Do you know what your customers are saying about your brand? Your industry? Your competitors?
If you don’t, you are cheating yourself out of some incredible insights – the kind of insights that could put your brand on the map.
It’s important to know what your customers think about your brand, products, and customer experience. The conversations that your customers are having about you can divulge more information than focus groups or marketing research.
And those conversations are happening. You just need to listen.
That’s the value of social listening.
Social listening or social media monitoring? What’s the difference?
Many people use the terms social listening and social media monitoring interchangeably, but they are missing the mark. While the two practices do have similarities, they are not the same. Social media monitoring is primarily geared toward marketing and part of its purpose is using it as a tool to gauge how effective a campaign is.
Monitoring is usually a part of an overall marketing strategy because it allows for the monitoring of various social channels to glean information about a brand. They can not only hear what consumers are saying about the brand, but it also opens the door for engagement with those consumers on those platforms.
Social listening is very similar, but the data is handled in a different way. It takes the data obtained from social media monitoring and aggregates it into usable feedback that reveals a better picture of the brand’s influence and reputation – the bigger picture.
Basically, social monitoring tells us what customers are saying. Social listening tells us why they are saying it.
Why do you need a social listening strategy?
A good social listening strategy addresses three main areas:
Brand intelligence
Industry intelligence
Competitor intelligence
The information obtained can do everything from promoting products using the best methods possible to identifying top influencers in your industry. You can gain valuable intel on what your competitor’s customers think about the brand, the company, and the products. Then you can develop strategies that effectively leverage that information and propel you to the top.
You can use the data to create better campaigns that speak directly to your customers and learn what potential customers are looking for. You can identify trends to utilise and get instant feedback on how your audience reacts to your marketing campaigns.
There are several listening tools available. They can collect the data much more quickly and efficiently than doing it manually. Some of the top social listening tools include:
Smart Inbox – Bring all your emails from all your accounts to one central location so you can process them quickly and easily. The app allows you to pin important emails to the top or snooze messages that you won’t want to address right away.
Social Mention – This amazing tool lets you plug in a keyword like a brand or product and see what people are saying about it. You can also get tons of interesting, useful data on keywords used, consumer sentiment about your brand, and much more.
Hootsuite – An exceptional social marketing automation tool, Hootsuite lets you schedule all of your social media posts for the week or longer. While this is quite handy, you can also view your comments, messages, even brand mentions across the social media channels you use. It’s all right there in an easy to use dashboard.
Social listening tips for success.
Once you have a good social listening strategy in place and the data starts rolling in, your next step is to figure out what to do with it. Here are a few things you can start doing today:
Start collecting FAQs to post on your website
Identify industry influencers
Find out what your customers love about your brand
Find out what your customers don’t like about your brand
Seek out the most common issues that your customers are having and find solutions
See how your brand is mentioned on the social platforms (positive or negative?)
If you can see fluctuations in consumer sentiment toward your brand, you can analyze those times that there was a dip then figure out what went wrong. There are so many things you can do and it’s all right there at your fingertips. You just need a couple of great tools and a little time to act on the info.
Social media listening is integral to successful marketing in general. It goes hand in hand with social media marketing, making your campaigns stronger and much more effective.
And at the end of the day that’s all we want from our marketing efforts, right?
How to become a social selling legend
We all know how hard it is to stand out. To be heard through the deafening noise of rivals, commentators, ‘thought leaders’, and anybody else who feels the urge to share. And of course many do, meaning emails and postbags remain fit to burst – with the poor prospect/customer also bombarded across every conceivable digital channel.
Find out how to cut through that noise and become a social selling legend. Download now
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