The online consumer market is densely populated. With more brands fighting for the same customers as ever before, it’s no surprise that many are searching for new ways to get closer to their potential leads.
Brands that prioritize demographic values and gratifications are the most likely to see success in 2024. In fact, 84% of online consumers now claim they will only engage with a brand whose values align with their own.
Therefore, in order to boost follower counts and conversion potential, smart brands must start social listening.
We have seen countless social listening examples that demonstrate the benefits of actively listening and learning more about what your consumers want.
Social listening can improve your understanding of demographic values and industry trends. It even gives you the chance to engage with brand mentions head-on to boost engagement and raise customer sentiment.
Experts at Everyone Social claim businesses can increase customer loyalty and advocacy by a staggering 25% when they monitor and respond to brand mentions on social media channels.
On the back of 61% of businesses now planning to implement social listening into their sales strategy in 2024, we’ve listed nine social listening examples to take inspiration from as you get to know your customers inside and out.
9 social listening examples to follow
Ben & Jerry’s: Analyzing Ad Performance
Ben and Jerry’s is a great example of a brand that listens. Responsible for numerous campaigns that have directly targeted consumers’ values and demographic trends, the ice cream brand is known for creating new flavors and designs based on key conversations and topics that keep its consumers talking.
However, for this social listening example, the brand stepped away from traditional media monitoring. It looked directly at its ad engagement for more clues on how to strengthen its social media strategy further.
After analyzing their ad performance outside of what they thought was their most profitable season, Ben and Jerry’s discovered that more consumers were clicking on their social ads during the winter season and increasing spend on their ice cream products.
Taking to social media with this news, Ben and Jerry’s analyzed brand mentions that showed increased demand for ice cream during the bad weather.
As more people stayed inside to watch Netflix, the brand found that their potential to target actually rose during the winter, as a pose to the summer months.
The brand has since tweaked its ad strategies to accommodate winter snack-ers. They have even released a targeted ice cream flavor known as Netflix & Chill’d to play on the exact brand mentions they discovered in this fantastic social listening example.
McDonald’s: Multi-Platform Monitoring
McDonald’s is also a great brand to consider as a positive social listening example. The fast-food brand excels at social listening.
Not only do they use social media platforms listening to hop on numerous social trends, but they are known for bringing back fan favorites on the menu on the back of social media mentions alone.
With this said the social listening example we’re focusing on is McDonald’s 2023 Grimace shake trend. After releasing their newest campaign based on the popular mascot, Grimace’s birthday, the brand saw a lot of love rush in for their themed meals and shakes.
However, this soon spread further across multiple social platforms.
When McDonald’s marketers leveraged their social listening skills, they discovered that the Grimace shake trend has gone live on TikTok and other platforms, such as Instagram Reels and YouTube shorts.
Their consumers had created numerous sharable videos and memes that the brand was able to republish on its own platform to boost social engagement.
Taking a witty response to the TikTok trend, McDonald’s posted their own Grimace meme with the following caption: me pretending I don’t see the grimace shake trend.
Not only did this stir up more social shares and mentions, but it also proved that the power of cross-platform social listening could help shape multi-sharable marketing campaigns.
Here’s another inspiring social listening example :
Stratascratch: Adapt the pricing
Pricing changes
During 2023, Nathanael Rosidi, the CEO of StrataScratch, a data science interview platform, noticed something when reviewing the mentions of his brand :
There were conversations online talking about his pricing. With the tech market bursting in 2023, having a good price positioning was one of the keys to survival.
Thanks to Mention, he could start a conversation with these customers and get all the feedback to guide my thinking on the pricing overhaul.
Customer feedback
He’s also actively using social listening tools to connect with customers on unofficial channels. This way, he can monitor customer feedback and issues that would otherwise not have been addressed.
If you want to learn more about how StrataScratch uses Mention, check the full case study here: StrataScratch Case Study
Amazon: Personalized Recommendations
Amazon must also be mentioned as a social listening example from which to take inspiration.
As one of the largest online retailers on the planet, it certainly knows how to keep its worldwide consumer base returning.
Amazon uses social listening strategies to enhance its online storefront experience.
Using a number of monitoring tools, mentions, and social media data, Amazon’s powerful algorithms decide what each customer is most likely to click on before displaying it right in front of them as they enter the app.
This is a perfect demonstration of the use and benefits of artificial intelligence in social media.
As consumer bases become bigger, using AI tools to listen to conversations on every platform is essential for large brands like Amazon.
Better still, Amazon takes the social listening game one step further, looking at consumers individually as a pose to a whole demographic group.
For instance, a social media user who posts a Tweet about their favorite skincare product is likely to see similar products popping up on their Amazon account.
They can even track the prices of the hottest-selling products mentioned by their targets and automatically adjust their prices to match competitors you may choose instead.
This is a great social listening example for brands looking to explore social listening to improve their consumer personalization and customized targeting strategy.
Fitbit: Consumer-Inspired Product Development
Fitbit is next on the list of the best social listening examples we’ve seen in action. Fitbit demonstrates how a brand can use a social listening tool to improve product development.
According to Allison Leahy, Fitbit’s ex-director of community, “Fitbit is trying to be everywhere you are and more”.
She explained that the brand is using social listening techniques to help improve product development and troubleshoot any issues consumers may face with digital displays and performance tracking.
However, Fitbit takes its social listening strategy to the next level using its own ‘communities’ page. Set up as a forum where customers can directly talk to other users about their experiences with the Fitbit brand, the communities page is a goldmine for its social listening efforts.
