Social Listening and Why it is Important for your Business

Building a successful online business requires a significant investment of your time and resources. Listening to the customer is one of the strategies to ensure a business succeeds.  In today’s digital economy, it has become more tasking as the modern consumers have go digital. Organizations are facing a multi-tiered challenge as they try to listen to the online customers and the walk in customers. This raises the question of social media monitoring. In this article, we feature social media listening. We shall look why maintaining an active social listening strategy matters for your business. But first,

What is Social Listening?

Social listening refers to the process of tracking the conversations around a specific topic, keyword, and phrase. You can also track conversations that touch a specific industry or brands. The social listening strategies allow a business to leverage the insights and discover the opportunities that can be beneficial for your business. Social listening involves much more than keeping an eye on the notifications. Social listening requires analysis and a reflection allowing the organization to achieve various benefits, as we shall see here.

·       Social Listening Allows Marketers to Track the Overall Brand Health

Social listening offers the organization sentiment analysis. How do your products make the target consumers to feel? This is true for the digital marketing consultants who are trying to understand the qualitative benefits of a particular product or service. Social listening helps a brand manager to understand the value of the products beyond what the product actually does. To achieve this, it takes taking all the data that is available across the social media and categorizing it for a positive, negative and neutral sentiment. With such an analysis, the organization can be able to determine how health their brand is.  If you realize more positive sentiments than negative sentiments, it is an indication that your brand has a positive reputation.

·       Social Listening Allows an Organization to Create Content their Audience Craves

Any social media strategy requires proper content. It is upon an organization to ensure that they are sharing content that their audience wants to see. If an organization is not keen to observe what content attracts the viewer’s attention, it is impossible keeping the customers engaged.

Some organizations result into trial and error strategies when it comes to creating content for their audiences. This might result into a high wastage of time and resources. With social listening, it is much easier and less involving. You just need to come up with different topics that your audience cares about more.

To achieve this, you use the trends tools that allow you to monitor the trending topics. This eliminates the trial and error method where you post just any topic.  With this data, you can then be able to construct personalized social media content. This content uses the type of language that is familiar with the target audience. The same applies when coming up with the content for your landing pages the ad copy or the blog posts.

The social media campaigns start with identifying opportunities in the market place. In most cases, these opportunities are readily available although you might not realize them. Through active social listening, an organization can brainstorm new marketing ideas by spotting trends in the social media conversations. This is by listening to the conversations your customers have on social media. To achieve this, look for trends in the content that your audience shares. You can as well capitalize on the user-generated content. The social media marketers can tag the posts from their customers so long as the content promotes the brand. Stay on top of the trending topics to ensure your social media marketing campaigns yield higher returns.

·       Focus on Improving Customer Experience

Social listening is an important tool that helps in improving customer experience. Your customers will use the social media to air their grievances. A business should be keen to identify such complaints. When you notice complaining customers, the obvious reaction to such incidents should be to focusing on addressing the issues with the product or the service. Moreover, reply to the customer complains directly and promise to address the issue.

·       Use of Social Listening to Drive Strategic Product Decisions

Social listening is not only for the marketing department. It is also important for the research and design department. You can get innovative ideas through actively listening to the online conversations. In addition to the research and design drills, in corporate what the customers have to say. Through actively listening to the customers, you can realize the features they have liked, you can understand why some products seem to outsell the others and you can understand the new products that your audiences wish to have.

Through the help of the social media listening tools, you can achieve the above benefits. As you might have seen, social listening benefits nearly every aspect of your business. The sales team, the brand management team, the research and design team as well as the marketing team will benefit from social listening. Is your business using social listening? Contact the Dill Design, for effective social listening strategies that will benefit your organization.