Social media listening is the identification of conversations that are happening about a particular product or brand and acting upon those engagements by analysing or reflecting on the results found.
There are people trying to communicate with your business all the time but unless you are effectively listening out for the conversations, they may become missed opportunities.You can use social media to tune-in to conversation happening all over different social media platforms and beyond and it’s a fantastic tool when used correctly to grow your business and find potential new clients looking for your product.
What benefits can social media listening have?
Good customer service
When you’re actively seeking to provide a first class customer service, you’ll want to respond and engage with people in a timely and responsive manner. Going above and beyond and being a company that is known for great customer care will speak volumes. If this sounds like you, you’ll already be on the case when it comes to individuals mentioning your company name but how about those times when people misspell your name or it’s not tagged correctly and they think they’re being ignored? What then? These moments will get picked up with your social media listening. It goes much deeper than just responding to messages, it requires you to seek out those extra conversations, it requires you to be proactive within social media and to search for people who are looking for your product – even if they don’t know it yet! Responding to all these messages whether positive or negative ones will boost your customer service rate and reputation.
Demonstrate authority or industry knowledge and expertise
When you are proactively seeking conversations that people are engaging in over social media, and you act on them, it will give you a level of authority. The more active you become, the more your brand will be known as being an industry leader having expertise. Put yourself in the middle of conversations that could benefit your business and create a sense of safety for those who are seeking solutions.
Don’t be afraid to stand up and stand out – use your social listening to boost the name of your brand.
Find key influencers in your niche
By constantly listening to conversations or actions taking place within your niche, you will start to see and hear about who the key influencers are in that area. By establishing key influencers it will give you opportunity to engage with them and help to boost your brand awareness when you’re seen to be interacting with them. This could also give way to collaboration paths in order for you to work together to promote your brand.
Establish what works
By discovering what may not be working well for another business, your brand can use these failure examples to show that you can do things differently. This can be built into your marketing strategy and you can target people who were let down by other companies. You can use social listening to find the people that have been affected or let down by others and create a relationship which demonstrates that you can do better!
Gain a wider understanding
When you’re social listening, you stretch further than your own social circles. You explore a wider net of customers who are already talking about your industry. Within this environment you can gain bigger insights and understanding of topics or discussions that you may not have heard from in your own circles. These conversation could lead to bigger opportunities or simply give you a learning curve that will help your business in the long term. Join in conversation and become part of the groups that people connect with which will boost your knowledge and understanding and at the same time, your brand awareness.
Create great content
By listening to the world around you and having ideas and suggestions coming at you from all angles, now is the time to use what you discover to create mind-blowing, eye-catching content. You’ve heard what doesn’t work, you’ve heard about what people want to see and experience – now it’s time to revolve your marketing around that. Create posts that are inviting and make people want to engage. Share your content in all the places you’ve found people to be spending their time most and ask them to respond by giving them a call to action.
Social listening is an extremely important part of a social media strategy and to gain the best results from your plans, we advise you to be listening at all times. There are a range of tools available to get you started, some free and some paid for. We suggest you use a mixture of both to give you a wider insight throughout your social media platforms.
Looking to boost your social media marketing and get ahead of the competition? Let us help! Get in touch today.
