Social listening is the process of monitoring conversations across relevant social platforms to gauge your brand’s position in the market and determine future marketing strategies. In today’s competitive commerce landscape, it’s more important than ever to research your audience and learn more about brand perception. After all, your brand is what people believe about your business; it’s the values, public image, and key identifiers that people associate with you.
If you stop and listen to the conversations about you, you’ll not only learn more about what people are saying, but how you can guide that dialogue in the right direction. For example, let’s say you own a homemade line of organic skincare products. After some social listening, you learn that certain people are experiencing dry skin from a particular product of yours. From here, you can make educated changes, reach out to customers, and build loyalty with your audience.
Today’s consumers want to be heard and understood, and there’s no better way to meet them where they are than by paying attention. If you want to learn how to become an entrepreneur that succeeds in their field, here’s why you should use social listening to achieve your goals:
An Effective Two-Step Process
One of the best aspects of social listening is that it’s a straightforward strategy to implement. There are two primary steps to consider: 1) set up your social listening plan using social listening tools and 2) have a process in place to respond to conversation and make changes to your business.
In a nutshell, the first step is all about monitoring, while the second step is about taking action. The actionable response is the key differentiation between social media listening and social media monitoring. While social media monitoring emphasizes key metrics like brand mentions and relevant hashtags, social media listening is taking action based on the data that you’ve collected. Listening looks beyond the numbers to better understand how people feel and what motivates their purchasing decisions.
Social Listening Tools
There are several social listening tools to choose from and it’s important that you leverage these digital platforms to your advantage, many of which offer free trials. BuzzSumo, Hootsuite Insights, and Sprout Social are among some of the best options. Each of these tools allows you to set up social media streams across different social media platforms, respond to conversations from within a unified dashboard, find meaningful patterns and trends, schedule posts, and analyze sentiment.
Customer Engagement
One of the biggest benefits of social media listening is that it allows you to engage with your customers. Simply put, the vast majority of customers are willing to pay more for a better customer experience. Furthermore, modern consumers expect to be able to access a brand through multiple channels and methods. A study from Salesforce found that 78% of customers prefer omnichannel engagement. Without social listening tools, responding to customers across different platforms would be difficult to manage. For example, if a customer was having difficulty using a special discount code you sent them, they might voice their frustration on Twitter and mention your brand. Ideally, you’ll be able to reply right away—even if you have a sizable audience and several customer service requests.
Social listening also allows you to identify trends early on. For instance, consider the aforementioned example; now imagine that you notice several people are struggling to apply or understand your discount codes. Although it may have seemed intuitive to your team, you might use social media to clarify the process for future discount users, thus improving your conversions, loyalty, and reducing customer service requests.
But customer engagement isn’t always about responding to customer service requests. Customer engagement can also be just acknowledging a customer. If they liked a product, you might say thanks or simply like their post. Acknowledging their presence goes a long way towards building loyalty; customers are more likely to continue buying from you when they feel noticed.
Competitor Research
While social listening is great for understanding sentiment around your brand, it’s also a great strategy for competitor research. After all, it’s important for you to understand what consumers are saying about your competitors, which offers detailed insight into where you stand in the market. What do customers like about your competition? What are their pain points? How is your competition responding to mentions and conversations about their industry?
Paying close attention to your competitors can also help you discover new leads. If a customer is looking for a product like your competitor, you can respond to them accordingly. You’ll find that even if the competitor is more established than you, a customer may be willing to give your brand a shot because they spoke to you personally.
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eCommerce11 months ago