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For every business, it is important to understand your customers and how they feel about your brand. Understanding their experience with your product or service can help you increase customer satisfaction, react to negative feedback, and find areas of improvement. A great way to learn about what your customers are saying is through social listening.
What is Social Listening?
Simply put, social listening is monitoring what people say about your product and brand online. It is understanding how people respond to your business, service, or campaign, and using your insights to improve your brand image.
Why is Social Listening Important?
There are many benefits of social listening. Let’s look at some of them:
The data you obtain through social listening will help you figure out what your customers are happy or not happy with, and what you should improve.
It helps you learn and understand new trends in this fast-changing environment. Staying up to date with trends and news will make you stand out among your competitors.
It helps companies get real-time insights and promptly react to what consumers are saying about their brand
It helps you engage with customers more naturally and create a connection with them.
It will allow you to identify potential influencers for your brand
With the increasing online competition, online shopping, and new platforms, it is safe to stay that social listening is here to stay.
Types of Insights you Can Gain from Social Listening
Conversations about your brand: You can find conversations about your brand. By tracking your brand mentions, you can learn what people are saying about your company and understand any positive or negative comments. This will also show you how your marketing campaigns perform or how people are reacting to your content. A piece of advice: don’t be discouraged by negative comments; you should welcome negative feedback because that is how you will find an area for improvement.
Industry Trends: Through social listening, you can learn the newest trends, famous topics, or viral content going around the internet. Understanding key trends and what your audience react to is the key to staying on top of your social media game.
Finding trends or content ideas your audience engages with gives you an opportunity to get more engaged on your page, or even create ads around it and convert some customers.
Competitor benchmarking: Social listening will help you monitor your competitors’ posts and how people are reacting to their brand. You will be up to date with competitors’ campaign performance and content ideas. This will help you understand what people like or dislike in the industry and how to get ahead of the competition.
Potential new customers: You can identify your target buyers by finding people who talk about your brand or those who look for similar service.
Growth Opportunity: Social listening will help you understand consumers’ pain points/feedback/issues with your product – this will help you address these concerns and upgrade your product
Start Performing Social Listening:
Now that you understand the benefits of social listening to your business, let’s see where to start this process:
First, you should understand that customers want you to engage with them and have a conversation rather than “spy on them” or run a survey. There are many benefits of having an honest conversation with followers and consumers. You will be able to gain much more information by having a nice conversation with consumers. They will appreciate your brand more and be more likely to engage with your content. Also, people who feel more connected to your brand are more likely to become returning customers or recommend your products to a friend.
You should start with people who already talk about your brand and are familiar with your product or service. Pay attention to both positive and negative talk. Many brands dread negative reviews and see them as the end of the world, but negative feedback is a great opportunity to find areas of improvement for your product.
Next, we need to identify the keywords we will be tracking. These are usually consumers’ pain points and solutions they seek. You also need to define how you will utilize the information you get. How are you going to react to customer feedback, both externally (answering to them) and internally (using the information to improve your product).
Using the Information to Your Advantage
In the early stages of social listening, creating content around it is a great way to use this information. Pay attention to frequently asked questions and give the answers to people through your content.
Some examples of the content you can create is:
“How-to” YouTube/TikTok video
A blog post with steps to achieve the desired result
A single-image social media post
Social media carousel about “5 Mistakes to Avoid” or “4 Steps to…”
Not only will this help your customers and increase your ratings, but it will also get more traffic to your blog and YT channel or increase engagement on your social media posts.
In conclusion, social listening is an essential activity your marketing team should perform. It is a great way to stay ahead of the competition, learn about your customers’ experience, engage with your audience, and increase your sales. What your customers are saying online about you is essential information you need to have if you want to stay competitive and retain a strong brand image.