These days, it’s impossible to ignore the power of social media.
If your brand isn’t currently invested in social listening, it’s doing itself a huge disservice by not caring about its customers. And that’s just bad business.
There are few things more critical than the ability to listen when it comes to marketing success, especially when you consider that more than 2.5 billion of the world’s population lives on social media. So, what is social listening exactly? It’s the process of listening to your customers and potential customers for mentions of your brand, variations of your brand name, competitors, products, and any other interesting information relevant to your business.
When positioned as an essential element of brand and marketing strategy, social listening offers unmatched insights into what customers expect (as well as how well a brand is delivering on those expectations) and the ability to identify engagement opportunities.
Listen, be an active observer, and the conversation will respond.
Build Community
Interact with your customers in a way that continuously builds a positive image of your brand and fosters relationships. Discover who your brand ambassadors, influencers, and advocates are. These individuals are the ones who have the ability to make the biggest impact for your brand.
Understand Consumer Behavior
The benefits of social listening go far beyond customer satisfaction. It allows you to track overall brand health, generate ideas for marketing campaigns, drive strategic product decisions, explore industry trends and terms in the content your audience shares, and highlight moments when outreach is required to engage in conversations and respond to customer requests, questions, and concerns.
Utilize Social Listening Tools
Hootsuite will help you monitor and manage all of your social channels from the one suite, which will not only save you time, but also your sanity. It’s the perfect tool to help you monitor and respond to comments and complaints in a timely manner.
BuzzSumo helps you search for and identify key influencers who are sharing your content and the content of your competitors. It works sort of like Google Alerts in that it allows you to monitor specific keywords with its Content Alerts feature.
The next step is analyzing and acting on social insights and tying that social data to business impact. Actions can range from engaging unhappy customers to shifting your overall brand positioning strategy to knowing who your most influential sources are. In the end, social listening lets your customers practically do the work for you.
So listen carefully. Pay attention to your customers, analyze what they’re saying, and then use that to your advantage to create the kind of content they want to see.
