Nowadays, everything revolves around social media and your presence on several channels. But have you ever heard of the term social listening? Indeed, it is quite simple, but oh-so essential.
Simply explained, social listening is looking at what is being said about your brand or product. This way you know what the consumer thinks and you can easily respond to it. Ideal right? Unfortunately, bitterly few companies use it or do not research it far enough.
“Simply explained, social listening is looking at what is being said about your brand or product.”
How do you do social listening?
- The most obvious: look at your reviews and dissect them. What could be better?
- Go down all social media channels and start your search for posts where people share their opinions about your business.
The bottom line, of course, remains social media channels. It allows you to further engage with your clients and prove yourself (if necessary).
Why start with Social Listening?
- Consumers love engaging brands
As mentioned earlier, customers have a slight preference for brands that engage with their followers. It’s all about people feeling heard. Provide answers with real value.
- Keep an eye on the growth of your business
Many companies face a scandal here or there. Think discriminatory posts etc. The way you deal with this also says a lot about your brand.
But most importantly, see what effect this has on the company’s performance. Look at your key metric that is essential to your business. Do you see a decline in this? Then you can think about the measures you will take.
- Discover new opportunities
Finding new opportunities for your brand or business is often a challenge. But thanks to social listening, your customers do the work for you. How then? If there are multiple consumers complaining about the same problem or hoping for the same development, there is work to be done.
In short, social listening is a great tool for finding ways to innovate your brand or products.
- Increase your customer acquisition
What company doesn’t want to grow? Yes yes, you heard it right: social listening is the opportunity. Ultimately, you are followed on your social media channels not only by your customers but also by people who simply enjoy your content.
To really capitalize on what your followers want to see, you can look at their posts, hashtags, etc. This allows you to create relevant content “tailored to your needs” and engage in customer retention. Moreover, you may be reaching other interested parties with this content and doing customer acquisition at the same time. Every company’s dream. Right?
What tools do we recommend?
Of course, it’s all easier said than done. Hence, we recommend some tools that will become your new best friend. Let’s go over them briefly!
- Sprout Social
They offer a social media management software to suggest solution that will improve your social media interactions with customers and prospects in the long run.
Sprout Social also gives you access to in-depth data analytics to streamline your engagement efforts, publish content and campaigns, and most essential: uncover trends and insights through social listening and so you can make strategic changes.
The platform also assists you in tracking your private messages and brand-specific keywords. In short, Sprout Social provides priceless insights that help you track and, of course, improve your social strategy.
- Hootsuite
Hootsuite also offers a social monitoring and listening platform. The social media marketing and management dashboard helps you create relationships with your brand’s social media followers.
With Hootsuite, you can make all your posts, comments and mentions of your brand across different social media channels. Super convenient and clear so! Moreover, you can respond to all these elements from Hootsuite.
This platform also allows you to import influencers and leads into lists and share them with others in your company. As icing on the cake, you can track what is being said about your brand, competitors and improve your campaigns based on that.
- HubSpot
HubSpot offers a tool where you can build campaigns, share content such as blog posts and thus automatically share your content on several social media channels and also discover the best times to post.
Compare the performance of your various channels and track the number of visits and leads you receive. HubSpot does offer much more than just social listening, so if you’re looking for a platform primarily for social listening this may not be for you.
Plan of action
Social media can indicate what trends are growing and what changes are occurring. Our advice: pay enough attention to it and respond adequately. Are you not doing this? Then your brand will quickly go downhill.
Consumers want a brand that is interactive and provides products, content and, most importantly, service that is genuinely useful and engaging.
Are you making it work? 3…2…1…Go!
