Social Listening: Why It Matters and How to Make the Most of It
As children, we were taught that before saying anything, we should listen first.
But while we as individuals can easily put this advice to good practice by actively listening to those around us and striving for mutual enriching communication, brands often lack the right tools or strategies to execute this endeavour at scale.
But there’s light at the end of the tunnel, and that’s social listening! We can see that in ads, commercials and social posts that often make us wonder whether they can read our minds.
While reading someone’s mind is a questionable superpower, it’s a good chance that those who produced that content engage in social listening – the practice of monitoring social platforms to understand what people are saying about your brand. It’s a way of gaining a holistic snapshot of how consumers perceive their brands.
Quick Peek Into Social Listening
Social listening is about tracking conversations and trends around your niche and brand and using those understandings to make more informed marketing decisions.
In short, it can help you understand how, where, and why these discussions are happening and what audiences are really thinking – and not just when they mention or tag your brand.
The more accurate data your social listening report includes, the more accurate your future marketing campaigns will be. According to Sapio Research, accurate data can help you design your marketing campaigns, optimize messaging and content, outperform your competitors, develop a stellar influencer program, and build really impactful brand partnerships.
Social listening involves monitoring and analyzing your audience. It means knowing what users say about the topic you’re interested in, and the easiest way to do so is to start a brand monitoring strategy.
Once you’re set and ready with your social monitoring process, it’s time to take the process one step further with social listening. Here you will analyze brand mentions and draw the most accurate conclusions that will help you achieve your marketing goals.
Why should you use social listening?
- To generate leads
- To optimize customer service
- To get customer feedback
- To improve or prepare a new product by implementing sentiment analysis
- To engage customers
- To track the progress of marketing campaigns
- To create and distribute content
- To increase brand recognition
- To obtain more accurate social media analytics data
There are lots of reasons to use social listening with both direct and indirect benefits to your business. Some of the main ways you can use social listening include:
1.Understanding your audience
Listening to social media conversations efficiently helps you to understand who your customers are. It gives you a better understanding of the topics they’re interested in and their attitude toward those topics.
With social listening, you will go way beyond demographic data and dive deeper into their needs, interests, and values.
2.Collect industry insights right from your audience
In today’s ever-competitive market, you will need to be well-versed with all that is happening in the industry. You will need content that resonates with the trends and industry’s patterns.
Social listening helps you identify any keyword relevant to your specific niche and capture all the conversations surrounding it. Such insights will provide you with a very valuable context of what’s happening in the industry and what people are talking about.
Needless to say, this vital data can form the foundation for your social media strategies and keep up to date on whatever means marketing campaign strategy. Even so, a marketing strategy derived from audience conversations will only make for an effective, rewarding approach for your brand.
3.Avoiding negative sentiment on socials
A clean-cut brand image on social media platforms is very important. Just as positive references, mentions and feedback can go viral, one negative reference also spreads like fire and puts the brand image at stake.
Listening to people’s voices can help you with PR issues more effectively and ensure you’re staying on top of what is being said about your brand on social media.
Instead of waiting for customers to break out and get in the damage control mode, you can blow off the fire before it spreads. But to do so, you need to constantly monitor your brand mentions on socials like Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, and whatever social platform your audience loves venting on.
4.Building exceptional content marketing strategies
Power up your content marketing strategy with insights from social media listening tools.
Content is what lures them to your brand, after all. And quality content plays a key role in establishing a brand image and bringing new followers on board.
Social media already does a great job in customers’ sales journey, but you need engaging, powerful social media content to lure them in. And how else you can do that if not by letting the audience inform your content output strategy? Instead of blindly sharing content on your social media platforms, you should create content that your followers will engage with.
To understand what type of content your audience likes and what they don’t, look at your social media analytics. These insights will help you better understand what kind of content they’re after.
5.Creating better customer service for high expecting audiences
Questions, complaints, and issues are easily discovered thanks to social listening. You will respond and provide them with the help they need in time. Even better, you will be able to go beyond customers who directly message you on social media.
The latest social listening tools even let you set up alerts for tagged and untagged brand mentions, so you’re instantly notified whenever someone tags you online.
With the right tools and the right strategies, social listening can benefit multiple nuances of your business – from customer service and sales to research and development; you can make the most of social listening and actively grow your business.
