A while back, I came across this exchange in my LinkedIn feed. A Canva user created a funny post about ChatGPT and Canva being down and how it affected social media managers. Canva commented a thoughtful response acknowledging the user’s frustration and reassuring her that the service will be back up soon.
Notice the hundreds of positive reactions on the brand’s comment? This one decision clearly left a good impression, which will eventually result in positive brand perception.
This type of social customer service is one of the most popular uses of social listening. But social listening can do a lot more than helping you identify customer service opportunities. It can inform your campaigns, show you how customers are responding, and uncover opportunities to adjust your strategies.
In this post, I show you some of the best examples of brands that used social listening to drive campaign success. I also break down how to go from passive listening to uncovering actionable insights to power your marketing campaigns. Let’s take a look.
Effective social listening is all about knowing what to listen for and where to find those conversations. Otherwise, you could end up with too much noise, making it difficult to identify the insights that truly matter. Listening to everything and anything means you end up with information overload, so you can’t extract actionable insights.
Let’s check out some of the top things to listen for to get a better sense of how you can get the most out of your social listening efforts.
Reality shows thrive on audience engagement. The more conversations happening around the show, the more successful it tends to be. That’s why reality shows like “X Factor” use social listening to get audiences more involved in the show.
This not only helped to drive more conversations related to the show, but it also made people feel more “in control” of how the show runs. So it’s an effective way to attract more viewers while earning the loyalty of existing audiences.
For the 2015 season, viewers were given the opportunity to vote on which category should be assigned to each judge. The voting was done through X (formerly Twitter), with viewers using specific hashtags to choose which category they want a judge to mentor. For example, #CherylGroups if they wanted Cheryl Cole to mentor Groups or #SimonBoys if they wanted Simon Cowell to mentor the Boys category.
The show tracked hashtag waves across X to see how viewers voted. This allowed them to make strategic decisions based on audience sentiment and preferences, which set the stage for the campaign’s success.
Social media conversations are a valuable source of information for audience sentiment and opinions around specific product drops. These social listening insights can reveal information about color and size preferences, design issues, durability issues, and more to help brands fine-tune their product releases.
For example, when sneakerhead pages on Instagram announced the recent LEGO x Nike Dunk Low sneaker drop, there were plenty of comments from fans lamenting about the kids-only sizing. With Nike’s history of listening in on social media conversations, if there are enough conversations addressing this preference, there’s a possibility of them coming up with adult sizes for this collab.
In fact, when the brand launched a new line of running shoes, they gathered customer feedback from review sites and social media platforms. This helped them understand that although customers enjoyed the comfort of the shoes, there were plenty of issues with durability.
The brand then used these insights to quickly adjust their production process to address these concerns. This enabled them to ensure better durability for their future releases and improve customer satisfaction.
Similarly, you can go beyond social media comments and look at other conversation sources to understand how people feel about your product drop. Forum discussions and social media posts are an excellent source for finding conversations about upcoming releases. Meanwhile, review sites can also uncover valuable insights after the drop.
Sometimes, you don’t need to go beyond the comments section of your social media posts to understand what your audience wants. This is where people ask questions, share their pain points, raise concerns, share their opinions, or even share their own recommendations or tips. So it’s an excellent place to look for valuable conversations that could inform various aspects of your strategy.
You might be able to get content ideas or even adjust your messaging based on the feedback in this comment section. Are they asking for skincare recommendations? Are they raising a specific skincare concern? Do they have complaints about a specific product or brand?
These are all valuable insights that you can leverage to develop more impactful campaigns or optimize existing ones for a greater impact. If necessary, go beyond your own social media comments and perform a comment analysis on an influencer’s post. TikTok and Instagram are the perfect platforms for this, as they tend to generate plenty of authentic engagement.
The following GRWM TikTok from an influencer received plenty of comments asking about the products she used. She also got questions about whether certain products are safe for hormonal acne. This could be a great opportunity to create content that focuses on products that are hormonal-acne-safe. Or you could adjust your existing campaign messaging to address these concerns.
Now that you know some of the key uses of social listening, it’s time to find out which brands have excelled at it. Here are some of the top campaigns that used listening to fuel success.
“Dancing with the Stars” revived its popularity by using social listening to drive fan engagement. In Season 20 of the show, they invited fans to tweet along during the show using the hashtag #DWTS. This helped to drive viewership while significantly boosting fan engagement.
Users who tweeted during the show could get a chance for their tweet to appear live on-air while the show was broadcasting. So viewers were enthusiastic about getting involved in the conversation. Hilarious commentary and memes poured in, allowing the show to generate a buzz across the internet.
