Social listening ROI: 4 ways social listening boosts engagement and revenue

The key to any great relationship is listening. It drives human connection and lies at the heart of successful businesses. For brands, social listening allows them to tune into their target audience, gaining insights into consumer needs, motivations and reactions to shifting market trends—crucial elements for an effective marketing strategy.

These listening insights empower marketers to build a strong brand reputation, generate higher-quality leads, and eventually increase revenue–all of which compound to prove the return on investment (ROI) from their social listening efforts.

Proving the impact and ROI of social listening is essential to secure buy-in across your organization, including from your leadership team, to ensure the necessary investment in listening initiatives.

In this guide, you’ll see what social listening ROI is and how it translates for a brand. We’ll also deep dive into how you can strengthen your social listening impact to help meet your goals more efficiently, and ultimately, transform your business.

Social listening ROI refers to the return on investment you get from your social listening efforts. This includes better audience understanding and engagement, increased brand visibility, enhanced competitor analysis and more effective marketing campaigns.

By analyzing social listening insights, you can make informed decisions that directly impact audience engagement, leading to higher conversion rates, customer retention and eventually, increased revenue.

Here are four ways to strengthen your social listening ROI for greater business impact.

According to The 2023 State of Social Media Report, 94% of business leaders believe social media data and insights have a major impact on building brand reputation and loyalty. While 92% believe it’s also pivotal in improving competitive positioning.

Insights from social listening, when shared and applied across an organization, impact every part of the business, to fuel growth opportunities. These insights help teams across the organization make more informed decisions with the help of data on customer preferences and rising trends.

Marketing teams can refine campaigns based on what resonates most with audiences. Customer care teams can proactively resolve issues faster and with better context; and product teams have data-backed insights to prioritize features based on evolving customer needs.

Similarly, you can understand competitor strategies and market shifts to adapt quickly and seize new opportunities to stay ahead in the market. Social listening data and insights help drive collaboration and align cross-functional strategies to catalyze unified growth and innovation.

Shared social insights ​​also help you benefit from a social media center of excellence model to bring all the advantages of social media to the forefront. This means increased brand awareness, better recruitment efforts, more impactful product development and revenue growth.

Here are some metrics you can deep-dive into with Sprout’s Listening capabilities and reporting to prove your social listening ROI.

• Potential impressions: The number of times audiences could’ve viewed messages from your designated Topic. This includes the total follower count of all users whose messages are captured for the Topic.
• Total volume: See topic volumes of messages across timelines and social networks.
• Brand sentiment: Learn the sentiment data in percentages of positive, negative and neutral messages within the reporting period.
• Messages, sorted by # of follower: Identify which profiles in the conversation have the largest reach when you sort messages by followers. This can help you see if influential accounts are already in relevant conversations, so you can gain more effective influencer partnerships.

Listening to what your audience wants and sharing content that resonates with them is important for building stronger audience understanding and connection. And NBA team Atlanta Hawks, used this strategy to their advantage.

They implemented social listening across all their social accounts to assess how their audiences were reacting to their content, and they built campaigns powered by those insights. They also have a comprehensive view of their larger campaigns, like their brand refresh and Jersey launch, through keywords and hashtags connected to the campaign. This data was then used to map out recommendations to improve campaign outcomes.

The result? Listening data helped the Atlanta Hawks focus on more impactful content, which catapulted their engagement—and still wins them the love and support of their fans. It also helped them show stakeholders and partners the true ROI of their social listening efforts for the whole organization.

Here are some future-proof ways you too can enhance your social media listening ROI, regardless of your industry:

Identify key conversations

As your market evolves, you need to keep a pulse on your target audience. Understand what’s on their mind. This could mean tracking brand mentions, industry trends and even conversations about your competitors. Plus, use social media sentiment analysis to gauge the emotions behind these conversations. Use this data to craft more targeted marketing strategies that hook your audience and keep them invested.

By staying on top of emerging topics, you can also proactively address customer concerns and position your brand as a thought leader in your industry.

Understand audience demographics

Learn who your audience is, what motivates them to choose you over your competitors and why they do so. Analyzing demographic factors such as age, gender, location and interests can give you access to these insights. This information isn’t only useful to create more personalized and relevant messaging but can help other departments such as product and sales.

Social listening tools can make this process easy and help you understand the unique characteristics and preferences of different segments. This helps you optimize your social content strategy to resonate with specific groups to drive higher engagement and stronger brand connections.

Engage in conversations faster

According to The 2023 Sprout Social Index™, 51% of customers say the most memorable brands are those that respond and engage with their audience.

Use social listening to respond fast to trending discussions and capitalize on moments of heightened interest and relevance. By being quick to join the conversation, you show that your brand is attentive and responsive, which builds trust with your audience. Plus, you get valuable and actionable feedback on specific topics.

Grammarly used Sprout’s Social Listening for this purpose and as a result, strengthened its brand connection and customer care efforts. They used the Brand Keywords feature to track and respond to users who mentioned Grammarly, even without tagging their account. Plus, with Conversations, agents across the globe can sync with each other and continue the conversation with a customer with all the necessary context to resolve issues quicker and seamlessly.

Analyze trends

Monitor emerging trends to stay ahead of the curve and use them to build more effective campaigns. Adapt your strategy to align with what’s gaining traction by identifying shifts in consumer behavior and industry developments early on. These trends will help you fine-tune your messaging, innovate your product offerings and also predict future demands. Thus, ensuring your brand remains relevant and competitive in a rapidly changing market.

Social listening boosts campaign effectiveness and content strategy by providing insights into audience preferences and trends. This data-driven approach enhances relevance, engagement and conversion rates, which ultimately makes for more targeted and responsive marketing efforts.

