Observing the emotions and expectations of end users is a must when developing a marketing campaign. If you do not understand the emotions of end users, it can affect your marketing strategies. As a result, you can waste valuable resources such as time, money, and effort.

When you are running a campaign, you need to try at least a couple of strategies. After evaluating customer reactions, you can decide which strategy will give you better results.

Positive customer reactions mean that your strategies worked. Negative reactions indicate that something is wrong or missing. This is where a social listening specialist can help you.

Watch Out: 6 Social Listening Trends 2023 To Stay Ahead Of The Game

Who is a social media analyst?

Social listening helps brands understand what their customers think when they see their brand name, products, or services. Social listening tools help you understand customer behavior. You can use these insights when designing a new marketing campaign or modifying an existing one.

A social listening specialist analyzes whether posts are successful or not. He does this by evaluating them against various social media metrics.

Let’s say you are running a campaign to increase your brand’s visibility. The number of views on the posts determines whether your goal has been achieved or not. Similarly, you can track different metrics for different types of campaigns.

Do you know: What Is Social Media Analytics? Here’s An Ultimate Guide 

Understanding the role of a social media analyst

The role of social media listening specialists is to track whether specific campaign goals are met or not. They provide feedback regarding how the audiences have reacted to the overall campaign. 

The social media managers responsible for developing marketing strategies consider their recommendations. With the insights provided by a social listening specialist, they design powerful and better campaigns. 

To be an expert social media analyst, you must know how to collect and interpret customer data. You can get this data from eCommerce apps, social media channels, the company’s social media pages, and other social outlets. 

Competitor sites and social media handles provide key insights into customer sentiments and expectations. So, the role of social media specialists also includes analyzing how well competitor posts and campaigns are performing.

Learn about: 12 Steps On How To Track Social Media Analytics

Key responsibilities of a social media specialist

Social listening specialists undertake several responsibilities for the effective management of their work. Some of their key responsibilities include:

1. Monitoring Online Conversations 

Online conversations reveal a lot about a brand’s reputation. Brands keep upgrading their products/services to stay relevant in the market. Online conversations highlight the issues that customers face while using your products or services. This helps brands improve their products or services.

A social media expert in marketing needs fresh ideas when creating a campaign or daily post. And online conversations can provide them with useful cues and ideas regarding customer requirements and expectations. 

A social listening specialist monitors the online conversations and provides new content ideas to the marketing director. The need for social listening experts in the marketing team arises for the same reason. 

Most of the audiences do not tag the brand name or handles with their posts and comments. This makes it difficult to get the correct view regarding a product or service. You can resolve this issue by hiring social media specialists.

An experienced social media expert knows how to track daily conversations and single out the important ones.

You can also understand what the majority of customers have to say about your brand through these conversations. Using this, you can determine whether your brand perception is on point or not. 

Here are some: 14 Social Media Monitoring Tools for Marketing Teams

2. Analyzing Data and Extracting Insights

A social listening specialist defines the metrics that are crucial for your brand. These metrics are selected as per your overall marketing objectives. 

Their next step is to mine relevant data from various social outlets. After obtaining the data, they start measuring the metrics from each network. Then they combine the metrics from multiple networks and employ data manipulation tactics to derive the key insights. 

They handle everything from determining the right tools to extracting data and measuring the performance of campaigns.

They recognize current trends and customer behavior patterns by interpreting the available data.

They also evaluate the reasons behind the popularity or failure of some posts. These insights prove to be useful for your brand in many ways.

A social listening expert measures the performance of the campaigns by using specific metrics. Some of the benefits of hiring a social listening expert in marketing include:

• Studying evolving trends and customer behavioral patterns, help you improve your social media strategies.
• You can pinpoint why your content is not performing as you expect it to. 
• If there are any lags in your customer service, you can fix them and revamp your support services. 

Exploring every conversation on social media is next to impossible. Konnect Insights is a platform that offers direct access to customer conversations. It is an omnichannel customer management suite that comes with a range of social analytical tools. 

By using it, you can analyze what customers are saying about your brand. It helps you evaluate customer data and take the necessary actions based on real-time analytics and insights. 

Here are the: 4 Reasons to Start Using Social Listening Today

3. Identifying Influencers

You cannot undermine the role of the social listening professional in marketing strategies. It is because you have to involve them in every major decision or strategy. 

For instance, identifying social media influencers is a critical responsibility that a social listening specialist handles. Working with the right influencers will help increase your brand’s reach and awareness. 

Finding the relevant influencers on each social outlet can be a difficult task. Therefore, social listening experts seek platforms that provide easy access to the most popular influencers on each platform. 

By tracking social conversations, they determine the influencers who create useful and relevant content. They can help you collaborate with these influencers. They also suggest ways of promoting your brand and its offerings through the influencer’s content. 

If you do not have a sufficient budget, they can also help you find relevant micro-influencers. Micro-influencers do not have a huge following on social media, but they can help create brand awareness. As they do not have a huge following, their services are available at a lower cost.  

Let’s get started with: How To Implement A Social Listening Strategy.

4. Competitor Analysis 

Competitor analysis is a crucial aspect of any social media campaign or strategy. By analyzing your competitors, you can detect their strengths and weaknesses. Fine-tune some of their strategies and add your elements to the posts to create unique content strategies. 

Social listening specialists monitor the bio, logo, banners, and other design elements that your competitors use by analyzing the voice and tone of their posts. 

Also, they check the hashtags, Calls To Action, and other aspects of their posts and campaigns. After that, they give you a detailed idea of your competitor’s mindset. By using their ideas, you can create an impactful ad campaign or post. 

Do you know these: Social Media Listening Tools for Competitor Analysis

5. Reputation Management 

Managing an online reputation is crucial for every business. A single bad comment or post can go viral and spoil your brand’s image. To prevent a crisis from a single post or series of comments/posts, you should monitor your brand mentions. 

Reputation management and the role of social listening experts are also correlated. Social listening experts track the negative emotions of customers.

The negative sentiments among customers can result in a social media crisis. Situations like this can damage your online reputation. A social media disaster can also decrease your online sales and revenue.

The social listening experts monitor your brand’s mentions closely. When a tricky situation arises, they convey it to your marketing director. Together, they analyze the whole situation and take the necessary steps to avert the crisis. If the damage is already done, they will try to reduce its impact on your brand’s image.

Why are social listening specialists important?

Social listening specialists are essential because they provide you with valuable customer insights. It helps you understand your audience better. Understanding customers’ expectations is a must to develop smart marketing strategies. 

Customer insights may also help you fine-tune your core business strategies. The role of social listening specialists is crucial because they analyze the data. They also evaluate the performance of your marketing campaigns. 

Online businesses cannot provide great results unless you are perfect with your marketing game. By providing data-driven analytics, social listening experts enable you to revamp your existing marketing strategies.

The adoption of better strategies will ultimately make your business grow and reach new heights. Social listening experts play a crucial role in all these processes. 

Conclusion 

The work profile of social media listening specialists consists of all these key roles and responsibilities. Understanding the nature of their work and hiring the right experts is crucial for your business. Along with that, you must also subscribe to an omnichannel customer experience platform like Konnect Insights. 

It will help your social listening experts gather customer data and interpret it. At the same time, it contains a dashboard to track the performance of all your marketing campaigns. The performance of campaigns is tracked based on your key business metrics. So, it will also make the role of social listening experts easier.