stop missing brand moments with this one tactic

howdy!!! happy friday (and long weekend!)

first off, there’s like hundreds of new folks here so i am just saying HELLO to you if you have joined and this is your first email from me. can you do me a favor? please hit the “reply” button, introduce yourself, and tell me what you would love to learn from reading this newsletter.

we are 15 folks away from 1,000 of us which is insane in the membrane.

here’s a quick update since we last spoke:

• i’ve successfully have eaten a PBJ every single night for seven days straight (the best late night snack IMO)

• i cannot stop listening to the new Billie Eilish album (10/10)

that’s literally about it so life is realllly crazy right now as you can tell.

anywho, today’s email is going to be a quick and smooth read since i know you probably want to sprint to the beach. also, lol to how i always say this and then it becomes 2,000 words.

today, we’re chatting about: social listening.

social listening, at least to me, is one of those tools in everyone tech stack where everyone is a bit hesitant to invest or it goes to wayside for a veeery long time.

we’re going to quickly breakdown the following:

• what is social listening? why is it important for your brand?

• the key components to look at when leveraging social listening

• how to analyze your efforts online via social listening

• why social listening can improve your brand sentiment online and improve your community efforts

BUT BEFORE WE GET INTO IT…

I am teaming up once again with my besties Andy and Anders at Superfiliate, my go-to platform for managing creator, affiliate, and ambassador programs 🙂 

If you’re a brand looking to:

• have a trusty platform that allows you to run end-to-end affiliate, influencer and referral programs (reporting, data, payouts, etc.)

• increase your conversion rate and work more closely with the creators on your roster

• handle and operate product seeding programs (hello automated gift tracking and goodbye manual work!)

• see what creators and customers are saying on Instagram and have the ability to request rights on the content within one click

Superfiliate could and might be be your solution.

I’ve been a proud user of Superfiliate since the beginning of 2024, specifically it’s what I use to manage Graza’s thriving ambassador program and to track our efforts with any paid creator partnerships across pieces of content like this and this with the help of their custom co-branded landing pages (see here).

However, months ago, I asked Andy if they ever would plan on getting into product seeding to allow brands to manage another big aspect of influencer marketing in one spot. Well, now that ask has become a reality.

Why? Because their new Instagram integration is LIVE!!!

Here are five quick reasons why this is so important if you work on a marketing team and have been trying to get your product seeding program off of the ground or want some extra (virtual) hands on the community management front.

1. You can now automatically pull in all stories, post, and reels into Superfiliate, including engagement data such as likes and comments (love). No more missing posts from those big creators where you then have to awkwardly DM them asking to send it to you.

2. See a creator tagging you who you love? You can now instantly send them a DM within the platform to join any of your affiliate tiers or seeding programs.

3. Fell in love with a piece of content a creator posted and reaaaaally want to use it for paid ads or organic social? Superfiliate heard your prayers because now you can automatically ask for usage and download any content from your creators.

4. Product seeding is now officially easier. If reaching new audiences and gaining more brand awareness AND increasing sales are all on your list of goals for 2024 (which I would assume all three are), then you can now officially do it all in one place and in three steps.

5. Have different audiences you want to appeal to? You can create custom product seeding campaigns for each and give them all an easy and smooth experience within one-click. Oh, and it’s mobile-friendly which is a gamechanger for them to easily redeem their products.

IDK about y’all, but I am HYPED about this.

If you just want to chat with the team, tell them I sent you right HERE and just for you, they are giving y’all 1 MONTH FOR FREE (!!!!!!!), which is something they really do not do so get it while it’s hot.

Now, let’s get to into it…

WHAT IS SOCIAL LISTENING?

LISTEN UP, FOLKS. SCHOOL IS IN SESSION.

So, first thing is first. WTF is social listening? Well, luckily it’s quite simple. Social listening is the process of monitoring what customers (and creators) are saying about your brand, the industry that you are in, or topic relating back to your product or niche.

It involves tracking mentions of specific keywords or hashtags associated with your brand, mentions of your brand, specific trends within your product category and even getting the deets on your competition (if you’re into that). From all of this, you’re then able to analyze the data to gain insights into customer sentiment, insight for new content you can create and creators & influencers who may have entered your ecosystem and you didn’t even know it.

THAT’S SO COOL, BUT WHY IS IT IMPORTANT?

If you a one trick pony of a social team, it’s quite difficult as an account scales to be inside the account running community and owning your social calendar, overseeing the strategy, and potentially having a hand on the influencer front, and yeah…you get the point. Therefore, social listening can be an always on solution that a team can come back to every day to see what’s the latest happening in their world.

Here are 6 reasons why I personally have integrated more social listening into the accounts I work with and why I think it’s helpful to a brand, especially in this day and age:

1. Customer Insights:

   • Understanding Needs and Preferences: By listening to customers who are mentioning you, whether in a good ro bad light, brands can better understand a customer’s true needs, preferences, and pain points, which can inform future product development, content that may need to be create to affect the issues, and more. For example, people have complained forever about Grillo’s containers, but now with all of the feedback Grillo’s took what was being said and took action with their new lids that just launched.

   • Feedback on Products and Services: Direct feedback from customers can highlight what's working well and what needs improvement like when Graza’s caps were too tight and so the team made a video to address it and act fast to give a solution.

2. Brand Reputation Management:

   • Early Detection of Issues: Identifying negative sentiment early allows brands to address issues before they escalate especially before the CX team then gets pounded with tickets.

