What Can Social Listening Do to Improve Customer Experience

Can social listening indeed become your reliable assistant in improving customer experience (CX), and how can you wind up this process for customer success? This article covers it all.

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Posted last month

If you work in social media at all, we bet you already know what social listening means.

What amazes most is that nearly half of businesses don’t know how to listen effectively to social channels, even if they are well familiar with the concept and would eagerly bend an ear to a company, topic, hashtag, etc.

Imagine you have a spying system, but you don’t know how it operates. We’ve saved you some time researching the web and prepared this instruction on social media “espionage” within ethical and legal boundaries, of course, to help you decipher the subtlest signals coming from your customers (and your competitors!).

So, welcome to this guide on social listening roles, tools, and strategies for improving your customer experience.

How Can Social Listening Enhance the Customer Experience?

If calibrated correctly, the social listening mechanism can lift your CX to an exceptional level.

Let’s see what functions it can take up.

Grasping customer feelings and emotions

How do people feel about your brand, product/service, or feature? Do they treat it positively, neutrally, or negatively?

You’d never guess that without sentiment analytics enabled by social media listening tools like Brandwatch, Keyhole, or others.

Leigh McKenzie, Community Advocate at Traffic Think Tank (TTT), remarks, “You particularly need social listening with sentiment analysis after major shifts in your company. Negative or positive sentiment may reach its climax after rebranding, launching new products or services, organizational restructuring, or any other update or event.”

For example:

The TTT brand mentions and emotional reactions spiked on Reddit, a centaur in the world of social media (half-forum and half-social network), after SEMrush acquired the company.

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Leigh McKenzie also warns, “If you want to elevate CX with social listening, never leave customer complaints and negative comments unaddressed.”

For example:

Burger King ignored the TikTok hashtags #sadness and #failed near the company’s name and numerous brand mentions after a negative customer experience (the staff was rude and forgot the cheese). Such indifference may leave customers frustrated.

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Noticing and tackling pain points

What are those?

Pain points are specific challenges customers encounter while interacting with your product, service, or brand. They may occur at any stage of the customer journey and, what’s worse, can dent customer satisfaction and loyalty.

The most routine troubles are linked to:

Product (out-of-stock situations or long waiting times)
Service (inadequate or unhelpful customer service, struggles with returns, refunds, or repairs)
Price (unclear pricing information)
Communication (no order status updates, no answer from support)
Delivery and logistics (issues with tracking, lost packages, or damaged items)

“Thanks to effective social listening, you can pinpoint and tackle customers’ problems right on the nose. It’s as straightforward as noticing and answering a question or comment under your social media post and redirecting the user to a DM or email if necessary,” says Jeffrey Zhou, CEO and Founder of Fig Loans.

That is precisely what the company did when it monitored the Instagram account and discovered the customer’s pain point related to late payments.

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Attracting and engaging potential customers

Social media listening also empowers you to actively scan social networks for opportunities to attract new customers and boost their engagement.

For Brooke Webber, Head of Marketing at Ninja Patches, a question format is the best strategy that goes hand in hand with social listening to engage leads and channel them toward purchasing decisions. She shares, “We ask questions, keep our eyes peeled and ears sharp to comments, and close the loop by reacting to them. At the same time, we pull out inquiries from our potential customers and reply to them directly on social media.”

For example:

The Ninja Patches team answered questions like these on TikTok:

How do I order patches?

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Or—

Can I use a regular iron?

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Hey, over here!

Here are 50 questions to ask on Instagram to skyrocket your customer experience with engaging interactions. Remember to track replies and respond to users.

Discovering brand fans and strengthening relationships with them

You may have hundreds (or even thousands!) of potential brand ambassadors, but do you have any idea about their existence?

Again, listening to social media conversations becomes vital for detecting your loyal audience, building authentic and close-knit relationships with them, and enriching their experiences with your company.

While using social listening in customer experience management, Logan Mallory, Vice President of Marketing at Motivosity, applies the “Thanks Matters” principle (likewise implemented for employees). He explains, “Once you discover a satisfied brand fan endorsing your company, you should form an emotional bridge with the power of gratitude. A ‘thank-you’ can be your first brick in it.”

For example:

Motivosity noticed a brand mention from a loyal client on LinkedIn and expressed appreciation for the shout-out.

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Preventing and handling CX crises

You wouldn’t want to get dragged into the vortex of a customer experience crisis; mark our words.

Yet, you never know what awaits you there: in the shadiest social media nooks. And if you miss it (let’s hope not!), a PR disaster may explode on social platforms as an infectious virus outbreak.

Unless—

You use social media listening to avert CX catastrophes and manage your online reputation overall.

Jonathan Feniak, General Counsel at LLC Attorney, argues that it may be a life-and-death tactic for businesses. “Proactive social listening saves companies from unwanted escalations and PR disasters when they provide a poor customer experience. It also helps them manage crises in an ethical and law-friendly manner.”

Let’s draw a brilliant lesson from KFC’s case. The brand aced social listening for crisis management. When the chicken shortage tarnished their customers’ experiences, KFC apologized immediately and calmed down the storm from angry customers. The company captured and answered all disturbing questions.

