Marketers today have to track many things under the radar for the brand’s online presence. Today, the web brings countless opportunities, and where half of the population shares their opinions about your business on social media, you can only listen. Social listening plays an active role in strengthening your brand’s reputation and turning down any red flags that may arise. As the social media landscape proliferates, using it optimally should be your business’ target.
In the world of social media, not everything is black and white. Many areas still need to be touched and require information and data to craft an actionable strategy. The value of social listening is outstanding for attaining a high brand awareness, and hence two-thirds of the marketers agree with the insights so retrieved with it.
What Is Social Listening?
Social listening monitors digital conversations for your social media channels and is used primarily for community management by identifying pain points and offering solutions to questions, complaints, and feedback. It further analyses the information and taps on the opportunities to act.
Social listening empowers your business to create the content your customers want to see, develop content according to industry trends, and improve customer feedback and experience by directly interacting with them. It ensures your business constantly revises the content strategy to fit flawlessly in customers’ shoes.
Social Listening Vs. Social Monitoring
Social media monitoring and social listening – it is natural to get confused about these terms. Social monitoring works on a narrower path. It is more about collecting data and focusing on specific keywords and campaigns. It allows your brand to track things that already happened with metrics like:
- Brand mentions
- Relevant hashtags
- Competitor mentions
- Industry Trends
Social listening looks beyond numbers and acts on a broader scope. It works upon the mood behind the data, naming this “online mood” as a social media sentiment. Social sentiment analyses how people feel about you and your competitor. It reacts to the fundamental causes of the social conversations and curates strategy to take visible actions. Being informed about the shifts in social sentiments allows you to act progressively. In a nutshell, social listening paves the path to respond brightly to unexpected changes to drive accurate business results.
Benefits Of Social Listening
The necessity of social listening is paramount, and if you are not implementing it in your business, you are driving your social strategy with blinders on. They say, when real people talk about your brand or business online, you must listen. The insights you can collect from social listening can benefit your business long term. Business doesn’t work on guesswork, and to build a customer-centric business strategy, hear precisely what your loyal force of customers are saying.
Therefore, you need social listening for:
1. Increased Customer Interaction
Everyone likes to get heard on social media, customers a little extra. Research has shown that 46% of consumers think that engaging with your audience on social media makes a brand best in class online. Responsiveness is a critical asset to speed up your social presence and influence customer behavior positively. When customers follow your brand, 90% will return with a purchase. It is quintessential to respond and use social listening to create real value and trust responses. Social listening is a big tangible thing to boost brand loyalty and customer retention rates.
2. Discover New Opportunities
Your customer network does half the job for you. It is easier to lose sight of certain loopholes that only your customer can face within your brand ecosystem. When customers raise specific problems, you can use social listening to find exciting ways to navigate and solve them. Monitoring is one aspect, and immediate social listening accounts for finding paths for long-term untapped opportunities. One of the most valuable uses of social listening is offering a great customer experience. Listening proactively helps you settle at ease with the online community and organically leverages your social network.
3. Industry, Competitor, And Product Intelligence
Competitor analysis is crucial in every marketing strategy. And the world of social media is no exception. Tracking your steps is essential, but what your competitors are up to in real-time is equally crucial. It leverages into identifying important insights where you fit into the marketplace. Are they onto the new launch? Following trends? Crafting new marketing campaigns? These insights nudge you to act in a direction and step up to fill a gap you might have overlooked. It collates as a goldmine of information for customer service, product development, and various marketing teams. In a nutshell, it triggers you to plan in real-time and find out to create a better experience for your target consumers.
4. Anticipate And Handle Crisis
Social listening tracks sentiments and moods online to instantly understand how your business is perceived. It alarms you about your brand’s positive and negative changes in the online social community. It works as an early warning system to ward off any area for mistakes and loopholes. It can gauge an overwhelmingly positive response to a negative sentiment by digging into the reasons and immediately amending it.
5. Customer Acquisition
The enormous opportunities social media uncovers in converting your content viewers into followers into leads, and finally, customers are non-negotiable. Approaching strangers and selling them products and services won’t land a conversion; hence social media widens the reach to the prospects. Social listening leverages customer acquisition by offering an idea of the audience’s content, their shares, likes, hashtags, photos, and more. With this, you can curate content aligned with their interests and entice them to your brand.
Tips For Brands To Incorporate Social Listening
1. Choose Strategic Keywords And Topics
A perfect recipe for good social listening revolves around choosing the right keywords for your brand. Tracking your brand mentions is essential, and choosing keywords or topics in your industry serves as an active engagement. The keywords will grow with time, but you can unleash the trending topics and keywords most talked about across the industry with social listening tools. For the optimal usage of social listening, select strategic topics, and keywords for monitoring.
2. Generate Leads By Following Recommendation Posts
This foolproof tip accelerates brand awareness and uses social listening to engage your audience in the most authentic way. You can narrow down the accounts in your niche and start a conversation in the comments by successfully finding them through social listening, competitor, and hashtag research. Later, extend the conversation in the most organic way to offer tips and tricks or offer them the products and services you have.
3. Narrow Your Search
When you use social listening, you can understand gaps in the industry and what’s bothering your prospects. Once you have figured down the terms and topics essential for monitoring, the next step is making the path more accurate. You can narrow your search by imbibing advanced search techniques to filter results and develop the most effective information ideal for prioritizing your social interactions and connecting with the right people. You can use Boolean search logic to retrieve more targeted search streams.
4. Alert For Changes
In the path of collecting social information, you are at a spot to identify a drop of change from the common sentiment and conversations around the brand. You can navigate significant changes in engagement or sentiment and adapt your strategy accordingly. This way, you can better address their needs and track metrics on their wants. It empowers you to take a required course of action at the moment, and that’s why social listening comes into play.
To Sum It Up
Social media is constantly evolving, and so are the business patterns. It shows growing trends and the changes that have become necessary to absorb. The content you create must tie with your business goals, and for that, social listening is the new pathway. Today, billions of consumers turn to talk about your business on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, Quora, Reddit and review sites sharing their love-hate relationship, experiences, and preferences. It leverages brands and influencers to work on the content with a new, interactive strategy.
Social listening sets a ground for businesses to take action on insights unleashed by social data to create an ecosystem powered by better marketing, go-to trends, and actionable marketing strategy. It fits smoothly with your brand goals and aces up your approach to boost marketing efforts by collaborating with the right influencers.
And to collaborate with the right influencers, get on board with our AI-driven platform, Atisfyreach. The platform matches brands with the “right fit” influencers based on the campaign’s goals – be it an increase in brand awareness, more engagement, or boosting revenue at scale.
Register with Atisfyreach, and request for a demo today!
