WHY SOCIAL MEDIA LISTENING IS IMPORTANT FOR BRANDS
By now businesses know social media isn’t just a broadcast platform. Social media has brought the most significant marketing change in the past decade. Before social media, brands couldn’t think of building such close connections with their audience or having real-time conversations with their customers on a global scale. In order to leverage social network presence and to create a successful strategy brands need to sharpen their social listening abilities.
What is Social Listening?
Social listening is the process of tracking conversations around specific phrases, words or brands. A company can later leverage this information for analyzing consumer behavior, determining the public’s perception of a company, and comparing a company’s public reputation to its competitors.
Right listening strategy will help you to enhance your social media efforts positively. Focused listening will tell you which social networks your audience is most actively using and the general sentiment about your brands, products, competitors or industry. By using social listening to determine your social media strategy, your company will save both time and money.
There are some compelling reasons why brands should make listening a top priority. Here they are:
Building Community : Social listening tools are available to businesses of all sizes. They enable you to track conversations and detect buyers, leads and key influencers in your industry. All this knowledge will help you to interact with customers in a way that builds a positive image of your brand and fosters better relationships, which eventually form a tight community of loyal followers or even brand evangelists.
Understanding Consumer better : Listening tool helps you identify which users talk about you the most, interact with you the most and have most followers. Once you have that kind of intelligence, you will be able to craft engagement strategies for them. Brands can identify common problems and provide specific solutions, create a comprehensive knowledge page based on questions frequently asked by consumers and integrate those insights with CRM to benefit from some cost savings.
Better customer service and direct interaction : Before the Internet, it was very challenging to track customer complaints. Not only that, but there wasn’t much you could do about an issue that wasn’t specifically addressed to you. However, people now turn to social networks for venting, questions and feedback, giving businesses a huge opportunity to be more involved in the customer experience. Adding social listening to your strategy will help ensure that you don’t miss out on the opportunity to help existing customers or gain new ones.
Identifying Influencers : Influencers are important to your social media strategy. Influencers love to talk about products, services and customer service issues both online and offline. It is being observed that 74% of consumers rely on social media to inform their purchasing decisions. 90% of consumers trust peer recommendations, while only 33% trust ads. With that much value placed on the opinion of another individual, it’s in your best interest to have influencers and tastemakers in your corner. Active social listening can help you identify key influencers so you can gather valuable insight about your products, brand, or industry. Once you identify your key influencers, you should create an Influencer Management Plan by developing these important relationships.
All in all, social listening is an activity that is rich with insights relevant to every area of your business. By keeping tabs on what’s being said about your brand, you can improve your interactions and build a positive image throughout the web.
Source: business2community.com, cdn.socialbakers.com