As the tweets came in, the team curated and monitored all the content in real time. They then projected select tweets on air during the show, which gave viewers a glimpse of the social buzz that the show was generating.
Till date, the #DWTS hashtag continues to see tons of engagement across X (formerly Twitter) and other social media platforms. You can still see fans sharing engaging content that drives more visibility for the show.
When Chipotle initially launched the smoked brisket in 2021, it soon became one of the chain’s most popular menu items. In fact, it got so popular that the company ran out of inventory just two months after launch.
After a three-year hiatus, Chipotle decided to bring the item back on popular request. The smoked brisket was the most requested item, so the company listened to the customers and brought it back for a limited time in September 2024. The comeback was a huge success, helping drive a 5.3% increase in transactions for the chain in 2024.
What worked for Chipotle in this case was listening to what their customers wanted. They further promoted the comeback by offering a $0 delivery fee. Additionally, relevant food influencers on social media helped to spread the message, resulting in the campaign’s massive success.
Unless you’ve been living off the grid completely (which is unlikely since you’re reading this), you’ve probably heard of the American Eagle ad featuring Sydney Sweeney that sparked a huge controversy across social media. Regardless of the intention, the social media backlash from the ad was enough to negatively impact the brand’s reputation.
In response, Gap came up with an ad that went in a completely opposite direction, featuring Katseye, a six-member girl group consisting of women from different ethnicities and cultural backgrounds. The diversity showcased in the commercial captured audience attention, resulting in the campaign becoming a huge success.
Within the first three days, the video had generated 20 million views and 8 billion total impressions. “Better in Denim” was also the No. 1 search on TikTok. Gap’s CEO even remarked that the campaign helped to reinforce the brand’s cultural relevance. About two weeks into the campaign launch, the video had amassed a whopping 1.5 billion views in total.
What’s even more impressive is the 20k+ comments, most of which showed positive sentiment. Some commenters mentioned that they were watching the video every day, while others raved about the clever marketing. This further reaffirms the campaign’s success with audiences.
Gap owes the success of this campaign to a few factors. Competitive social listening played a major role in identifying a viral topic involving another brand. Gap rightfully identified an opportunity to get involved in the conversation to strengthen their cultural relevance.
Many Reddit users speculated that the commercial might have already been in the works well before the American Eagle controversy. Even if that were the case, Gap’s timing was perfect as they managed to launch the campaign during the height of the controversy. This allowed them to position the brand as a “better” and more diverse alternative to the competition.
The brand’s decision to partner with Katseye was another factor in the campaign’s success. With 6 million Instagram followers, the girl group already has massive influence, especially among Gen Z and younger Millennial populations. This added relevance to the campaign, with the groups’ diverse looks and incredible talent further strengthening its appeal to the target audience.
The above campaign examples may serve as an inspiration to start using social listening for your own campaigns. Before you begin, here are a few tips and best practices to fuel listening success.
You’ve launched your campaign, and you notice a significant spike in brand mention volume. But this doesn’t necessarily mean that your campaign was an instant success. In fact, positive volume doesn’t always equal positive sentiment. This means that an increase in brand mentions could also indicate backlash because people are still talking about your brand…just not in a positive light.
That’s why it’s crucial to combine your social listening efforts with sentiment analysis. This involves taking a deeper look at the conversations involving your brand and determining the sentiment behind them.
So you’re essentially going to analyze whether the conversations are positive, negative, or neutral. Influencity offers powerful monitoring tools that are capable of in-depth sentiment analysis. You can use it to visualize the sentiment behind brand mentions and even get a breakdown of the emotions. So you can determine if people are feeling things like anger, anticipation, trust, fear, joy, surprise, and more.
The insights from your social listening efforts are valuable for understanding audience reception toward your campaign. They can reveal whether the campaign resonated or fell flat. So with the right approach, you can use these insights to make necessary adjustments for a more impactful campaign.
This is why you need to map your insights to campaign pivots and ensure that your marketing dollars don’t go to waste. Be prepared for mid-campaign optimizations, such as adjusting your messaging, that could deliver a bigger impact.
Conversation volume is still a good indicator of whether your campaign yielded results. Make sure to compare how the volume changes before and after launching your campaign. This will help you understand if you managed to reach a bigger audience as a result of the campaign.
So you can connect the patterns and discover what works. For example, you might be able to understand that influencers amplifying your message helped to spark a bigger conversation.
Now that you’ve seen all the wonderful ways social listening can drive campaign wins, it’s time to put these ideas into practice. Use the tips and best practices I shared above to streamline your listening efforts and get the most out of your insights.