Since then, the brand has focused on customer service and uses the data it gathers in the community forum to improve its product functionality. Better still, it likes to let its consumers know about it, making them feel as if their voices are taken seriously and playing a big role in developing new products.
A great example of social listening in action is the brand’s new “Reminders to Move” feature.
After a number of community members talked about the brand introducing reminders for them to get up on their feet, the buzzing reminder was added to newer models and has seen great success!
Duolingo: Newsjacking
This next social listening example is rather chatty. Leveraging viral social trends and stories as an opportunity to start conversations, Duolingo has all but mastered its social engagement strategy using this tactic.
Take this example, for instance. After a story about actor Cillian Murphy learning Dutch went viral in online chatter, Duolingo saw its opening and jumped into the conversation.
As a language learning platform, this was a great opportunity to promote the brand using the powerful magic of newsjacking. By simply sharing a witty response to a tweet, the brand managed to garner viral engagement without directly promoting its services.
This demonstrates the benefits of engaging in social listening.
If you can continuously monitor social media conversations and platforms for trending stories, posts, and mentions, you’ll be able to respond quickly and insert your brand into a trending conversation.
Barbie: Leveraging The Power Of Celebrity Influence
Barbie the Movie, in 2023, gave us a great social listening example with its influencer marketing-led approach to social media monitoring.
After employing social listening to its brand mentions, Barbie marketers found that the majority of trending UGC content was meme-worthy comparisons of fan-favorite Ken’s wardrobe choices and an outfit sported by BTS star Jimin in 2021.
In response, Barbie’s marketing team took the opportunity to play on this fun comparison by getting lead actor Ryan Gosling involved.
Ryan Gosling, who played Ken in the movie, created a lighthearted piece of social content in collaboration with the team, acknowledging the great fan comparisons and copying some of Jimin’s famous moves.
Jimin himself also reacted to the post in his own video reply, saying: “Hi Ryan and hi Ken, it’s Jimin. Congrats on your big release. My fans are excited to see your video, so thank you so much. I could see that you look great in my outfit.”
This is a great social listening example in action and scored Barbie their best tweet engagement yet, with a total post lift of 744% in comparison to other tweets posted.
Better still, the team also leveraged multi-platform posting, receiving a whopping 149 million impressions on Instagram Reels. This demonstrated the powerful effect of combining social listening strategies with influencer-led responses.
Engaging with large platform influencers through the power of fan monitoring is a great way to keep the conversation flowing about your brand.
While many of the Barbie followers were well acquainted with Ryan Gosling as Ken, introducing a new group of BTS fans to the conversation helped double the exposure of this social media marketing tactic.
Starface: Leveraging User Generated Content
Let’s take a closer look at the skincare brand Starface. This social listening example demonstrates how monitoring UGC content can help you identify trends and enhance your social strategy.
After scanning their brand mentions on platforms such as Twitter and TikTok, they found numerous videos that showcased their product organically. These reviews and content simply showed users wearing their famous pimple patches.
Rather than creating promotional content for their products, Starface decided to leverage the power of UGC and repost certain videos on their own platform.
Not only does this promote the brand more organically, but more users were inspired to create review-like content for a chance to be featured on their high-engagement feed.
Take this example of TikTok repost. Starface expertly chose a video that was not directly about their product but rather another beauty topic and used humor to bring attention back to the stars on the face of the TikTok influencer.
The post generated humorous conversation in the comments, boosting engagement and providing social proof for their target audience.
Hunter: Generate 200+ High Quality Backlinks
Last but not least, let’s talk about Hunter. As part of their SEO strategy, the Hunter team was trying to enhance their backlink profile to improve their rankings. One way they consistently got backlinks is through social listening. They’ve managed to identify unlinked mentions with Mention.
Then, they manually emailed websites that weren’t linking to Hunter to reclaim those unlinked mentions.
“After reviewing some of these mentions, we’ve noticed that not all websites provide a backlink when they mention us. This is where Mention becomes invaluable.
It automates the detection of these mentions, which we then use for personalized outreach efforts to convert unlinked mentions into valuable backlinks. This strategy helps us grow our brand and increase our organic traffic.”Antonio Gabric Outreach Manager @Hunter.io
You can check the full case study here.
What’s Next For Social Listening In 2024?
As we step into a new era of social monitoring and listening, it’s becoming easier than ever before for brands to monitor and listen to their customers online.
The question is, where will it go next?
“The proliferation of digital access and its integration into the routines of billions of people worldwide means that there is now an abundance of information on what people want and need,” says Paul Herrera, COO and co-founder at Maven Road.
Industry leaders have embraced these developments and become more data-oriented than ever before.
They base their decision-making on a thorough understanding of their target audiences, an understanding that continuously evolves, informed by data that reveals valuable insights about their audiences’ changing behaviors and preferences.
Following Amazon and Netflix, marketers will use social listening data to enhance AI-powered brand customization in the future.
Drawing data from brand mentions, social engagement and demographic trends, social listening will inform product preferences and enhance personalized experiences for the best engagement results.
Social Listening With Mention
Social listening successes will become more data-driven in 2024. Using powerful social listening tools such as Mention, you’ll be able to listen and learn from social media users using data alone and can rely on an expert tool to monitor conversations across every social platform seamlessly.
Using Mention, you’ll quickly receive a comprehensive analysis of your social sentiment, key online conversations and trending topics. These are then automatically compared to your competitors, giving you an opportunity to get competitive intelligence and benchmark your social success.
As social media consumer groups grow, maintaining your brand reputation online is essential in the race for conversions. It’s no secret that the brand closest to its consumers will win the targeting war in 2024. Try Mention for free!
