0:05
Jennifer Gutman
So let's go ahead and kick off. Hello everyone, wherever you are sitting in the world. I want to welcome you to 5 Practical Ways to Use Social Listening for B2B Brands. I'm your host of this webinar, Jennifer Gutman. I am the director of Customer Experience Marketing and a big hello to everyone I see. Joining here with me today to really walk us through these practical ways, right. To use social listening and I think this is a big conversation we're all having is my colleague and social extraordinaire, if you will, and apologies. There we go. Whitney Blankenship, our Senior Content Marketing manager. Whitney, welcome to the webinar and as you can see on the right, our mascot, or rather known as our cmo, right, Chief Mascot Officer will be also joining us for this webinar. So a few components before we get started. Everybody is currently on mute, so if you have any questions, comments, concerns, short stories, feel free to go ahead and add them inside of the chat. And if you have any questions you can go ahead and drop them in the Q and A. We'll either get to them throughout the webinar and of course if we don't address them in that real time on the webinar at the end, we'll be sure to go through all the questions and of course have a little bit of a Q and A. So interactivity is what we love. So feel free to drop it on in. I have a new computer, so hence the little bit of delay and which button to press to get these slides moving. So Whitney, I am going to go ahead and pass it over to you because when it comes to social listening, you are actually one of my go tos when we are talking about B2B use cases, how it's used, why it's used. So can you walk us through why we as B2B brands really should be caring about social listening and how we can incorporate it into our social strategy?
2:03
Whitney Blankenship
Absolutely. So you know we're going to always go back to data, right? And social listening is important because social media itself is important. We saw during, if you go to the next slide, we saw during our CMO study that we performed last year that 82% of CMOs are saying that social media is the fastest growing marketing channel for them. And if you pass the next slide, social listening is not new. It's not some new shiny revolutionary thing. This is something that we've been doing for years in social media. We may not have always had the same terminology around it. Sometimes it was social listening, sometimes it was brand Monitoring. Sometimes it was talked about as brand reputation management. There's been a bit of confusion around that. And also it's really been seen as a very B2C exclusive initiative. And it's true, when you talk to a lot of B2B brands, they say, well, social listening is for customer support, right? And yes, in a way that's true, that can be used. That's one potential use case. But. And you know, just to kind of make that link, let's go to the next slide. Even if you're B2B, people buy from people, right? And your customers, according to Microsoft, are not always going to tell you when they're unhappy, Right? This is actually from 2017, and 80% of customers believe that it's actually too much of a hassle to actually get in contact with support and say, hey, I had a terrible experience and here's why. They're more likely just to bounce to the next competitor. And of course, you know, in B2B, that might be a little bit more difficult because we do have these contracts and things like that in place. But if you don't, if you're on a month to month to month sort of thing, chances are not so much if you pop to the next slide. The thing is, they may not tell you that they're unhappy, but they will tell their friends. And this stat is, it's older. It comes from 1980. Coca Cola found that unhappy people tell between nine and 10 people. And I want to ask you, what do you think the amplification is with that when it comes to social media? Because it's not just, oh, we're going to tell nine, ten people now. We're going to post it on our feed to a thousand followers now. We're going to tell literally every single person that is in our radar, is in our orbit how much we disliked working with this brand. So it goes a little bit further than just, oh, we want to make the customer happy. Oh, we just want to, you know, we want to get him on top of bad pr. It goes further than that. But the thing is, is that people don't really pay attention unless you start talking about acquisition and retention. If we pop to the next slide, that's what we're going to do today. We're going to frame social listening in the context of does this work for customer retention, does it work for customer acquisition and how you can apply that across your B2B business. So, for example, in retention, we're talking about engaging current customers. In acquisition, we're talking about identifying Prospects and competitor analysis we're talking about for both retention and acquisition. Understanding pain points not just around yourself, not just around your own brand, but that of your competitor. And of course, reputation management, how to get ahead of things before they start snowballing. Nobody wants to be behind that, so let's go ahead and jump in and we'll start talking a little bit about why social listening is important for retention. Because I want to create that link. You already know that it's great for customer service. We're going to start there and we're going to branch outward. You can use social listening to engage your audience. The idea here is to really keep yourself top of mind. If you have a customer that is celebrating a win, you should celebrate that win with them. You need to show that you're invested in their success. So, for example, if, let's say you have a brand, let's say you have a customer that is doing a new initiative to become more sustainable, more green. And this is something that aligns with your own company values. You can actually be promoting that yourself. You can actually be going out and saying, hey, look at what our customer is doing. This is how it aligns with our values, too. And this is such a great way to not only really cement your own brand values, but also a really, really great way to show your customer, hey, we're watching you and we love your success and we want you to be successful as well. And this also, you can expand this. For example, if you see that they're celebrating a win on Twitter, take it to LinkedIn. If more engagement on LinkedIn, take it there and start saying, hey, we saw that you posted this on Twitter and we want to celebrate this on LinkedIn. We want to get more eyes around it. It's as simple as promoting the things that your customers care about. And it doesn't even have to be just tied to brand values or important events. It can also be, for example, if your customer launches a new feature and they want more eyes around it, show them that you support them by being that vector as well. That can be something that's really, really, really important. As in social listing is a really great way to discover that it's really hard to keep up on all of your different customers.
