Social Listening: An Important Strategy for Your Brand
Have you ever wondered about mind reading – one super power that Marvel has yet to really capitalize on… I mean, wouldn’t it be sweet to know what people are thinking – especially when it comes to your clients and customers? And while mind reading still seems to be a ways off, there is one strategy that can help us to understand our audience better: social listening.
Learn about what social listening is, why it’s important to your brand, and how to start incorporating it into your strategy today.
What is Social Listening?
Social listening is the close monitoring of your social media channels for anything that could be important to your brand. This includes customer feedback, mentions of your brand, and conversations about your industry, competitors, specific keywords related to you.
Once this information is collected, it’s followed by an analysis. From this analysis, you can gain key insights to help you make decisions about your company and content marketing strategy.
While you can do some of this simply through observance, you really do need a tool that will sift through everything happening on social media and deliver relevant information back to you. For this, you can choose one of the following tools:
Why is Social Listening Important?
There are multiple reasons why you need a strategy to listen to what people are saying about you online.
For starters, this can help you to…
Discover Content Opportunities - Whether it’s an emerging trend or a question from a customer, you’ll likely find a treasure trove of content opportunities as you tune into social media. It’s a great way to fuel your overall content strategy!
Avoid Disasters - Social listening can reveal problems that you may not even know about. Perhaps there’s a storm brewing on Twitter and your company’s at the center. Or perhaps one of your customers is posting angry comments about you. Knowing this ahead of time gives you the opportunity to respond and diffuse the situation before it escalates.
Make Your Audience Happy - Nothing makes an audience feel happier or closer to a brand than feeling like that brand listens to them. Whether you can respond to a comment on the spot or internalize the information to make your product better, it will lead to customer happiness
So now you know more about what social listening is and how it can benefit your brand’s strategy – but how do begin? Let’s look at five tips on how you can make this a part of your company’s strategy.
5 Tips for Social Listening Success
1. Determine What You’re Listening For
Outline specific words that you believe will give you a healthy look at your company and industry. Of course, this will be different for everyone, but for starters, you should include:
Your brand name
Your social media handles
Names of your products
Your company’s slogan
Industry buzzwords
Your competitors’ names and information
Names of key people within your company
Also include common misspellings and abbreviations – after all, you’re smart, but technology sometimes isn’t.
2. Find the Right Networks
In addition to knowing what you’re listening for, you also need to know where to listen. Just like how Uncle Andy knows the exact best fishing spot for every season, you want to know where your audience is talking about you.
In the beginning this can be tough. So start out by casting a wide net – be in as many places as you can feasibly handle.
To give you a well-rounded impression of your brand online, include a variety of networks in your listening. This means including LinkedIn, as well as Instagram and Twitter. Don’t be afraid to listen to other networks, no matter how far-fetched it might seem – we’re looking at you TikTok!
3. Tighten It Up
With time, you’ll see where conversations are happening. You might also see some keywords that produce useless information. For example, if you own a consulting business with the same name as an apparel store – many social listening tools won’t know the difference.
So it’s time to tailor your strategy and filter your results to give you the purest data. You might add parameters to your listening strategy to make it more productive. For example, you could limit your search to a certain geographic area or demographic.
4. Do Competitive Research
As much as it’s important to know what people are saying about you, it can be just as important to know what they’re saying about your competition.
This is not to copy their strategy. It simply gives you more data about the kinds of things that work – and what doesn’t. It can also show you holes in their strategy where your company can really shine. Perhaps you notice that their customers are clamoring for a certain product feature – you can make that feature a part of your offering.
Monitoring the competition can also serve as a kind of measuring stick for success. It can highlight areas where you’re rocking it and expose areas where you need some work – both equally important!
5. Use It (and Share It)
There are so many things that you can learn from a social listening strategy. But all of that is useless if you don’t use it throughout your company.
For example, you might find a customer’s question that you could make into a blog post. You could find an up-and-coming industry trend that you can address in your social media strategy.
But this goes beyond marketing. The data you collect might reveal vital information that could help your sales team or product development team make better choices. So share the data and insights you find across your entire company.
Concluding Thoughts on Social Listening for Your Brand
As you may have guessed by now, social listening is not a set it and forget it kind of strategy.
To really succeed and benefit from this strategy, you will need to adjust course periodically. You might find new keywords to integrate or new networks could emerge. Always be alert to ways that you can grow and improve your listening!
I hope this strategy helps you not only strengthen your content strategy, but also your entire brand!
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