The online environment is a battlefield with many players. However, your job as a marketer isn't to play that battle - it’s to win it. By staying one step ahead of competitors, clients, and customers, you not only stand out from the crowd, but you also get ahead and stay ahead. People are often reluctant to talk about issues or complaints. Businesses have traditionally struggled to gather such information from social media as it's not easy for brands to trace the sources of their customer’s questions or comments. Social listening is an effective tool for gaining that information as you don't have to rely on customer service teams to interview customers. By identifying the types of queries they’re likely to have, you can tailor your response.
Social listening is an extremely valuable marketing tool, and if you do your job well, you should be able to find a way to use this data for your business. Research conducted by IBM reveals that on average, business owners get 82% of their customers to respond to and engage with them. Social listening involves gathering data from social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram, Pinterest, and more. Here are the key benefits of social listening:
- Get an Edge on Your Competition-When it comes to winning customers' trust and loyalty, social listening is key. As soon as they're asked, customers talk to other customers, other customers talk to friends, and friends talk to family, and so on, so there's a whole community of potential stakeholders that you can tap into. It's important to be seen as a trusted influencer in your market. If you're a small business, you probably don't have the resources of a big brand to rely on, but the social networks of your existing customers, especially those who've engaged with you before, are a great place to start.
- Improve Customer Service- Social media users expect companies to respond to them the same way they do to their friends and family. Social listening helps brands meet customer expectations by giving them an early warning on what's working and what's not, and allows them to respond accordingly, quickly. It can also help you increase trust by being responsive to customer's questions and concerns quickly and consistently. By tracking what's being said about your product on social media, you can improve product quality. You can also potentially cut down the time it takes to develop your next product by identifying issues early on that can be fixed.
- Competitive Insights-Social media listening tools let you examine your customers’ comments in the same way an internet researcher would look at search results, profiles, and social media comments. It allows you to examine what people are saying about your brand, what themes they are focusing on, and what they’re reacting to. You can find out what’s important to them, who they’re listening to, and how they’re reacting to your brand. With a good social listening tool, your team can help you to identify what they're saying, why they're saying it, and how they're responding.
- Discover New Products Ideas-Social listening allows you to grow your reach by identifying the target audiences you should target. A quick and easy way to get started is to analyze your customer data from a variety of platforms. Over time, you’ll notice trends that can be used to improve your message and improve engagement with your audience. By using social listening, you can determine which of your competitors are doing the best. Using your analytics, you can see what is resonating with your audience, and what is doing the worst. Analyze all the data in your customer data to understand what are the best practices for each competitor and how you can use your solutions to surpass your competitors.
- New Business Opportunities-Social listening is no longer just for social media – it’s a vital component of every business’s online presence. It’s a core part of the B2B marketing and sales strategy, helping you learn what your customers are saying about your company. It’s so important that an annual Market Research Association report has called social listening a "valuable part of any marketing mix" for several years running. Social listening can also help you sell to new customers – by helping you see how they like to engage with your brand, you can also sell to them better.
In general, using social listening tools is a low-cost way to scale your customer experience efforts, which can help you become a more customer-centric business. Even if you’re managing your social media channels on your own, there are many benefits to hiring a dedicated social listening agency to ensure that you’re not missing anything. Having an external social listening partner will give you the insights needed to discover things that you would otherwise have missed. A good social listening agency will have a wide selection of tools to help you find out more about your customers and share that data with your team.
