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Without a social listening strategy in place, you’re guaranteed to miss out on a range of invaluable data to help build your business. This article is going to detail what social listening is and explain why it matters, so keep reading for more.
What is social listening?
Social listening is essentially following social media sites for anything related to your brand and then analysing them for insights to discover business opportunities. There are two steps to social listening.
- Monitoring social media channels for mentions of your brand or products and keywords that are related to your business in any way.
- Analysing the information so you can put what you’ve learnt into action. This is often done in small ways such as responding to customers but can also result in huge changes such as adjusting the way your brand is positioned.
This is similar to social monitoring, but social monitoring is more focused on collecting data and monitoring return on investment (ROI). Take a look at this social listening tool and see what it can do for you.
Why does social listening matter?
- It helps you to understand and engage with your audience
One of the best things about social listening is that it helps you to understand and engage with your audience. Without this, you’ll be trying to create a business strategy without knowing the whole picture.
You might find that an existing customer posts about how much they love your service, or perhaps you will come across a group of people looking for solutions that you can provide. You just won’t know unless you take the initiative to have a look!
- You can gain invaluable industry and competitor knowledge
Although it’s important to understand what people are saying about your brand, it’s also good to know what is being said about your competitors and the wider industry in general. The biggest advantage of this is that you will learn more about where exactly your company fits in the wider marketplace.
Social listening will also show you what your competitors are doing. Maybe they’re launching a new product that’s similar to yours, or maybe they have a great new marketing idea that you could take pointers from.
- Product intelligence
Using social listening tools to monitor wider industry conversations also gives a good insight into what’s working well and what’s not working for any existing or new customers. This kind of information is useful for each of your company’s teams and will go a long way towards ensuring customer satisfaction. You never know, maybe what you learn will inspire a new product or marketing idea.
- Identify collaboration opportunities
Further, keeping tabs on conversations about your industry will give you an idea of important people within the industry that you might want to connect with. Remember that these kinds of people have the ability to influence how a lot of people feel about your business so it’s imperative you keep your eyes open to identify the best opportunities.
It’s more than likely that you’ll find brand advocates or meaningful collaboration opportunities when you watch the space around you.
