With nearly half the global population on social media, it’s become necessary for businesses to understand the insights into their existing and potential consumers as well as the new trends that can be found in the comments and posts generated on social media platforms.
Instead of making assumptions on what your customers want or need, why not listen to precisely what they’re saying? That’s where social listening comes in.
What Is Social Listening?
Social listening is the process that businesses adopt to monitor and track public mentions and conversations about their product or brand. The purpose of social listening is to use this data to discover opportunities that can benefit the businesses’ operations, advertising approach, and product updates.
We’ve listed 5 reasons why businesses can benefit from embracing social listening. Let’s go!
Why Is Social Listening Important?
1. Customer Expect Brands to Respond
Customers who write on social media want to feel heard, and they want you to respond to their questions or join conversations. No matter how fast you get in touch with them, if the answer is inappropriate or unsatisfactory, it will only frustrate the customers and give them the impression that you don’t care about what they have to say.
Social listening is about understanding your customer’s problems and crafting responses carefully to provide value. Engaged customers and valuable interactions will increase customer retention rates and prompt brand loyalty.
2. Crisis Management
Apart from positive customer feedback, social listening helps address PR disasters before they get out of hand. By monitoring social media accounts, you’ll be able to identify pain points in real-time and address common issues to prevent more customers from being affected.
Even though an incident has been solved on your side, remember that unhappy customers know how to use social media platforms to empower their voices and spread negativity. So, use social listening to mitigate the negative impact and track your brand’s PR health. If the mistake is yours, don’t hesitate to apologize in public, you can earn even more respect and establish yourself as a trustworthy brand.
3. Discover New Opportunities
What’s the latest trend in your sector? What issues need to be addressed? Are they any gaps and shortfalls in your industry that people are talking about? Social listening can help you find answers to these questions.
Social listening acts like an online focus group where conversations, feedback, recommendations, and opinions expressed by users can be beneficial for the marketing, product, and sales team to identify opportunities, rectify problems, and provide improvements.
Furthermore, marketers can use the language that their audience itself uses to create content that will resonate further with them. By doing so, you’ll increase customer acquisition humanly and smartly.
4. Track Your Competitors
Apart from monitoring what your customers have to say about your brand, social listening will allow you to discover where you stand in your respective market. You’ll learn what your competitors are up to in real-time and, most importantly, what people say about them.
You’ll either identify new opportunities or learn a hard lesson by watching your competitor’s misstep and get it wrong.
5. Identify Influencers to Reach New Audiences
Did you know that 49% of customers depend on influencer recommendations?
Thanks to the number of post likes, the number and content of comments, and similar, social listening can help you identify who is talking about your brand and impacting your target audience’s decisions.
As a result, businesses can collaborate or partner with ‘influencers’ or natural brand advocates to execute marketing campaigns to increase brand exposure, enhance the online reputation, and cut through the noise to attract new followers and customers.
Not yet convinced to seek influencers and brand ambassadors for your brand?
According to a 2019 survey, businesses are making $5.20 for every $1 spent on influencer marketing. This is indeed a significant return on investment. It’s believed that influencer marketing is the fastest-growing channel for brands – even bigger than paid search, email marketing, or SEO. So, don’t miss out!
Wrap Up
If you don’t want to miss out on the benefits listed above and if you care about your customer’s opinions, it would benefit your business to embrace social listening.
It’s the most effective way to learn what your target audience thinks of your products, get the chance to develop new ideas based on industry trends, improve your customer experience, and create the type of content that your followers actually want.
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