Why Social Media Listening Matters

In the blink of an eye, social media has expanded stupendously. The days without Facebook, Twitter and Instagram seem like a distant memory in the past. It has changed the face of conventional marketing and has now become a crucial platform for marketers everywhere. There are innumerable brands promoting themselves online and competing to stay on top. For them, the thought of not having a social media strategy in this day and age is unimaginable. But to design an effective social media strategy, you need to listen to the consumers first. Social media is one the first places people look to while making product related decisions. Your brand’s online image has to be agreeable or you risk losing a number of potential customers. It’s one of the main reasons why social media listening/monitoring has become essential for marketing. Brands everywhere are slowly realizing its importance, so much so that companies like Dell actually have social media listening command centers!!

So here is what social media listening can do for you:

Know What Is Being Said About Your Brand

From the galore of information on social media, through listening you can find out what is being said about your brand in particular- how often it is being mentioned, popular sentiments associated with it, who the top authors are, among which gender your brand is more popular, etc. These insights can help you understand how successful your products and services are, how effective your social media strategy is, so on and so forth. Customer feedback can help you fix any problems in your products or services or make changes to them based on their demands. Such feedback can even work as reviews for people looking up your brand online for the first time.

What’s New In The Market?

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The market today is ever changing and it is necessary to keep up with the changing times. There are a countless number of people talking about the latest trends and their preferences online. Listening can help you understand the current market. You can know what type of products (or services) are most talked about, whether the attitudes are positive or negative, what people are looking for in new products, so on and so forth. These findings will help you design new and better products as well as make changes to existing ones. And if you go beyond your company/industry related online activity, you can find a plethora of ideas for new products, services or campaigns from people’s conversations. You know what they say, devil’s in the details!  

Keep An Eye On Your Competitors

It’s a known fact that this is a highly competitive world. And when there are so many brands specializing in the same field, you need to keep up with the rest of them to survive in the market. And SM monitoring can help you find out which competitor is talked about the most and how often, what their customers are saying about their products, what their unique selling point is, how well are they engaging their customers, success rate of their online campaigns, latest additions to their products and services. You could gain insights from their activity and match their products, services and offers as well as go a step further to stay on top.

Get Acquainted With Influencers

Influencers are present on all leading social media networks and have the power to affect the opinion of their audience about various subjects. They are opinion leaders, with a large following and expertise in a particular field. So a word from them could make your brand rise or fall. You could also learn more about your industry through them as well as discover other influential people in their networks. So once you identify them using monitoring tools, building good relations by engaging them can go a long way in strengthening your brand image.

Meet New Prospects

Social media monitoring can help you in real time lead generation. If you track online activity, you can find people who are looking for your industry related services. Then you can figure out the ones who could potentially convert to customers, engage them to find out their needs and choices and present them with the offers that suit their demands. Also, if you reach out at the right time, you could convince competitor customers who are disappointed in or frustrated with their services to switch! 

Talk To Your Customers

Customer is king and you need to pay attention to everything they say. Whether it is praise, a complaint or a question, social media has made it easy for them to address brands directly and instantly. Hence, customer relationship management has become essential for marketers today. Responding to their posts will ensure good customer relations as well as enforce goodwill. 

Meet Crisis Head On

Every brand has faced negative attention online at one point or the other. But the brands that tackled the issue with agility are the ones that came back on top. In today’s social media world, a small slipup, like not responding to an angry customer could be a blow to your online reputation. Posts can go viral in no time, especially if you do not address the source of such a potential risk at the right time, leaving you in a serious crisis situation. But thanks to social media monitoring you can get an early warning about any such potential risk and respond immediately to control the situation. Listening can make online reputation management a lot easier as you can understand the reasons behind negative sentiments, study the profile or behavior pattern of the source of the problem, figure out which influencers can help you in that particular situation and so much more!

Create Compelling Content

Simply talking about your products and offers will not turn the audience into loyal customers. You need to create content that they can relate to. They have to be able find a match between it and their opinions, preferences and needs. All the above mentioned points can give you the understanding you need to generate the most suitable content to attract audience.

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To know more about how Social Media Listening can be beneficial for your brand, get in touch with us