Introduction
Social listening is keeping an eye on what people are saying about your company, your services, or your competitors on digital media channels. You can learn more about your audience’s requirements and preferences by using audience listening. It’s a quick and easy approach of acquiring detailed insights into your existing and future clients and delving further into your audience research. Also, it might aid in the development of lasting connections with your audience.
Keeping an eye on the conversations taking place on social media platforms is one of the most popular and efficient methods for audience listening. Social listening is the term used for this. It’s vital to maintain tabs on what’s being said because people talk about your brand or subjects related to your sector on a daily basis. You may develop stronger audience profiles, develop better content, and come up with better digital strategy if you are aware of this.
Benefits of Social listening
Customer happiness is just one of the many advantages of social listening. A correctly crafted social listening plan can improve your brand’s reputation, attract more recommendations, help you find new USPs, and make it simple for you to keep tabs on rival activities. Using audience listening in your marketing efforts has several advantages. It will assist you in:
- Keeping up with market advancements to improve your sector understanding; B2B marketers should pay particular attention to this.
- Keeping tabs on what consumers are saying about your brand on social media and other online forums, such as blogs and news sites.
- Keeping an eye on online mentions, updates, and announcements from competitors.
- Providing fresh concepts for your marketing, message, and content.
- Improving customer service by being aware of your audience’s wants and needs.
- Modifying products, services, and propositions to meet both current and future client needs.
- Creating a connection with your audience and work to establish a trusting, long-lasting relationship.
- Helping you react and prepare for a social media crisis or brand incident.
How to listen effectively
According to Statista, 36% of consumers say excellent customer service is what makes them suggest a company online. Thus it makes sense to use social monitoring to see how your brand is viewed in the marketplace. You can listen like an expert by following these six steps:
- Determine what to listen for
- Use social listening resources.
- Snoop on your competitors.
- Discover how to react to criticism, praise, and complaints.
- Make a note.
- Take action.
It’s that easy. Let’s take a closer look at each step.
1. Determine what to keep an ear out for
Identifying the “what” and “why” of your social listening strategy is the first thing you need to do- Your complete digital marketing plan should be in line with your social listening goals. The following are some examples of what you can track with social listening:
- Brand references.
- Inventions or improvements in the industry.
- Identify and follow competitors
- Consumer feedback, including negative and positive comments
- Chosen keywords
- Topics pertaining to your business or sector
- Targetable and relevant hashtags
- Talk forums – Reddit, Facebook, LinkedIn, or Google groups
You can learn more about your target market, your industry, and your competitors by monitoring some or all of these. This will assist you in creating better content and using platforms to promote your company and encourage participation.
2. Use social listening tools
There are numerous tools available for audience listening. Let’s examine a few of the most common ones.
Hootsuite- Hootsuite allows you to manage several social media accounts simultaneously from a single dashboard, making it simple to monitor all of your networks at once.
You may follow influencer accounts with this tool, measure keyword usage, examine and respond to messages, and watch brand mentions. Additionally, you can build influencer and lead lists, view analytics reports to gauge your progress, schedule posts in advance, and deliver training via Hootsuite University.
Google Alerts-
The scope of Google Alerts is one of its main draws. It monitors all web content, including web pages, blogs, news articles, scientific research, and much more, to look for your chosen search phrases. You can create alerts for any term or phrase, which is an additional advantage. This enables you to keep an eye on goods, services, brand references, rivals, or keywords. You may also control how frequently you will receive email alerts, enabling you to keep a close eye on what people are saying about you.
Brandwatch-
A social media analytics program called Brandwatch keeps track of billions of online discussions from blogs, forums, news sites, forums, videos, and social feeds. It allows you to track mentions and keywords in real-time and is a platform for social media management and consumer intelligence. As an added feature, the tool makes advantage of image and sentiment analysis. Accessing consumer insights, trends, brand perception, and influencers will be made easier thanks to this.
3. Snoop on your competitors
It is always a good idea to keep an eye on your competitors to see what they are up to, particularly if they are generating talk or increasing engagement. Using social media metrics and social intelligence tools will help you achieve this. Keep an eye out for the dialogues, promotions, and posting times used by your rivals’ most interesting content kinds and themes. Using these tools, you are looking for audience-resonant material shared by your competitors as well as the fundamental statistics like followers and likes.
4. Understand how to respond to criticism, praise, and remarks
There is no point in ignoring what your consumers are saying, whether it is positive or negative, if you are putting up social listening to monitor mentions. Every company has received a negative review at some point, or perhaps even a fraudulent one, but how you respond to it distinguishes your brand. Reach out if you see a complaint or someone complaining about your goods or services. Begin with an expression of regret, such as “I’m sorry you’re having this experience,” and then address the matter at hand. Suggest to have a private WhatsApp chat or other type of conversation to settle the issue. Display your concern and want to keep them by your actions.
5. Make a note
Keeping track of interactions will help you understand your audience and get feedback. Make a spreadsheet and assign someone the duty of updating it. As determined when you established your social media style manual and routine, this could be a representative of your marketing or customer care teams. Make a note of the different comment categories, such as the ones for compliments and concerns. After that, you can add each comment worth noting into the relevant area of your document.
6. Take action-
Every week or month, pull up your updated spreadsheet and give each tab a fresh makeover. Are there any recurring themes or patterns in your complaints that you could use to create more effective content or enhance a service. If so, you should discuss this with your customer support team to see if you can find a long-term solution to the problems your consumers are having. To acquire more feedback, you can always reach out via an email campaign or a social media poll.
Conclusion
Thus, marketers and businesses like Digital MarkEthics may learn a lot about their customers and brands via social listening on social media. Understanding how to use each platform efficiently and evaluating the data to generate business insights are challenging tasks.
