Brands are being continually forced to keep up with the latest trends in order to stay relevant and successful. Successful brands have been using social media listening in order to stay ahead of their competition for years.
If you’re not familiar with the term, social media listening is known as the process of identifying and assessing digital conversations through searching keywords, phrases, and topics to discover what customers are saying about a brand online.
Why is it important?
The importance of social media listening derives from the idea that it’s a way to be able to overlook your customer’s thoughts, insights, feedback, and suggestions from either a birds-eye-view or customer-by-customer in a personalized way.
It analyzes content and trends that lead to the finding of valuable insight about what impacts your brand and why there may be a shift in your brand’s dynamic. The content in a user’s post could contain information about your brand, services, or products.
For instance, a study conducted by J.D. Power found that social media is used by 67% of consumers for customer care, while another study by Sprout Social supports that claim reporting social media is the people’s top choice for customer care. Within the same study, “36% of people have used social [media] to shame a company for poor customer service.”
By understanding that social media is being used as a bridge between consumers and suppliers, it will help you establish a basis for your brand by evaluating posts and suggestions from the public.
RELATED: How To Generate Leads Through Social Media
What does it do?
Social media listening accomplishes separate functions that fuse together to aid success and growth.
Here are a few things you can accomplish with successful listening:
1. Improve Customer Service and Customer Satisfaction
Social media listening gives you an understanding of your brand from a customer’s point of view. It allows you to see what interactions customers have with your employees, what needs to be improved, and areas that you’ve succeeded at. Whether a post is negative or positive, set aside time to respond to posts to let customers know you hear and see them.
Being personal allows brands to connect with your client, thus, reaching out to the shows you care about. By using social media listening your brand can take action and implement improvement.
2. Find New Potential Clients and Learn More About Existing Ones
Beneficial use of social media is the power to “guide”, or influence, client decisions. As your brand overlooks posts, responding to those applicable, giving suggestions, or answering questions that relate to your industry, creates conversation. Reaching out to users, putting your brand’s name out there, can accumulate new possible clients.
Looking at social media as a whole, you and your brand will be able to see common trends among your customers. These trends can help you understand what your customers are interested in and how you can better appeal to them. Understanding the physics of your clientele can allow you to target new customers by seeking out users with similar characteristics.
3. More Effectively Market Products and Advertisements
Social media listening helps a brand with marketing by being able to better specify what audience their products and services reach. Identifying a brand’s target audience uncovers common phrases and tendencies among that audience that can be put into advertising and marketing strategies. This can help stimulate the generation of well-developed advertisements that uses more compelling content.
Additionally, if your brand is seeking a new way to advertise, introducing industry influencers for your brand on social media is an option. A brand can market products better by using influencers because having information and insight comes from a person, rather than a company, which gets better responses from clients. Influencers put a face to your brand, which creates a higher level of trust in the offers and opinions.
4. Understand Your Competition
Social media listening doesn’t only apply to your customers, it can be used for your competitors as well. This may be one of the most valuable and important aspects of social media listening when applying it to your brand.
with Social Media Listening, You will be able to follow along with updates and news announcements about competing brands; competitors’ successes, failures, mistakes, and what new developments they are producing.
On top of that, a brand is able to compare itself to its competitors and acknowledge what is helping them succeed and what is hurting them, so that it can implement new ideas or plans.
The function of social media listening can lead to the improvement of your own brand along with having the capability to diversify yourself from other companies.
How do you get started?
Fortunately, there are social media management tools that do much of the work for you. The social feedback that these tools provide is most meaningful when looked at as a collection or group of unstructured data points.
Unstructured data is a collection of straightforward, raw, and occasionally emotional data. Unlike other types, unstructured data allows brands to understand and get to the true heart of customers.
The social media management tools use buzzwords, keywords, and hashtags that refer to the brand’s industry so that they can create data analysis.
Along with that, you can track information about your competitors, information about your brand, slogans, monitor employees, and search for common misspellings and abbreviations. Constant monitoring of this information paints a path for easy-to-reach information and feedback.
You can use this data and information to craft personalized content using the type of language your audience uses and is familiar with.
To grow as a brand, use the data given from social media listening to stay current with trends. It will paint a clear picture of your brand and its reputation from a consumer’s perspective.
In order to grow effectively, someone must be listening to online social media conversations. Since social media is always going 24/7, using a social media management tool, such as SproutSocial, Agora Pulse, and Sendible, can make it easier for your company to see day-to-day shifts via social media interactions.