   • Building Positive Relationships: When you work with a brand that gets tagged everywhere and anywhere across platforms, you may not get to everything. However, with social listening tools or Superfiliate’s new collection tool for example, you can see User Generated Content you were mentioned in that you may have missed, but can now instantly go and connect with that person.

3. Content Strategy Optimization:

   • Relevant Content Creation: Understanding what topics resonate with the audience helps in creating content that is more likely to engage your current audience. I also love being able to use keywords that have to do with the brand that are very high level (for example: olive oil) so that I can see potentially educational and entertaining points that can help make their way into content.

   • Trend Identification: Keeping up with trending topics ensures that the brand remains relevant and can capitalize on current conversations happening within the niche you’re in. This is also just a reminder that not every trend will be made for your brand and you should ask yourself what it does for your customer/for the brand if you do engage in it vs. sitting one out.

4. Marketing and Campaign Effectiveness:

   • Campaign Tracking: Monitoring the performance of marketing campaigns in real-time enables adjustments for better results. This is why Superfiliate’s new Instagram integration is so helpful (again). Can you tell I like it? CEO saying that product seeding isn’t helpful and cannot be tracked? Hehe, well, when the stories are getting pulled of those people posting, you can now put better results to your campaigns that may not have code/link attribution. On a brand that has such high output on the seeding front, this is everything you want and more.

   • ROI Measurement: Analyzing the social media data can help measure the return on investment of specific initiatives that you set live across channels based on how many people are talking about, etc.

5. Crisis Management:

   • Real-Time Response: Quickly addressing and mitigating potential crises = happy current customers and potential new customers if they see how amazing you are in handling the situation. No more seeing a CX DM days later.

KEY COMPONENTS OF SOCIAL LISTENING

1. Monitoring:

   • Keywords and Hashtags: Track specific words or phrases that are relevant to your brand. For example, if I was redoing Graza’s social listening hashtags and keywords, it would be “olive oil”, “graza”, “#graza”, "#getgraza”, @getgraza, etc. I would want a mix of brand-forward keywords and high-level words that just simply relate to the brand or what you sell.

   • Brand Mentions: Keeping an eye on mentions of the brand name across social channels, on blogs, in press.

   • Industry Trends: Staying updated on general industry trends and discussions. For example, some of the social listening tools I use for more the industry trends, allow me to see reddit threads or blogs where the brand is mentioned or even latest scientific articles that are getting published that may help inform content that can be created.

2. Analyzing:

   • Sentiment Analysis: Evaluating the sentiment (positive, negative, neutral) of the conversations. Do people love you so much right now? Did you have a brand hiccup and people talking about it? If so, now you can fix it and get back to those people. Did you royally F up and need to understand how to make a comeback?

   • Volume Analysis: Measuring the frequency of mentions and discussions over time is a great KPI on that front whether it’s across Instagram story mentions, the reach that keeps expanding through your brand hashtag on Tiktok, etc.

   • Influencer Identification: Identifying key influencers and opinion leaders in your world who are mentioning you that you didn’t even know were friends of the brand. The other side is those that may be speaking badly or poorly, allowing you to start a true conversation with them to understand the situation better. At the end of the day, I still feel like a lot of creators are shocked when a brand decides to speak up and enter a conversation where they are being mentioned vs. taking the virtual beating. I’ve found some people who have become paid partners to the brands I am on through social listening because their content popped up and I had no idea who they were.

3. Responding:

   • Customer Service: Addressing customer queries and complaints in real-time!! SOCIAL MEDIA IS A CUSTOMER SERVICE CHANNEL FOR THE 10TH TIME.

   • Content Strategy: Shaping content based on what the audience is interested in or current mentions around your brand in the market - what are they loving? what don’t they like? what do they want more of? You can learn all of this and then some in a few scrolls.

Social listening allows you to help all sides of the social organization and higher level marketing IMO. From learning how you can switch up your content strategy on social (and email…and SMS…and maybe on your blog, if you have one) to learning about new, quickly growing creators who love your brand who potentially be a great fit for your ambassador program or for a paid partnership to keeping customers happy and that CX inbox low.

We love all of that <3333

BRAND OF THE WEEK: DUALIST

Calling all my skincare lovers!!! New product alert for ya. It’s time to add Dualist to your routine.

I have been using it for the last month or so and it’s perfect if you’re someone who doesn’t want a long routine, but just wants an easy, quality, functional product. I love their oil-serum because it’s just literally just that with an amazing ingredient profile.

Honesty Hour: I never had skin mishaps growing up, but unfortunately, ended up with a very weird chronic staph infection in my system for literally years that unfortunately decided to show up on my neck, cheeks, jaw and more. It truly was the worst period of my life and I still deal with a lot of insecurity of the aftermath of it all, but this product has helped with dryness, especially as the weather changes and dealing with all this AC being on now and just inflammation. Sooooo, two thumbs up.

LOGGING OFF

That’s a wrap folks. I hope you have a lot of great food this weekend, get some much needed relaxation, and a perfect tan.

As always, if you have someone who you think would like seeing this in their inbox, it would mean the world if you could share this link with them: https://kendalldickieson.beehiiv.com/subscribe

If you have any questions, don’t hesitate.

If you’re new here, you can read all the past edition here for free.99: https://kendalldickieson.beehiiv.com/

I will see you all next week!!!!

-KD