A lot has happened since Listen launched in May, so we sat down with Johanna Strande, product owner and one of the minds behind Listen, to learn all about what’s happened since the launch and what’s next!
What has the reaction been from clients who have started using Listen?
–Funnily enough, most of our feedback has been from clients being excited to start the onboarding process. And that's actually a good thing since it means that, once they're in, the tool helps them do exactly what they were hoping to do – and they're able to do it independently. I think that's one of the best parts of Listen: it's incredibly intuitive, so anyone who's used to working with social media can quickly start using it right off the bat. As you know, we pride ourselves on having excellent customer service, but we also want to make sure that our clients' processes are made easier and more efficient – and I think Listen really incorporates the best of both those worlds.
What makes Listen so special?
–First of all, we've developed the entire tool with several of our clients. In other words, we tailored the whole tool to what real companies need and want and designed it to be truly intuitive and easy to use. We wanted to make something unique that we knew would be valuable to our clients, and this process made sure we hit the mark.
One of Listen's most exciting features is the Market concept. The market concept lets you define your market and compare your social media with any benchmarks that are relevant to you. Listen's intuitive dashboard presents all the data to you, from sentiment to engagement rate, making it easy to interpret the numbers, understand the results of your communication efforts, and compare the data to your previous results or the benchmarks of your choice.
This allows you to learn from – and more efficiently compete with – other's in your industry or organizations similar to yours simply by knowing the name of their Instagram account. Without the right tools, big amounts of data are just that. But by comparing the data side by side, Retriever Listen helps you turn it into insights.
Another great feature that Listen has is a tool we call Top Insights. Top Insights gives the user an easily digestible overview of the most important and relevant things that have happened on social media during the last 24 hours. This way, you can quickly see what you need to do immediately and take out any guesswork.
What parts are completely new to the Retriever toolbox?
–The feature that measures and compares engagement and sentiment is something none of our other suites have offered before. With Listen, our clients can see how people engage and interact with their brand, if what's said about the brand online is positive or negative, and even compare the statistics to their competitors and other benchmarks of their choosing.
And last but not least, what’s next for Listen?
–The next step is to include podcasts and Youtube videos in our analyses. It's a bit more complicated to add spoken format into the mix, but we're hoping to be able to include them in the next couple of months. And starting next year, our customers will be able to add open web into the mix in combination with social media to get an even more accurate assessment of their online presence.