Optimize your social listening ROI with stronger campaigns. Here’s how:

Access the full scope of your listening data

Use social listening to understand how your brand is perceived across different sources and target audiences. For example, Sprout’s AI-driven Listening tool uses natural language processing to help you capture relevant conversations from a wide range of sources. And then lets you further narrow your search with keywords and hashtags in the Query Builder. This gives you a broad spectrum of insights into public sentiment and trends, along with a better understanding of not only what people are talking about, but why.

This quick video explains how Sprout’s Query Builder tool helps pull relevant information from big data to give you the exact insights you’re looking for.

Find specific, actionable insights to optimize your strategies

Once you have a comprehensive view of your data, narrow down your insights to match your specific goals by automatically sifting through billions of data points. This will strengthen your social listening ROI. For example, if your goal is to improve customer satisfaction, search for social listening insights to identify recurring complaints or suggestions, so you can adjust your product or service accordingly. If your focus is to increase brand awareness, track trending topics and hashtags to tailor your content strategy.

Similarly, by analyzing brand sentiment, you can detect potential product or service gaps, as well as PR crises early, and take proactive measures.

Get an easy, quick data drill-down

Get quick and easy reports on your campaigns so your teams can understand the true impact of your initiatives. For example, Sprout’s Social Listening tool helps you summarize listening data from your campaigns to share metrics such as engagements, shares‌ and comments on specific campaign Topics. You can view the volume of conversations from your campaigns and measure the response to learn from those conversations.

Competitive intelligence

Identify industry gaps, track share of voice (SOV) and understand consumer attitudes toward competitors to uncover business opportunities. This will also help you differentiate your brand and address the unmet needs of consumers, strengthen the impact and ROI of your social listening strategies and the tools that help you execute on those strategies.

For example, in the Nike post below, we see that audiences really love the new design but have mixed feelings about the pricing.

Sprout’s Listening tool helps you get up close and personal with such social chatter. Using AI-enabled conversational analytics, the tool helps you identify how customers feel about your brand, their sentiment when they mention your competitors, as well as gaps where you or your competitors fall short. This gives you an early marker to shift your strategy where needed, so you can be the first choice for your target audience.

Competitive listening also helps you track your share of voice (SOV) to measure how much your audience talks about your brand compared to competitors. This metric tells you your market position and highlights whether your share of the conversation aligns with your strategic goals.

According to our Influencer Marketing Report, almost half of all consumers (49%) make purchases inspired by influencer posts at least once a month.

If you’ve spent time on Instagram or TikTok, you’ve likely seen influencers sharing products or services that match your interests, often without even giving it a second thought. It’s become so ingrained in our feeds that it feels almost natural. Even so, influencer trends have bridged the gap between B2C and B2B businesses for a more natural, organic audience connection.

Influencer marketing has become this widespread because it capitalizes on the credibility and connection influencers have with their followers. Brands collaborate with these influencers to connect with specific audiences more effectively, leading to higher engagement and conversion rates.

By incorporating social listening, you can pinpoint the right influencers in your industry, assess their effectiveness and refine your campaigns to better engage your audience. This will give you a greater social listening ROI that moves the needle for your business.

Take advantage of this strategy. Use social listening for influencer marketing to:

Increase brand visibility and credibility

Increase brand visibility and engagement by using the reach and credibility of individuals who have a strong following in your target market. When these social influencers endorse your brand, their audience is more likely to consider you and engage with your products or services. This not only introduces your brand to a wider, more engaged audience, but also drives meaningful interactions.

Influencer endorsements also give your brand added consumer trust within a new market because followers tend to view influencer recommendations as authentic. As our 2024 Influencer Marketing Report shows, nearly half of the 2000+ consumers surveyed trust influencers just as much as they did six months ago, while close to 30% trust them more. As a result, your brand gains greater credibility along with stronger, more organic connections with potential customers.

Identify influencers that fit your brand voice and persona

Social listening can help identify influencers in conversations that align with your brand voice and keywords. By tracking conversations and evaluating influencers contributing to the conversation by their reach and relevance, you can pinpoint those who authentically resonate with your target audience and share similar values.

You can start influencer research with listening and extend it with Sprout’s Influencer Marketing tool to identify influencers who are the best fit for your audience, from a pool of thousands of influencers across the globe. This ensures your collaborations not only amplify your brand message but also maintain consistency with your brand’s identity and tone. You can also manage and track campaigns easily with comprehensive reports and analytics.

Explore new markets by partnering with influencers in relevant niches

Explore new markets by identifying niche influencers who have a strong presence in specific areas relevant to your brand. You can use specific words when listening to conversations on the internet. You can also find influencers whose audience is similar to your target market by looking at social media chatter and engagement in certain areas. While niche influencer marketing may require micro influencers, they can be far more effective than macro influencers and celebrities in driving conversions.

Collaborating with these niche influencers enables you to tap into specialized communities, enhance your brand’s relevance and establish credibility in new areas. This will ultimately drive more targeted engagement and foster a stronger market presence.

Identify market opportunities based on metrics

Know how your partners and specific partner campaigns stack up against one another based on the metrics that matter to your brand. This helps you understand which topics are growing rapidly around your brand/industry, so you can collaborate with your partners and influencers to quickly pivot strategies and double down on these conversation themes.

The ROI of social media listening is driven by the business-critical learnings you get from the millions of unfiltered thoughts, opinions and feedback of your consumer base. Use the strategies above to tap into your raw listening data and draw valuable insights that can enhance your marketing and content strategy, and act as a northstar for your future plans.

Explore social listening to improve your content strategy and build powerful future campaigns to outpace your competition. Tap into the true impact of your social listening ROI.

Request a free, personalized Sprout demo today.