Social listening refers to the process of monitoring social media platforms for mentions and keywords to help understand better your target audience and industry. Social listening is a means for you to know more about your competitors, your product, and discover potential leads.

It is the best way to get to know and interact with your audience as it gives you knowledge on what people are saying about your brand. It gives you the opportunity to track, analyze, and respond to conversations about your business/brand on social media (Tran, 2020).

With that information, it becomes easier to track, analyze and respond to conversations on social media, which is crucial for building lasting relationships with an online audience.  

Improve Customer Care

Social listening will help you know what people are saying about your business online. You can use this information to identify both positive and negative feedback from customers. It is your way of determining your strengths and weaknesses and how to improve.

Ensure to recognize and thank the customers who made positive mentions and find a way to respond to the negative mentions and turning the bad experience to a positive one. The negative mentions should be viewed as a way to help your business improve.  

Competitive Analysis

Social listening helps you track your competitors on social media to see which businesses are doing better and how you can improve your brand. It is a perfect means to identify if there are any gaps and new opportunities to keep your business competitive in the social media world.

Generate Leads

Social media has turned out to be the best tool for lead generation. Social listening is your best means of finding and joining online conversations about your business. Always take advantage of these conversations because there could be potential customers who need just your confirmation about your services and product to become customers. By being part of these conversations, the potential customers will have more trust in your brand and convincing them to make a purchase will be much easier now.

Figure Out Where Your Audience Spend Most of Their Time Online

Social listening helps in identifying the exact platforms where conversations about your business are taking place. This is the most effective way to discover where your community hangs out and then you can invest your time and resources to join in the conversations. It can be on Twitter, Quora, on blogs, or Facebook. Join in the conversations and convert the leads into customers.

Social listening ought to help you enhance your marketing on social media, customer service, product management, and business management. Below are some tips on how you can build a successful social listening plan.  

Choose a data tool for social listening

You first need to identify the best tool that will provide all the necessary data for social listening. This is a tool that can provide data on hashtags, keywords, competitor analysis, and keep a record on crucial conversations about your business from potential customers. The things you need to track and keep records on include, brand name and account handles, your slogan, your industry hashtags, your top products, campaign names, misspelled names of your business or product, and finally, your competitors hashtags and slogans.

Identify where your target audience is concentrated

From the reports on conversations around your brand, you can see where most of your potential customers are located and where they are having important conversations about your brand. Then, you can concentrate on the platform with the highest potential.  

Track your top competitors

Competitive advantage is achieved when you do better than your competitors, and you can achieve this only after you have understood them very clearly. You need to know the platforms they are most active on, their social media posting frequency, the trends and events they are utilizing to grow on social media, and most importantly what their audience is saying about them. With this information, you can easily work on your brand to match or precede your competitors on social media.  

Social listening gives you a means to spy on your target audience without them knowing. It allows you to get the sincerest feedback about your business or product. When you have all this information, you can get to figure out what the target audience wants and work on delivering it to them. Social listening is even better when you join in the conversations, it helps build trust with your audience. C180 help brands improve their online presence and one means of achieving that is by conducting social listening.  

Are you currently using social listening to improve your business? Would you give it a try? Click here

Reference

Tran, T. (2020, November 3). What is social listening, why it matters, and 10 tools to make it easier. Social Media Marketing & Management Dashboard. https://blog.hootsuite.com/social-listening-business/#

...