Social Listening- Important?

In social media marketing, what matters the most out of all can be being updated about anything and everything. May it be Face book, Twitter or Google plus that you use, you need to be updated about the current topics in the society, new trends and fads. This can be properly done only of we are attentive to the conversations happening around, may be among our interested parties/ target groups. This is the very concept of “Social Media Listening”!

Social listening is the process of monitoring digital or online conversations to understand what customers are saying about a brand and industry online. Marketing teams primarily use social listening for community management, such as identifying customer pain points and providing direct consumer response to questions, complaints, and comments. Marketing teams also use social listening to surface feedback that could help to differentiate their brand, product, or service. Here, they monitor what people generally perceive as issues, and according to them what real solutions are, or at least how the solution looks like.

Listening to what people are saying about your brand on social media will benefit your business as a whole. Not only will customer service be able to provide quick problem-solving, but your R&D team can easily access feedback on what your target audience thinks about your products as well as those of competitors.

Once you’ve established yourself as an active participant in social media discussions, your community will start watching out for you. For instance, more people will start tagging you in their recommendations or conversations instead of just simply mentioning you.

Social listening is important. It is important due to several reasons. As digital channels proliferate, there are myriad ways for consumers to share feedback and experiences — both directly and anonymously. Social listening allows marketing teams to prioritize and evaluate feedback from the public. This feedback can be used to create more appealing offerings, both in the form of product and services as well as content and advertisements.

Before you start monitoring conversations, you need to figure out your goals. Like with most social endeavors, having a specific objective in place will help guide your strategy and influence. What do you want to get out of social listening? What exactly you want to monitor in the online conversations? And whom do you specifically target in this deed?

According to the Social Media Examiner – the followings are the ways social listening can benefit your business;

1. ·         Generate Leads by Solving Problems
2. ·         Attract New Customers
3. ·         Identify Influencers and Advocates
4. ·         Discover Where Your Community Hangs Out
5. ·         Improve Customer Care
6. ·         Get Feedback on Products
7. ·         Find Top Talent
8. ·         Drive Innovation

So, it must be clear to you by now that with social listening, you don’t have to ask people what they want; just listen in on their conversations and use these insights to figure out what they really need. Sometimes, people don’t know how to tell the exact thing that they want to mean when asked. But, still even without their knowledge, they express them in their daily conversations.