8:11
Jennifer Gutman
I want to just chime in here for a moment, Whitney, because I think something you said, it made a lot of sense. And I really think this is fascinating, right? Because many of us know in B2B that when it comes to APIs, LinkedIn is a little bit more limiting when it comes to social. Their APIs don't allow us, you know, social listening tools or in general third party platforms to do as much as Twitter. And Twitter is a great platform because it moves so fast to get kind of these insights or gains or be able to listen to your audience. So what I really liked, and I just want to emphasize if anybody's, you know, taking notes, the fact that you're doing social listening, let's say across Twitter to gain these insights and then taking that, what you've gained to bring it to LinkedIn to engage. I think that's a really interesting connect for B2B companies thinking about how to kind of approach that social listening strategy for B2B. Because it's not saying, hey, what are we socially listening to on LinkedIn? Right, because we know the APIs can be, you know, fun with LinkedIn, but it's more about, hey, let's go socially listen on Twitter and then use that in a content strategy to engage our audience. And I think that was just, I don't know, spot on point. So thanks for bringing that up.
9:25
Whitney Blankenship
Absolutely. Honestly, Absolutely. And you know, you talk about social listening with B2B brands and a lot of the time they'll say, oh, well, this is just for Twitter. And we don't really, we don't really do Twitter. Like, okay, well, maybe you should, first of all. Second of all, you know, you have so many insights. There are so many things that you can see and watch and monitor and kind of get into the middle of and then transfer those to other social accounts. And I mean, it's B2B. It's not like you're trying to find rando Twitter handle and find them on LinkedIn. You know, you're looking for brands, you're looking for companies. So it's that much easier to make that connection and something you absolutely should be doing. And on the flip side of those really positive wins that your customer might have if you pop to the next slide, sometimes it's not about the win. Sometimes it's about the frustration and the pain points and the friction. You want to see where your customers are struggling. If they're having issues with your brand, with your company, with your service, your product. This is something you absolutely need to know. Maybe your customers are posting often about a problem. Maybe it's a problem that comes up often when your customers are comparing you with your competitors. And knowing about this problem either helps you make a change or create resources that help your customers navigate that problem. For example, I come from a SaaS background, a really heavy B2B SaaS background. So a lot of my examples may come from B2B SaaS, because that's just where my brain is most of the time. But if you have a SaaS software company and your customer talking about an issue with onboarding, then this is friction you need to remove. You already know at this point you have to create some kind of content or a guide around getting them onboarded properly, maybe a tutorial, video, whatever you have to do to ease that friction. And if that content already exists, you reach out and let them know about it. Either way, you should be reaching out and offering some kind of help, saying, hey, we recognize this is a problem. We're really sorry. Here, this will help. This can help, you know, make it easier for you. Or, hey, do you want to have a call and we can chat through the problem that you're going through? That. That's always taking that initiative. It's not just for customer attention, even at this point. It's also for acquisition. Because if I'm looking to buy a new product, if I'm looking to start business with, like, do business with another company, you better believe I'm going to be all over Google, I'm going to be all over Twitter, I'm going to be all over LinkedIn, I'm going to be all over all channels where this company is present and seeing that they interact with customers, seeing the way that they navigate difficult situations where customers are unhappy, because that's. That tells me whether or not I really want to work with them. Because a salesperson or corporate brand channel, you know, that's well and good, but I want to hear it from customers, I want to hear it from people who have done business with them. And I'm not the only one. Everybody wants to do that, right? So this is definitely a great way to use social listening for that. So we've talked about retention, so let's dive a little bit further into acquisition. Let's talk a little bit more about how you can actually use social listening to get more customers. So if we pop to the next slide, we all want to do competitor analysis, right? We all want to see where we measure up against our biggest competitors. And social listening is really great for that because you're actually getting the pulse for how people feel about not just you, but, but also your competitors as well. For example, we have like a. We just pulled this for CRM platforms and we can see HubSpot is marketing automation.