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How to Use Social Listening for Improving CX

Decode your audience’s “dialect”

What if you speak different languages (or dialects) with your customers on social media?

Suppose you say “for real,” while your target customer says “no cap” (in Gen Z slang).

Social listening lets you easily catch your audience’s vocabulary and learn to use it in your social media posts.

Roman Zrazhevskiy, Founder & CEO at MIRA Safety, believes it is the utmost advantage when improving CX with social listening. He says, “It’s like you’ve tuned to the same frequency. You hear your customers. They hear you. And you perfectly understand each other. Such synchronization in your social speech helps you bond faster and create a smoother customer experience without hiccups and misunderstandings.”

Roman Zrazhevskiy recommends decoding the following elements:

Graphic communication style: with or without emojis.
Conversation tone: serious, friendly, humorous, etc.
Jargon: niche terms or slang.
Speaking and listening activity: time of your audience’s active presence on social media.

For example:

A mix of funny memes, emojis, and Internet slang is like a chart-topping track for MIRA Safety’s audience. Look at this particular meme that convinced the Instagram user to buy a gas mask from MIRA Safety.

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Cater your content to your customer’s tastes and requests

That’s not what we ordered!

Just as it may happen at a restaurant, your social media “food” may not coincide with what your customers asked for.

Through vigorous social listening, you can extract data-driven insights into customer preferences, likes/dislikes, and the most anticipated social media content.

John Baek, Founder of JSB Digital Works, also calls attention to the necessity of analyzing the most searched keywords. “You must give your customers what they requested to ensure a positive customer experience. Luckily, there are keyword search tricks (varying from network to network) to figure out what they’re looking for.”

John Baek reveals a list of those:

Autocomplete search and tags (practically on any platform)
Advanced search (on LinkedIn and X)
Recent searches (on Pinterest)
“Explore” tabs (TikTok, X, Instagram)
“Trends for you” tab (on X)

For example:

Knowing what the ideal buyer persona searches on social media, the digital marketing agency publishes Instagram posts with “content tips to boost a website’s rankings” or “SEO mistakes.”

seo mistakes customer service and experience

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Mind: People’s search behaviors have changed dramatically over time. Today, 31% of people seek answers to their questions via social channels, and 15% prefer a social search to a traditional search engine like Google.

Size up your competitors’ strengths and weaknesses

You aren’t duty-bound to do this. Still, many brands tap into social media listening for competitive analytics.

Here’s how.

Competitors’ victories

Thomas Medlin, Co-founder at JumpMD, persistently advocates for social listening because it can demonstrate where you are on the social media “road” compared to your competitors and what marketing practices they enforce to outrun you.

“Competitive benchmarking helps you answer the first and foremost question: Where and why exactly are your competitors better than you in shaping their customers’ experiences on social media?

Once you get the answer, owing to social listening tools, you can replicate their winning ideas but adapt them to develop smarter offerings and eventually improve your customer experience.”

Competitors’ fiascos

Yup, you sometimes have to rummage in your competitors’ dirty laundry.

But!

You don’t have to do this bare-handed: scroll through the best competitor analysis tools to help you monitor and analyze the performance of your primary rivals in the social media marathon.

Meanwhile, let’s review the case with two competitors: Samsung and Apple.

Samsung saw a noticeable “stain” on Apple’s “clothes.” As you may recall, in May 2024, Apple controversially advertised its new iPad Pro, featuring a hydraulic press crushing cultural artifacts.

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Samsung instantly hopped on this opportunity to attract Apple’s dissatisfied audience and trolled the brand with the “Creativity cannot be crashed” ad.

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The Best Social Media Listening Tools: Roundup

Finally, it’s time to select the proper social listening tool for your business needs.

Again, we’ve done this tiresome job instead of you and picked the best-fit social media monitoring tools for different platforms:

For Instagram → Flick
For TikTok → Exolyt
For Reddit → Gummy Search
For YouTube and X → Notifier.so
For Facebook → Radarr by Genesis
For Pinterest and Snapchat → Emplifi.io

For example:

Flick is tailor-made for your Instagram analytics. It shows what hashtags rank the highest, what content resonates more with your audience (you’ll finally see what’s effective and what’s futile!), and what time is best to reach your target customers.

Plus, it has an automatic multi-scheduling feature! You simply lean back in your chair and enjoy the process, sipping your favorite drink, while Flick’s AI social media assistant, Iris, writes incredible captions and generates post ideas for your business.

iris social media marketing easy and effective

Ready to Boost Your Customer Experience with Social Listening?

Congrats! You’ve cracked the code to social media listening.

Now, you can breathe out with relief and start incorporating all the tips and tools from this article to maximize your social listening efforts and blow past every expectation in your CX strategy.

Let Flick be your hashtag codebreaker and your performance interpreter on Instagram. Your free trial is ready for a soft launch.

Content

How Can Social Listening Enhance the Customer Experience?

How to Use Social Listening for Improving CX

The Best Social Media Listening Tools: Roundup

Ready to Boost Your Customer Experience with Social Listening?

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