listening metrics to focus on instead. That said, here are four critical social listening metrics that every business should track:

1. Share of Voice on Social Media

Share of voice refers to your brand visibility on social media channels compared to that of competitors in your industry. When you understand how you measure up against your competition, you can determine whether or not your campaigns are performing as they should. That can help you make the necessary adjustments if needed. 

For instance, if you see your competitor, who runs lots of user-generated content (UGC) campaigns, has a big chunk of brand mentions on social media, you might consider adding UGC content initiatives to your own campaigns. UGC and social listening go hand-in-hand, as social users are more likely to mention your brand online when they see your account interacting with and sharing content from other people like them.

Cosmetics brand Morphe coined the hashtag #morphebabes, and uses Pixlee TurnTo to automatically collect and curate content posted by fans using the hashtag. The brand then populates inspiration galleries and shoppable carousels of UGC with this content in addition to resharing it on social media.

An increase in the share of voice is likely to lead to an increase in social visibility. In other words, with an increase in the share of voice can come an increase in brand awareness and, potentially, sales. So, the question is, how can you increase your share of voice?

You can start by being active on your social media accounts. Being active ensures that your target audiences are constantly engaged. Create different forms of content to avoid boring your audience with the same kinds of posts over and over again. Also, you should analyze the audience to understand when they’re most active and strategically schedule your content to go out at the most effective time. Check out our guide on the best time to post on TikTok to get an idea of how to analyze your audience demographics and activity.

You can also spark conversation. When you initiate a conversation that interests your audience on social media, they will engage, increasing your mentions and visibility. 

Article replies to comments on the brand’s social posts to keep the conversation going and show customers that the brand cares about their experiences.

By starting these conversations, you pave the way for more UGC, too. Use Pixlee TurnTo to keep track of this UGC. You can use the tool to search by hashtag, mention, or by an influencer.

2. Conversation Share

Conversation share is a deep dive into how much presence your brand has when it comes to a given topic on social media. It is a critical social listening metric as it gives you a clear picture of what conversations matter to your audience and how you feature in those conversations.

With insight from this metric, you can improve your voice in those critical conversations. Your goal is to establish yourself as an authority there. That, after all, will make it easy for your brand to generate and convert leads.

But to fully take advantage of this metric, you must listen to your target audience through social listening tools beforehand. You need to know what interests them, what questions they have, and their general sentiment regarding pertinent issues in your industry. That will inform your approach when contributing. You’ll be able to tweak your messages to have maximum impact.

Combining social listening with audience intelligence is one of the most effective ways of boosting your conversation share. Social listening will help you identify the key conversations you need to be involved in.

3. Customer Satisfaction Feedback

Customer satisfaction feedback is a social listening metric that informs you of how well people receive your product or service. You want to monitor this so you can perform sentiment analysis and know how you’re doing as a brand. Ratings & Reviews are crucial to your customer satisfaction strategy, and should be considered alongside insight you gather via social listening.

If you get positive mentions, that means you should continue what you’re doing. If you get negative feedback, it means you need to improve your marketing strategies or your product or service. 

When you monitor customer satisfaction, you can also determine who your potential brand ambassadors are on social networks. You want to find happy customers who consistently make positive mentions of your brand. These are your brand advocates, with whom youcan collaborate with for campaigns to promote your brand further.

It helps to monitor negative feedback, too. Tracking this allows you to step in in time and correct, clarify or offer support to frustrated social media users. 

While you will never silence all the negative comments on social media, you can work hard to keep them as low as possible. By responding to these negative comments, you show your brand is committed to delivering on its promise.

You can also use negative feedback to improve your product or service. So, if you find someone who says the clothes you sell are too small for them, for example, you can step in and offer new sizes. 

Don’t just confine your monitoring to social platforms. Monitor Google My Business reviews, too. If you don’t have reviews there just yet, learn how to create a QR code for Google reviews and put it on your physical store or other marketing collateral. That way, all your visitor needs to do is scan the code to leave a review for you.

4. Number of leads

A business without leads is a dying business. Without leads, you can’t get customers in the first place. Social media can help you boost brand awareness and generate new leads by acting as an extension of your customer service.

For instance, you can directly respond to a user’s query about your product or service. These people who ask are typically already interested in making a purchase. If you answer correctly, they might just convert.

Xtreme Lashes uses its Instagram account to answer questions from users in the brand’s comment section.

The key to converting these leads (and, therefore, an increased conversion rate) is for you to jump into the conversation as quickly as possible. Social media monitoring tools allow you to monitor these conversations, so you can do just that. 

Simply put, track the number of leads you produce by social listening so you can determine whether or not you’re generating enough to potentially convert into customers and sustain your business.

Summing It All Up

Social media is a goldmine of information businesses can use to their advantage. With social listening, you can get this information.

But that much information on social media can be overwhelming. That’s why it helps to focus only on key social listening metrics.

When you track these social listening metrics, you can make the necessary adjustments if needed to your marketing campaigns, products or services, and other aspects of your business. In other words, you can take your business to greater heights.

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Carlos Serra is the head of corporate development and strategy at Audiense, a customer insights and engagement company, where he is responsible for managing partner and integration channels, ensuring seamless commercial expansion. He was named a pioneer in The Social Intelligence Insider 50 (2022) by The Social Intelligence Lab.