13:38
Jennifer Gutman
Marketing.
13:39
Whitney Blankenship
Oh, is it marketing?
13:40
Jennifer Gutman
Yeah, marketing automation. It's one of those. It's Wednesday. It's hump day.
13:44
Whitney Blankenship
It is one of those Wednesdays. It's absolutely one of those Wednesdays. So yeah, for marketing automation. And you can actually see that, you know, HubSpot is really owning a lot of the conversation when it comes to marketing automation. Whereas, you know, Marketo, Aloqua, Pardo, they're not necessarily being, they're not necessarily as present. People aren't talking about them as much. And this is something that you would want to know regardless of where you stand on that circle, whether you have, you know, the large bit of the Pac man or whether you're what the Pac Man's eating, you know, you definitely want to know. You know, where, where do you stand? Where do you, where can you gain ground? Where are there opportunities? So it's not just about, you know, this is, this is just an example of share a voice, for example. But if you are looking at what your competitors are doing, not only are you gathering inspiration for yourself, but you're also learning where their strategy is headed. For example, if you see somebody, you see one of your competitors posting an offer for more SEO specialists, you know that that's where they're going to be focusing a lot of their time in the next few quarters. You see somebody posting, you know, for, to recruit an sdr, you know where they're headed, you know what they want to do. And if you have, if your competitor has any sort of friction or pain points that your, that other customers of theirs are communicating, that's huge. That's something you should absolutely know because the friction can happen on your end as well. This can help inform your content strategy. But for example, if your customers are complaining about competitor pricing and you happen to be more affordable, that's something that you would be highlighting in not only your content, but your sales calls. So this is definitely a way to figure out, okay, so where's competition week? You're actually in the process of locating weak spots and those are definitely helpful to know. And you know, in like locating those weak spots. This can also help you identify prospects that you can also market and sell to if you want to pop to the next slide. So every business solves problem, right? So social listening can also help you identify the people that have the problem that you solve. You just have to find them. By following certain hashtags and subjects, you can actually identify those conversations that are really relevant to your brand. Now I've got an actual practical, real life, done it myself example of this. Back, back a couple years ago, I was working for a SaaS company and we were selling to e commerce professionals, we were selling to e commerce brands. So obviously Shopify was a huge partner with us. We always, you know, we worked with a lot of Shopify brands and our biggest competitor actually stopped integration with Shopify. With Shopify. And that meant that all of a sudden, thousands of e commerce sellers suddenly needed the problem that we solved. And I'll never forget the actual the press Release dropped at 5pm on a Friday afternoon. And that was a fun weekend because we spent the entire weekend and maybe the following three weeks reaching out to these people and saying, hey, you know, we're really sorry about, you know, the position that you're in. We're sorry that this, this marketing channel that's driven so much revenue for you is no longer an option. Here's how we can help you solve it. And by approaching it the right way, having saying, hey, if you're coming from a competitor, here's a 30% discount over your next three months. We also have a free trial if you just need to get started quickly. Try us out, see if we're doing everything that you need. And if you want to talk about exponential growth, it was huge. Being part of those conversations was thanks to social listening. It was because we were using social listening that we were able to reach out to so many people. And we weren't the only ones. Everybody that solved the same problem that we solved was doing the exact same thing. Had we not been doing it, there's no way we would have had any of that business. There's no way we would have been part of the conversation around solving that problem now. So that's actually a really interesting real world experience that I had with social listening. But just a note for this, don't just jump into conversations and say, well, if you were using us, you wouldn't have that problem. That's a terrible way to go about it. You want to start by showing empathy. Start by showing empathy. Then respond with some content that adds value and helps solve the problem indirectly. For example, if you provide an invoicing service for your company and someone is struggling creating invoices, they might post something like, hey, anybody know