What Is Social Listening?
Social Listening simply put is when you track social media platforms and forums for mentions and conversations relating to your business, brand, product, keywords, and competitors. From tracking this data you can then analyse how you can use this information, from answering customer comments and questions to using the data to help with your marketing efforts.
Why You Should Be Social Listening
These days it’s just not enough to have a good product, and website you need to be excelling in customer relationships, this is why Social Listening is essential to all businesses. It is important to know exactly what your customers and potential customers are saying about your brand and it is equally important to be active in interacting with the real people who are talking about your business and products. This goes further than what people are commenting on but also how people are responding to your posts and other people’s posts in way of emotions such as like, love, anger etc…
How It Can Benefit Your Business
There is no better way to get a true understanding of how people view your company and your products than through social listening. It will not always be complimentary unless you are very lucky, you cannot please everyone all of the time, however, all feedback whether it be positive or negative helps a company to improve.
It is like having a huge focus group feeding back to you. Once you start monitoring the information it can help you to choose the best way to market your product, and will also give you a good insight into your customer audience.
What Should I Be Listening For?
Firstly know your audience and which platforms they are likely to use, this will help you to focus on the right platforms, as well as focusing on the right countries, or your local area.
For your social listening strategy to work you need to be very careful as to which words you want to listen out for. Obviously, you want your product name brand name company name, but it is also worth listening out for common spelling mistakes associated with any of the words you choose. Furthermore, if your product relates to something then it is also worth choosing that word also, for example, if you sell spades then you would be listening for the term digging.
Don’t forget to keep an eye on your competitors to monitor what they are doing with their marketing, any new products or campaigns, and what feedback they are getting from their audience. Take a look at how they respond to their mentions, could you do it better?
Interacting With Posts
Try to remember it is not all about the hard sell, it is about interacting with people who are using your products or may have a requirement for your product. Let’s take the spade example – there may be a post about digging over a garden, as a spade company you may respond with the following ‘that looks like hard work, you should try our spade it’s lightweight, with a comfortable handle‘ you could even add a discount code on there to entice people in.
Make your comments and reactions personal, people like to deal with people and adding personal touches will really make you stand out from your competitors, and will help you to build relationships with both clients and potential clients.
Here Are Some Social Listening Tools
The following Social Listening Tools monitor various different platforms. They have a dashboard which will help you to monitor and allow you to post, once you have tied them in with your social media accounts many will show analytic data.
Many offer free trials so you can give them a try before committing!