Social Listening has become an essential element of every business’s marketing strategy, placing increased emphasis on how a business engages with their customers through their social media channels and the role this plays in raising brand awareness and providing top quality customer service.
It’s important for business to adapt and develop a social listening strategy, as it allows you to better tailor your product or service to the wants and needs of your customers, enabling you to engage in an online conversation with your customers on social networks in real time.
In this article, we will cover what is social listening, the benefits of social listening and social listening best practices that you can utilise in your organisation in order to best utilise you social listening tools.
What is social listening?
Social listening is the process of monitoring your brand’s social media channels for any customer feedback regarding your brand, products or services, and using these insights to frame your next steps. Social listening should occur on every social platform in which your business has a presence, including Facebook, Instagram, Linkedin and maybe even Tik Tok.
It is essential to any business to prioritise building an online presence and following on social media, however building an online community through engagement is the key to business growth and success. Social listening can allow you to gain an insight into the effectiveness of your social media marketing campaigns in real time, as you’re able to actively monitor mentions of your brand and the engagement your posts are receiving.
Organisations and brand’s these days should have customer-centric mindsets. Understanding your customers is achievable through data. Social listening ensures customers feel heard on social media and will appreciate evidence of a personal voice behind a brand. This is why social listening is critical to brand monitoring. It allows you to gain an accurate insight into the effectiveness of your marketing campaigns and social media management.
According to research done by Sprout Social, 83% of respondents like when brands respond to questions, and 68% like when brands join conversations.
Social media listening holds many opportunities for broadening your reach to prospects. Your company’s following isn’t just loyal customers but users who enjoy your content and will spread your brand’s awareness to other potential customers.
There is a clear link between social listening and engagement levels on social media platforms. We are living through the humanisation of business, and through social listening, followed by an analysis, you can gain insights into your customers thinking and act on those opportunities. T
Here are some of the brand affiliations you can track with social listening:
- Your brand/business name and social media handles
- Your most popular products
- Your branded hashtags
- Your slogans
- Relevant unbranded hashtags (product or service related)
- Industry-specific keywords
- Competitors’ brand names/handles/products/slogans
Asking your followers their pain points, concerns, and things they want to know or understand further will provide valuable steps to future content creation and curation.
Benefits of social listening
Here are the 7 reasons your brand or organisation should engage in social listening:
- It shows you care
- Lets your followers feel heard, prompting them to engage further
- Build deeper relationships with your customers
- Pinpoint customers most common issues
- Monitor the health of your brand and its reception with followers
- Each account’s content can be tailored based on the follower feedback data
- Reply to negative comments to demonstrate brand transparency
The benefits of engaging in social listening outweigh the energy and resources used to monitor your brand’s online presence.
The customer service, content marketing, and product development teams could all benefit from what you learn when you’re listening on social media. Make sure to communicate those learnings. And seek input from those teams, too.