of a good invoicing software? I need some help. And you follow up and you say, hey, I'm really sorry that you're having a rough time. We've created this article with some invoice templates that might help you help out. We also offer an invoicing software, but these templates should help you out in the time being. Chances are, might Be just what they use. And chances are when it comes time for them to choose an invoicing software, they're going to go for the people that help them solve their problem. This is a really great way to make yourself part of that conversation and use social listening to do that. And I know Jen's always talking about how we can use social listening for, you know, the product roadmap. How do we. How do we figure out where our customers want things to go? Where do we figure out where trends are going on the market? And you know, it's entirely possible to use social listening to inform your product, product roadmap. If, if you have flexibility, if you say, okay, you know, this is becoming a really hot topic. This is what we should prioritize. That's absolutely something that you could also use social listening for. Then of course, you go into brand monitoring, which is something that is very typical use case of social listening, something that a lot of people tend to think about when they think about social listening. It's great for getting ahead of potential PR crises and taking the opportunity to address things or they Snowball. It is 2022 and things snowball very quickly on social media and nobody wants to be behind a PR disaster. Yeah. Use social listening to control the narrative around your brand and your story. We can pop to the next slide. As a bonus, I have a bonus use case for you, a practical use case that you can take home, put in your pocket, and use tomorrow. It's for employer branding. For those of us who have hired recently or are in the process of hiring, which I'm going to bet most of you are right now. It is very difficult in our industry to hire anyone for anything, and especially hiring the right people right now. It is an employee's market. That means your employer brand is more important now than ever has been. So use social listening to take the pulse of the candidates you want to hire. And I don't mean using it to pinpoint them exactly, but look at how other professionals are reacting to other employer brands and other recruitment processes. What benefits are they valuing right now? Offering remote work, offering unlimited pto? These are things that are hot. Benefits. However, if you're reading through a LinkedIn post, well, reading through a Twitter post and you're saying, hey, unlimited time off can be kind of a scam. You want to know a little bit more about, you know, what they're thinking saying, oh, okay, so when you offer unlimited time off, people who, people feel pressure to race to the bottom and not take any days off, you Say, okay, well, what if we do this and we offer a minimum. What if we offer a minimum amount of days off, for example? And this is a great way to kind of navigate that anxiety, that apprehension that some candidates might feel with your benefit. You can also use it to.
23:05
Jennifer Gutman
Yeah, I want to just chime in because.
23:07
Whitney Blankenship
Just interrupt me. I'll talk forever.
23:09
Jennifer Gutman
That's fine. Employer branding and employee advocacy. I think that has become my calling to, you know, to be radically transparent with everyone. And there's another use case that I would say is a bonus that I want to share with. Actually, what I'm doing here at Oktopost and some of our customers are doing, which I find phenomenal, is that we're also using social listening to keep a tab on our own employees in terms of how they're feeling across social. What's the sentiment that they're sending across social media? So, for example, right, by. By actively listening across social to what is going on. If you're doing an employee advocacy program, this one comes in really handy. Right. So maybe you have some of your C suite or maybe you have some of your sales leaders who you know are pretty socially savvy and you want to keep your pulse on perhaps what they're talking about and then maybe spit back some of what you're learning they're talking about for content for your advocacy board or what the sentiment, what your employees are feeling by using social listening to actually monitor your own employees in an advocacy program. It can be very strategic in the content that you create and the culture that you create. And then, of course, bridging the marketing team with the HR team. And, you know, we're actually going to be having a whole, keep me honest, Whitney, but we're having a whole separate webinar on employer branding and strategy and partnering with marketing hr. So we'll dive deeper into that. But don't discount social listening for even your own team members to just keep a pulse check. I think it's really, really healthy and really helpful.
