Social Listening is the key to discovering how your brand fits into the world's expansive social landscape, gaining insight into consumers' needs, ascertaining potential collaborations, and maintaining brand health. Businesses use social listening for strategic decision-making, new product development ideas, crisis management, competitive intelligence, and so much more.

The Rival IQ Instant Search feature allows you to dive into any topic so you can get the pulse of your brand, your competitors' brands, a product category, a campaign, or anything else people are talking about online.

Below are several methods for incorporating Social Listening into your brand’s social media and marketing strategies.

Remind your fans why they love your brand by repeating what your biggest fans are already saying.

Rival IQ’s Social Listening tool allows you to go beyond classifying positive and negative posts to identify what drives positive or negative sentiment toward your brand. You can use the Sentiment Drivers by Type widget to uncover content ideas by discovering specific attributes, emotions, and behaviors that consumers associate with your brand.

Under Social Listening > Instant Search, go to Sentiment Drivers by Type. In the Airbnb example below, there is a negative perception around the cleaning fees, but a marketer can emphasize the “unique experience” and “cool Airbnb interactions” that customers love when booking Airbnb.

Find inspiration for your next marketing campaign by seeing how consumers use your product. In the Sentiment Drivers widget below, we see that consumers talked about Yeti being the “best college graduation gift” 36 times in the last month. This could help Yeti’s marketing team spark a great new campaign idea targeted at inspiring customers to buy their cooler as a gift for any recent grads in their life.

Rival IQ shows you the terms, hashtags, brands, and people that are mentioned within the posts about your brand. This provides endless opportunities for you to expand into new collaborations and marketing strategies.

The Brands Mention widget in Instant Search can help you capitalize on the insights provided by Social Listening by finding your next collaboration. We can see a great example of this when looking at posts for Ikea. As you can see, consumers’ posts about Ikea often include references to Nintendo, suggesting that frequent commenters have the desire to lounge on their Ikea furniture while using their video game console. We’re not saying the world needs a functioning Nintendo Ikea coffee table collab, but we’re also *not* saying that.

Considering a new campaign and want to predict the outcome of the message? There are thousands of campaigns happening all the time—analyze one to learn from their mistakes and capitalize on their successes.

Considering a campaign to celebrate Pride Month? Let's take a look at ways to explore previous campaigns by other brands.

If you don't already have a list of brands to explore, create an Instant Search for Pride Month, Pride Campaign, and LGBT*. Scroll down to the Brands Mentioned widget and select a few brands to explore.

Create Saved Searches for each brand you want to explore. To focus your search on Pride campaigns, add the brand to the FIND field and terms related to Pride campaigns to the INCLUDE field.
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After you've created a few brand searches, use the Saved Searches dashboard to compare the Net Sentiment and Volume of those brands. Below you can see the difference in sentiment around the Pride campaigns for Ikea and Target.

Before you start your own campaign, dive into the campaign for each retailer so you can emulate Ikea’s campaign and avoid making the same mistakes as Target.

Digging into Ikea's dashboard shows that customers loved the campaign and a specific bag. You can click through the results to see the bag and what customers said about the bag on display.

With today’s accessibility of social media, consumers are more than happy to share their thoughts on your brand across the entire social landscape, so don’t miss your chance to capitalize on all of this free and fabulous feedback. Social Listening is your key to building a better, stronger brand.

Check out these additional Social Listening resources:

Social Listening User Guide

Best Practices for Building Searches in Listening

How to Use Social Listening to Improve Your Marketing
​Social Listening Examples From Brands Doing It Right

7 Important Social Listening Metrics to Monitor