Business and listening are closely related. Succesful entrepreneurs listen to the customer needs and great revolutionary products and services. Listening makes us smart. We do not gather information required to innovate by talking. We do it by listening.
“When people talk, listen completely. Most people never listen.” ― Ernest Hemingway
Today listening landscape has changed. It is not enough to hear with your ears anymore. All of the buzz and ideas are on the noisy channel of social media. When the number of the social media channels are growing, it is becoming increasingly difficult to grab all necessary information about your industry changes and inquiries.
Your business is not only expected to talk about their services, post news about product launches and share lovely images. Listening and answering to customers and helping them when they search for a solution on social media is equally important. Therefore today there is a discipline in social media marketing called Social Listening.
Social listening (sometimes called Social Monitoring)
What are the benefits of social listening?
Certainly, this practice is all about analytics and willingness to understand your customers and audience worries, daily tasks, challenges and interaction with your brand.
“Most people do not listen with the intent to understand; they listen with the intent to reply.”
― Stephen R. Covey, The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People: Powerful Lessons in Personal Change
- When you understand the fuss about your industry, product topics, you can easily create content that is helpful to your customers. Your content marketing will benefit from the listening.
- Product improvements. Listen to the reviews and comments, and you will find 100 ways how to make the product better. Your customers are the best inventors and engineers.
- Find key Influencers marketing always pays back. Make sure when you listen you monitor conversations that attract influencers.
- Build a community of brand ambassadors. Have you launched an affiliate program recently? Great! Contact customers that praised your product on social media and offer them to join the program.
- Recruit people that are active in your industry and grow your company with talent.
- Continuously update your FAQ or HELP sections with most frequently asked questions about your service or product.
- Scott Stratten encourages brands to listen to employees in social media too. Sometimes your team members can get a false feeling of freedom when it comes to expressing an attitude towards your brand.
Bonus tip:
Discover spaces where your customers and your competitors are hanging out. Where is the discussion happening? Which social media platform? What blog? What forum? Is it Reddit? Is it Twitter or Linkedin? Maybe Pinterest?
Ultimately these details can alter your marketing direction and make your effort more efficient in the future. Each social media marketing platform is different. Attention span and interaction levels too.
Ruby Rusine, Social Media Coach, gives you many more reasons to perform social media listening.
Is it for me?
It is for every size of business.
So which tools allows me to listen to social media noise?
Mention is an excellent tool because it is not limited just to the brand mentions. It gives you more in-depth insights that you can convert to a smart action in your business.
Do not be confused by the social media noise and continuous flow. Neal Schaffer, the social media marketing expert, tells you that social conversations are not so random. You just need to understand them and monitor.
What exactly can you monitor?
These are just examples where to start:
- Your company name
- Your brand products
- Products features
- Your competitor’s company name
- Keywords that describe your service
You are listening to them, but what can you do?
Protect your companies reputation by always becoming available and answering the requests. More importantly, you can always fight with competitors and win their customers. How?
Mention has Sentiment Analysis for you. That way you quickly identify positive and negative mentions of your brand and competitors around the web with sentiment analysis. If you see that customers of your competitors are not happy with the service, target their unhappy customers real-time.
Analytics in Mention doesn’t have to be a static report. You can always use integrations like Slack to make real-time notifications to the right team members.
The point often overlooked – By monitoring your social media, you can always generate leads using Red Cappi email marketing software. When there is a real-time conversation about the problem or pain point, still have a form ready and ask for an email from the potential lead.
After that have a drip email campaign with automated email sequence (that is so easy to set up on Red Cappi) ready and make sure to grab a customer that couldn’t find a solution in your competitor’s space. We hope that by all means, you start using the tools which transform and grow your business.
Most importantly – So easy a baby can use it.