24:47
Whitney Blankenship
Absolutely. And I think you guys can probably tell I'm pretty passionate about employer branding and these kinds of topics. So we passed this for now, for sure. But know that we do have an employer branding webinar that's going to be coming in, I think, June, if I'm not mistaken. So stay tuned. Okay, so we've talked a lot about how to use social listening, and now we want to talk a little bit more about. Okay, so how do we actually measure social. Social listening? What are the KPIs? What are the metrics that go into this type of social initiative, and the first one we saw a little bit earlier, it's called share of voice. And share a voice pretty much shows you the amount, the weight of your presence in social media. So it's pretty much who controls the narrative around your industry. How often are customers, prospects, partners talking about you versus your competition. And as you can see for marketing automation, it is typically HubSpot that's going to be talked about across social media. This can also help you identify which influencers are talking about you. Maybe it helps you identify, okay, so which influencers would I like to work with and partner with who has a relevant audience for, for what I'm doing? Share a voice can be really, really interesting in that way. And regardless of where you fall, whether, you know, you're maybe, maybe you don't have a lot of brand awareness on social yet, maybe you're still working on it, or maybe, you know, people just aren't talking about you on Twitter and they're talking about you on other networks. It's important to know where you fall in regards to your competition. Another great way to measure social listening is through sentiment analysis. Now, sentiment analysis is kind of fun because it's machine learning and it's AI and that's really great and sexy. But, you know, when it comes to sentiment analysis, you have to understand that it's not yet a perfect science and I'm going to explain why. So machine learning and AI, they need a lot of time and a lot of data in order to report things accurately. And at the end of the day, sentiment analysis, a bot is not going to understand sarcasm. They're not going to understand more complex sentences. For example, I really love, I loved Oktopost latest webinar. But I just wish, you know, I wish that maybe it was longer, I wish it was shorter or whatever, you know, they're not going to be able to understand a more complex sentence. So it's good for taking the overall pulse and for understanding, okay, you know, especially if there's a lot of negative, you know, okay, so how deep am I in? How bad is the situation? How good is the situation? What, what can I influence? What can I change? What can I, what can I do to help? But I do recommend that when you are using sentiment analysis, go in and look at those social posts yourself. Go in and look and actually do proper social listening, like granular, granular, post by post. I can't speak today. I'm sorry. End of day, it just happens. I just, English just left me Go in post by post, actually take a look at, you know, what people are saying and think about it critically and say, okay, you know, they're feeling this kind of way, they're feeling that kind of way. And then use that to do all of the different use cases that we've kind of gone through today. Now, as I've mentioned before, you know, the insights that you get from social listening are those that most companies would spend thousands in, third party market research. They're at your fingertips with social listening. If you care about your brand, if you care about attracting new customers and talent and keeping the customers and talent that you already have, you should start social listening yesterday because the insights are just too valuable to ignore. I think that about wraps it up.
29:13
Jennifer Gutman
Fantastic. So I'm going to open it up for Q and A and I see we have some questions that are popping through. So I want to first thank everybody for joining us again. Everybody will receive a copy of this recording post webinar, so keep your eyes in your inbox. It will come. So if you want to go through anything again, you also receive the presentation. So I just want to go ahead and see. One of the questions we have here is when it comes to social listening, besides retention and acquisition, are there any other popular B2B use cases that you've seen brands using?
29:56
Whitney Blankenship
Well, I mean, we did go through a few of them. We talked a little bit about employer branding, we talked a little bit about identifying trends and influencing roadmap and content strategy. There's a lot that you can glean from social listening. It sort of just depends on what your priority is and what you really, really want to use it for. Acquisition and retention, those are great goals. But it's entirely possible to use social listening for a variety of other goals as well, I think.
