Ever wondered what your customers or competitors are saying about you on social media?
With thousands of messages published every second on social media, there’s a lot of comments out there to learn from.
Today we are going to explain how important it is to listen to your audience to understand better and grow your brand.
Here’s what you’ll learn in this post:
- What is social listening?
- How can social listening help you grow your brand?
- Effective social listening strategies to scale your business.
What Is Social Listening?
It’s common for people to share their opinions on social media, so it’s no surprise they do the same about your products and services.
Social listening is the process of analyzing conversations on social media and turning those insights into better business decisions. It allows you to tap into what’s being said on your channels, and beyond.
This might sound a lot like your everyday social monitoring where you respond to comments and DMs.
But while monitoring, you will learn what people are saying, how people feel and why, even when they don’t tag your brand. This can have a big impact on your social strategy and your entire business.
Social listening includes customer feedback, direct mentions of your brand, or discussions regarding specific keywords and topics.
How Can Social Listening Help You Grow Your Brand?
Social listening can help you collect feedback that can help you update your working process and improve customer service.
So instead of making assumptions about your audience, social listening helps you hear what they want or need.
- Customers appreciate brands that respond. Responding to your customers on social media increases engagement and builds trust with your audience.
- You can improve your product or service. Your customers usually identify issues with your products, services, or work processes.
- You can easily manage a crisis situation. If your marketing campaign creates bad buzz, you can quickly sort out your strategy by following your customers’ feedback.
- You can increase customer acquisition. Inbound marketing allows you to convert people who like your content into customers ready to buy your products or services.
7 Effective Social Listening Strategies to Scale Your Business
Now that you understand the importance of social listening for the development of your business and your brand let’s see what the most effective strategies to implement are.
Monitor Brand Health and Reputation
It is essential to monitor what they are saying about your brand.
In social conversations, you can monitor your social media channels, brand mentions, topics, keywords, and products. You can repeat this process daily, manually or also if needed, you can automate it.
Choose the Right Keywords and Topics to Monitor
Social listening can be difficult to track across multiple channels. However, selecting strategic keywords and topics to monitor can simplify the process.
Simply put, the keywords and topics should be related to your business. Doing so, you will get the most relevant information in real-time. But always stay up to date, because keywords can change as your business grows.
For example, some people may not mention your brand name but your product name. In this case, you should search by product name.
Take Your Customer Feedback to the Next Level
Listening to your customers gives you trustworthy information about what you should do. One of the main reasons when using social listening is to get a sense of customer feedback, whether positive or negative comments. By listening to what they say, you can use their feedback to improve your product or service, regardless of what the feedback is about.
For example, if people are complaining about the customer service response time, you can fix it by creating frequently asked questions (FAQ) and helping them resolve their issue way easier.
Track Your Competition
Social listening allows you to have a better understanding of your competitors. Now everyone comments on everything online, so it is easy to find what they think about your competitors.
You can use this information to improve your brand by understanding what the audience loves about your competitor or even what mistake they are making. So listen and learn from the audience!
Leverage Key Events
When promoting your conference or event, hashtags are essential to get the word out to as many people as possible.
However, it would be a mistake to base your hashtag only on the title of your conference or event. So you should shift the terms you use, such as meeting titles, speaker names, or subjects.
This strategy will give you a complete picture of how the participants perceive your event. You will be able to know the positive points and the things to improve and thus maximize your business opportunities.
Generate Leads Through Engagement
Another strategy is to use social listening to engage with your audience. The main idea is to engage in the comments of accounts related to your niche and offer your expertise or simply launch conservations on relevant topics.
You can, for instance, follow posts titled “recommendations” that are suitable to your sector. Then you can respond with an advice or a product recommendation.
Track Analytics, Measure Results, and Optimize
Today, dedicated hashtag campaigns are fairly common. Especially since it has been demonstrated to be one of the most efficient methods for expanding user engagement and reach.
You can gather data that could benefit your brand’s marketing campaigns by monitoring online conversations on social networks.
Use the different tools to automatically measure and evaluate the reach, generation and engagement of your marketing efforts.
In addition, you can easily export the data to demonstrate to your clients the significance of social listening.
Key Takeaways
Now that you know how important social listening is, you can start monitoring what they say about your brand. Keep in mind these strategies:
- Choose the right keywords and topics to monitor.
- Launch conservations on relevant topics.
- Use hashtags to leverage your events or conferences.
- Track analytics, measure results, and optimize.
Now back at you. Do you read what your customers or competitors say about your business? Tell us in the comments below!
Denisa Lamaj
