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What is social listening, why is it important? ?

In today’s times, many businesses want to understand their target audience and customers more effectively. They search for ways that they can reach them so they can better market their product or services.

One of the most effective ways is social listening which is used to help you understand how others view and think about your business. It can help your business grow because you learn about your customers’ needs and want and find ways to develop an effective marketing strategy.

Continue reading to know more about social listening in detail and why it’s important.

Social listening definition

Social listening is defined as the monitoring of your business’s social media channels for customers’ feedback and mentions about your business.

It also involves analyzing customers’ feedback and mentions to gain insights about your business that will help in improving your marketing strategies so your business can perform really well.

Through social listening, you can learn and create the type of content that your followers will be engaged with, come up with new ideas for how to promote your business on social media and improve customer experiences through positive interactions with customers.

Why is social listening important?

Social listening is important where it will help a business grow and expand. This happens because a business gets to know all about its target audience’s opinions and feedback which means it can make you reach your business’s target audience effectively.

Here are also other top reasons why social listening is important for a business:

Helps you engage with customers

Through the use of social listening, you can engage with customers when they post comments about your business on social platforms.

For example, a customer might post about how he or she likes your product or service or have an inquiry or issue that he or she needs help with. As a business, you can take this as an opportunity to respond to customers on social media which makes customers become more loyal to your business.

Helps you with managing crisis

Social listening helps you track which posts that mention your business or that your business created on social media are positive and which aren’t.

Therefore, it can help you manage a crisis if people are providing you with negative feedback about something that your business was involved in.

Negative feedback signals that there is something that you need to pay attention to and need to resolve because customers are facing a certain issue with your business.

For example, If your business is facing a PR disaster, social listening helps you identify it and then you can work on solving it before it affects your business negatively.

Tracks competitors

Through social listening, you can also track your competitors where it gives you insights about them and where you are in the market.

For example, you will also learn about whether your competitors are launching new products or developing new marketing campaigns through social listening. Therefore, social listening will help you know what your competitors are doing and create a plan that can help you outperform your competition.

Helps you define customer pain points

Through social listening, you can learn a lot from customer feedback where you can know what’s not working with your customers such as issues that customers find in your product or service.

Using this feedback, you can then solve these customer pain points in many ways such as by adding a feature that can solve the issues that customers face or even develop a new product idea.

After solving these pain points, you need to use a targeted marketing campaign that will reach your target audience and spread to your customers so they can remain loyal to your business.

Helps you discover new sales leads

Customers are more likely to buy your product or service when your business builds relationships with them instead of selling to them your product or service directly.

This is where social listening can help your business where you get to learn about customer opinions and thoughts about your product or service and then develop these relationships by communicating to customers and sharing relevant information guaranteeing your credibility and business sales.

Helps you identify influencers and brand advocates

Using social listening can help you find out your important influencers. Influencers are those who have a large number of followers and fans and can influence them greatly. Identifying these influencers can help you in creating marketing strategies and campaigns around influencer marketing.

Social listening also helps you find brand advocates who promote your business on social media without any incentive other than they just love your business and what it offers. They are actually important in building your business’s credibility and trustworthiness.

Best practices for effective social listening

To be effective in social listening, you need to follow these best practices that will guarantee you top results in other marketing activities as well. These practices are:

Find social mentions:
You have to find how people talk about your business on social media and what’s their opinion when someone mentions the business on social media.
Gather all the different spellings of your business’s name:
By doing so, it helps to use these specific keywords that people search with even if there are misspellings so you could use it in search engine marketing where you appear in search engine results through paid ads.
Analyze the number of positive vs negative feedback:
You can know a lot about what customers think about your business through analyzing customer feedback. If the negative feedback is more than the positive ones, then there is a problem in your business that you need to address. If there is more positive feedback, then your business is doing well in terms of its marketing strategy.
Respond to feedback:
Part of a strong social listening strategy is to respond where you need to communicate with customers when they give you feedback whether it’s positive or negative.
Search for influencers:
If you are searching for an influencer try to find someone who has a high reach and audience engagement to get positive results from implementing your strategy.