30:29
Jennifer Gutman
Yeah, and I'm going to chime in on that question because as Whitney kind of mentioned before, um, when you're a B2B brand, you really want to be using a tool that is designed for B2B. And one of my absolute favorite use cases is indeed you know, the influencing of the roadmap. And I'm not to say, right, that your product team is going to be on social media looking through what people are saying about product. But what I am saying is, especially as a marketer, when you're looking to make informed decisions that's going to impact your organization or perhaps your role in an organization is doing the listening and then reporting up to give your CMO those reports to be able to understand, right. How to make those decision, important decisions. What's interesting is if you have a pulse on the trends that are being talked about today, and then you're looking and perhaps following and socially listening to, let's say, influencers or what the industry as a whole is saying, you're going to be able to make very interesting and much more informed decisions about your brand five months from now, a year from now, and even, right, looking down the road five years from now, we saw this when it came to actually AI, right, because everybody was hashtagging, you know, hashtag AI, and there was a lot of jokes like, oh my gosh, is AI going to take marketers jobs? And everybody was very concerned. But then as we understood and started socially listening to what people were saying is the benefit of AI for their organization or where it was coming into play, we could start to understand those traffic trends. And then when it comes to building your product, right, taking those insights in and maybe helping to influence your roadmap. So I think that's one of my most favorite for B2B, so I'll throw that one out. So I'm opening the Q and A. So we have a question from Laura. Thank you so much for your question. Does Oktopost enable monitoring across all platforms or just your own accounts? So I guess I'll grab that one. Whitney?
32:21
Whitney Blankenship
Well, yeah, and if I leave out anything, like, feel free to jump in and correct me or guide the, guide the ship. So, you know, you can actually watch, especially like on Twitter and via, I believe social listening, also covers news and certain sites like Reddit and Quora. I believe if you, you can actually like, take your competitor's name and put it in there and watch their account and watch what they're doing and kind of watch like, okay, so how are they interacting with customers? What are they publishing, what's going on, who's adding them, why are they adding them, that kind of thing. You absolutely can do that and you should do that. It's a really, really great exercise for making sure that you're keeping up on the things that they're doing and kind of seeing what they're putting out there publicly.
33:13
Jennifer Gutman
And just to answer back, if Oktopost enables monitoring across all platforms. So yes, we are able to monitor across LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook and Instagram, but I would definitely say when it comes to Twitter, that's where we have the most flexibility due to the APIs. So, Laura, happy to take the conversation and kind of give you a deep dive there of what we do monitor. But yes, we can definitely Monitor all. And then I see. Have another question there, Laura, regarding the sentiment analysis. If it's the entire Internet or just social media. So it is at this time just, I believe social media. Whitney, you can keep me honest there.
33:50
Whitney Blankenship
No, I believe you're right.
33:52
Jennifer Gutman
Okay. And we can, we can follow up, Laura. I can, you know, make sure to deep dive on that and send you over some more answers. All right, so with that being said, I don't see any more questions. Opa. Absolutely, Laura. So here's a question. What would you suggest is the best tool for social listening? And what should we look out for when picking a tool? So I think that's a really great question. And if you don't mind, Whitney, I'm going to. I can start it and you can finish it off. But you know, I think when it comes to social listening, first of all, it's going to depend on the strategy in which you have in place. But if you are looking for an all in one solution, which I think especially when you're just getting your grounds and just getting started with social listening, Oktopost is a really fantastic tool. Tool to look at, especially with our new social listening component which does allow you to do all of those reports and pull all of those use cases that Whitney showed us today. But I think when you can bring it all together and have it all in one. Right. It makes a powerful impact because then you can take the insights you're using from social listening, you can bring them on into your content strategy. As we talked about, you can bring them into your employee advocacy strategy. So I personally. Right. Would be a fan of Oktopost. And of course, if you have any further questions about that, I'd be happy to speak more about where you are in your strategy and kind of take a deeper dive into it. Another question coming in. Can we use Salesforce+ your. Your tool? The answer is absolutely. And Ash, I would be happy. Again, you know, if we want to kind of learn a little bit more about your tool stack, I'd be happy to take this conversation and we can kind of run a deep div. Just hit all those nails on the head. All right, so if there are no other questions, I want to thank everybody for joining us today. And just a reminder, we are going to be sending out this recording and the deck so you'll have all the use cases, you'll have the recording and we look forward and invite you to explore the Oktopost social listening component. And feel free to reach out to myself or Whitney with any, with any questions.
36:16
Whitney Blankenship
Thank you so much for having me.
