Businesses do not exist in a vacuum.
You don’t do your best and make money out of thin air.
What does social media listening mean?
Social media listening is the process of collecting every scrap of data point mentioning your brand and products found online and drawing out deep conclusions about its position and wellbeing.
It goes beyond rudimentary metrics like shares and comments. Rather social media listening has more to do with interpreting data and analyzing the sentiment. So brands are able to understand how the public sees them, what they appreciate, what they don’t, what about your products is valuable, how you can improve your messaging.
Why use it for your online business?
Without adequate feedback from friends and family, we’d get nowhere in life. So we also seek out the help and advice from people that matter to us to solve a problem as big as calibrating career trajectories to a decision as small as what color shirt looks best on us.
Social media listening capitalizes on a similar relationship between brands as an entity and their customers. As a result, the insights you gain from social media listening have a direct, tactile effect on every aspect of presentation and marketing.
Online businesses are even more dependent on digital conversations and interactions as there’s no brick-and-mortar extension to anchor the business to a community. So what happens online is simply the most important thing to follow and manage.
How can it help you boost your business?
Engage your customers
The customer should always come first. Otherwise, what are you even doing with your social media presence? Social listening pulls the attention back to direct interactions as a source of information and potential repeat sales based on how you engage with your audience.
Has a customer tagged you in a post complaining about your brand? Companies don’t like to draw attention to negative press, but the evaluation is already out there. How it affects your brand now only depends on you. Acknowledge concerns and complaints. Work towards better, timelier customer support online. Accept praise.
Every interaction is a fresh opportunity to generate good will. Tagged posts are just the surface. Be sure to find mentions where you’re not tagged. Address larger discussions.
It helps you find your pain points
Successful brands are always on the move. They don’t rest on their laurels. They always seek ways to service their clients, and social media makes for a good resource on how to improve products. But, of course, no company is free of pain points. You might think you’re different and perfect, but that’s only to your detriment.
Pay close attention to what’s happening in your market. What are the products that generate the most hype? What are product features used as the backbone for marketing campaigns? What are the current design trends shaping up? Then, identify what’s missing in the recipe.
These are your pain points.
Provides information from different sources
To do social media listening correctly, you need to cast your net wide. Well beyond your profile pages and direct messages. Look for opinions and evaluations across the entire Internet to create a full picture of the attitude towards your brand. But, of course, this all depends on the specific tools you choose to get the job done as well as the proper keyword selection to narrow down the most relevant content.
A lot of the tools available for social listening and monitoring can be expensive. A smaller brand might need to get creative on a restrictive budget, and this is where I’d recommend RSS readers. Quite the versatile tool, when you know how to use it right. Current readers like Inoreader give users great flexibility between content discovery and a fantastic browser extension.
Helps you develop a better product
No matter how good the marketing, and the inadequate product do not move units. At least not for long anyhow. Even starting out with a good product is no guarantee it won’t lose its shine, luster and appeal over time. Consumer tastes change over time (reread the part about pain points) and what they need in a product also changes.
It’s your job to listen to their needs, whether that’s actively (sourcing opinions through polls and surveys) or passively (reading their experiences in evaluations and social posts). What are the most frequent complaints customers have with your products? What do customers wish there’d be as features?
The answers are free consumer research ready for application!
Helps you find influencers
Once you’ve spent enough time on the task at hand, you’ll start noticing the individuals with high social capital. Influencer marketing is not below your interest given how TikTok has done quite a lot to boost sales on cute gadgets as well as influence book sales internationally.
Knowing your influencers opens doors to potential collaboration and paid partnerships. At the very least, they serve as the voice of the consumer market at large, which is also useful when it comes to research.
Social listening can also identify the people who love your brand and champion it already. That’s not something that should be ignored.
It helps you track your competitors
A warning. Do not forget about your competitors. It’s tempting to lose yourself in measuring and analyzing your performance, but there’s no such thing as a solo player in the business. No matter how big or small your niche is, there are those companies you’ll have to outpace to get ahead. It’s why social media listening should be extended to your direct competitors.
There’s a lot to be gained from keeping a close eye on other brands. You’ll catch wind of their announcements, campaigns, and projects and act accordingly. What are the threats they pose to you and your marketing schedule? What are the best opportunities to shine without having to share the spotlight?