5 best social listening tools

Hootsuite

You can use Hootsuite to monitor conversations, keywords, mentions, and hashtags. You can also use this tool to respond to conversations or mentions from the Hootsuite dashboard instead of responding from social media platforms.

There is another option in Hootsuite where you can follow influencers and brand advocates so that you can collaborate with them to spread brand awareness through campaigns.

You can also use Hootsuite insights to collect data about social media posts where you can find trends that you can use in your social media strategy.

sprout social

sprout social is made specifically for all social listening for Facebook and Instagram ads. You can also view the analytics behind your Instagram and Facebook ads to find out which ones have higher engagement.

Talkwalker

This tool is very effective and useful for social listening where it can analyze data on social media platforms, blogs, forums, news sites, and videos.

You can also monitor conversations about your business where you can analyze engagement, reach, and comments.

Mentionlytics

This tool is used to find mentions, keywords, and influencers across social media platforms where you could easily use them in your marketing strategy and to reach your target audience effectively.

Brandwatch consumer research

This tool monitors conversations from many different online channels such as blogs, forums, social networks, news, videos, and reviews. It can then send you email notifications to let you know about the conversations that involve your business.

Tips for using social media listening to improve your social marketing strategy

Know your target audience

It’s important to do research about your target audience to find who they are so that you can engage in effective social listening after finding those who are interested in your product or service. Not knowing your target audience can cause you problems because you don’t know who to target with your marketing strategy and campaign.

Therefore, you need to define who is your target audience through knowing their demographics, behaviors, and interests that will further help you understand them and then you can use social listening to collect information that you can then use in marketing strategies and campaigns.

Find user generated content

User generated content is the type of content that people share such as comments, images, and videos about your business.

Through the use of social listening, a business understands customers’ opinions when they share user generated content so they can know which areas of their strategy are doing well and which aren’t.

If user generated content is positive, it is highly effective in promoting your business organically because it adds credibility for your business where people are more likely to trust your business.

When user generated content is negative, a business can use it to understand the issue and then work on finding a solution for the customers.

Learn from your competitors

Effective social listening involves monitoring your competitors to know what areas are working for them well in their social media strategy and what isn’t.

You can find topics and types of content that are doing well for competitors so you can get an idea of how to further improve your strategy and get inspired to create new marketing strategies that will help your business grow.

Through monitoring competitors, you can get an idea about what interests your target audience based on the way that competitor’s target audience comments on social media channels which can help you create new marketing strategies.

Take action to create the strategy

Social listening isn’t just about monitoring customer’s mentions and feedback. It also involves gaining and analyzing insights about what customers want and then creating a suitable strategy that will help you achieve your customers’ wants and help your business grow.

In conclusion, social listening is all about monitoring how the customer thinks about your business on social platforms through analyzing the mentions and feedback that they post. You can then take action to create a suitable marketing strategy that will help your business achieve its goals.

Osolutions

We hope you enjoy reading this guide

What is social listening, why is it important? ?

Social listening definition

Want to know how to build an effective social listening strategy, read our guide now to know about the best steps for a top performing social listening strategy.

Why is social listening important?

Helps you engage with customers

Helps you with managing crisis

Tracks competitors

Helps you define customer pain points

Helps you discover new sales leads

Helps you identify influencers and brand advocates

Want to learn about the metrics used to measure social listening . Check our resource which can help you:

Best practices for effective social listening

Find social mentions:

Gather all the different spellings of your business’s name:

Analyze the number of positive vs negative feedback:

Respond to feedback:

Search for influencers:

5 best social listening tools

Hootsuite

sprout social

Talkwalker

Mentionlytics

Brandwatch consumer research

Tips for using social media listening to improve your social marketing strategy

Know your target audience

Find user generated content

Learn from your competitors

Take action to create the strategy

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