Social Listening, Its Importance, and Benefits
Companies can become a household name when it achieves higher brand awareness, which can be made possible with social media. Thus, building a strong reputation and following on social media is really important for any company’s success. However, there are many aspects to it.
Developing a reputation can be tricky, and you would not want to build an image for wrong reasons – poor service, no value for money, and impropriety are a few elements that can destroy your brand image. To avoid such issues, you should keep track of your company’s social media handles. Keep an eye for any negative signs that may lead to bad social media mentions through Social Listening.
Social Listening: Definition and Importance
Social Listening lets you monitor your company’s social media accounts, any direct feedback from customers, social media mentions or conversations around specific topics, keywords, phrases, competitors, and leveraging your perception to find opportunities and act on them. Unlike social media monitoring, which only focuses on the former, social listening is not just about keeping track of the conversations and mentions on social media but also about acting upon it.
Social Listening helps you track the overall brand health, generate content as per your audience’s interest, and discover significant leads. In addition to this, you can also analyze your target audience and industry, upgrade your customer experience, and create a long-term strategy according to the analysis. It helps you research well and come up with exciting concepts as per the latest trends in your industry to engage more with your audience.
Finding the root causes of the flaws will help your brand to meet the requirements of your customers. All of this is possible with social listening.
To further break it down, we have explained the importance and benefits of using Social Listening in the following four key points:
4 key points on why you should start using Social Listening straight away
Most entrepreneurs believe that social media has made it easier for them to get a better customer understanding. No doubt, people love sharing their opinions publicly on social media channels but are you listening to them?
Brands can use these platforms to get direct feedback and gain insights into what the audience expects. Ultimately, with Social Listening, you can provide better content/products and get ideas for future campaigns.
- Customers want to be heard
Customers appreciate it when the brands respond to them or join conversations. If your brand is responsive on social media, it is sure to make a positive impression. Ultimately customers would want to make a purchase with brands who value them and respond. However, it’s not just about responding. It would be best if you learned to take this interaction as an advantage. With social listening, you can come up with thoughtful responses that your customer wants to hear. These responses will build a solid reputation and increase retention rates.
- Tracking the overall brand growth is important
The famous saying, it only takes one matchstick to burn hundreds of trees. This one matchstick can be a scandal or any other issue that businesses face at times. Getting a few harsh comments now and then is alright, but if the negative comments start outweighing the positive ones, you might be in serious trouble.
With Social Listening, you can analyze the root cause of this incident and check if these negative comments have led to a decline in your followers or sales rate. Further, based on your research, you can build strategies to deal with the situation or come to a conclusion if it is a matter of just a few days.
- Say “hello” to new opportunities
Social listening lets you monitor your progress and helps you discover ways to enhance your service. In business, almost 50% of your work is done by the customers themselves. If many customers are giving negative feedback related to the same problem, that is something you need to improve quickly. Or if many customers start appreciating something, you will know it is a keeper.
Let’s assume; you own a dance class. If your customers are complaining about how the place becomes a hotchpotch, it is an opportunity to bring some considerable changes. You may want to get a bigger place or make more class shifts or limit the number of people that attend a class, etc. These changes may have pros and cons, but they can hopefully give some satisfactory results.
- Your followers are your asset
Social media is filled with opportunities to broaden your reach to potential customers. Your followers are your loyal customers who enjoy your content and love your social media feed. So practically speaking, these people must be your target audience. After all, converting your pre-existing customers into leads is easier than converting a complete stranger.
Inbound Marketing refers to creating informative, engaging, and useful content that can add value to your customer’s life. This will eventually attract your viewers to your brand more than your distracting ads ever will. Using social listening, you can create content that your target audience enjoys. You can gain insights by exploring their posts, mentions, shares, hashtags, and pictures. A content that matches their taste is sure to make an impact.
Fortunately, there are some very effective social listening tools available in the market that will help you analyze your results better.