Learn More, Enhance, Improve and Expand Your Reach
Social media listening shows that there is a lot of power in the opinions of consumers. Interacting with these people allows your business to leverage that power.
With a social media listening strategy, it’s possible to grow your business and make it more successful. If you’re wondering about specifics, here are 8 great ways a social listening strategy can help your business by providing a better understanding of how to use the data you collect, improve customer satisfaction, expand your reach and grow.
1. Learn more about your clients
No matter what your business, if you’re going to effectively reach your target audience, you need to know them and be relevant. So, how do you find out what pleases your customers? Ask them, yes, but forgo traditional methods such as a questionnaire or survey. Those aren’t always the best way to gather insight because few people spend time doing them and you’ll likely get biased information.
Social media listening comes in handy when you’re seeking more reliable data.
Looking at data with social media listening tools allows you to see what customers like and dislike, and you can begin identifying trends or maybe detect other valuable clues along the way.
2. Improve your customer service
Poor customer service impacts your bottom line. In fact, $62 billion is lost by U.S. companies each year due to bad customer experiences. When people have an issue with a product or a brand today, they don’t go to a website to fill out a form. They rarely type up an email to the company. Do you know where these dissatisfied customers complain? Social media.
Statistics show 54% of customers have higher expectations for customer service (this jumps to 66% for 18 to 34 years old). People expect more transparency and 81% percent of consumers believe social media has made organizations more accountable.
Businesses must make every effort to avoid bad customer experience. Social media listening provides information about the good and the bad in your industry overall; consumers may have had problems with the competition, but you can learn from those mistakes and make experiences good ones.
3. Protect your brand
Monitoring feedback on your social media channels enables you to track reviews and comments. If something critical pops up, you can quickly work to defuse the situation and rectify it. You have to remember, however, that the Internet is huge. Comments about your brand can show up in places that are far away from your own social media feeds.
Social media listening enables you to see all kinds of chatter happening on platforms all over the place. Most importantly, you can begin to recognize normal conversation and set a benchmark. This way, if anything ever becomes too heated, you’ll know when you need to perk up and get ready to take action. Spotting a problem early can help prevent damage – sometimes serious damage – to your reputation.
4. Improve product and services
Many companies actually forget the basic principle that people will spend their hard-earned money only on things they need and want. It’s not smart business to focus only on supply when there is no demand.
If what you are offering isn’t being snapped up and utilized, it’s important to find out why. Using social media listening can glean information about how to make improvements on what you currently have or how to create a new products or services for the marketplace. Brands – from fast food to pharma– now use social media listening to actively improve and deliver.
5. Keep tabs on the competition
If you only focus on your own business, you’re missing the big industry picture. To be better than the competition, you have to see what’s going on with the competition. And occasionally popping onto a competitor’s website to see what they’ve got going on is not gathering adequate information to outpace them. You need to obtain the overall intelligence social media listening can provide.
There’s a wealth of information out there that can be easily tapped, including data on marketing strategies, product development, public relations activities and key customers. When you employ social media listening, it is possible to identify the competition’s strengths and weaknesses. Learn what works well and what your business should avoid.
6. Reach industry influencers
People are far more likely to accept the advice of someone they trust. In addition to family and friends, consumers today look to bloggers and influencers on social media. You want to catch the interest of these powerful people. To do so, you have to build a relationship.The only way that process can begin is to first find out who these people are.
Social media listening provides opportunities to discover the influencers who are talking about your company or the types of products or services your business provides. Through various listening tools, it’s possible to learn about these authors.
7. Support marketing campaigns
Content marketing is an extremely effective way to reach your target audience, but it can sometimes turn into a one-sided conversation. For example, publishing blogs on a consistent basis is important, but if you’re posting and you aren’t getting any comments, how effective are those blogs for engagement?
Use social media listening to see what consumers are talking about. This will help you come up with appropriate blog topics. You can then promote that content in ways they want most. For example, with social media listening, you’ll see the most popular hashtags for sharing your content. Using hashtags well helps amplify your message on social media platforms.
8. Create target ads
Target ads are highly effective and social media platforms are offering more options to tailor ads. But those tools aren’t yet perfected and you can spend a lot of money reaching unintended audiences.
Use social media listening tools instead and sift through data that will show segments of people passionate about your product or service. You can also gain insight about the actions those users take online. You can better identify appropriate audience members that will actually click your ads and are more likely to buy.
Your listening partner
Now that you have a better grasp of how social media listening can impact your business, you’ll likely want to implement some tactics. Don’t know how to start? Need some help along the way? Just give us a call. The T.E. Digital team has expertise working on a variety of social media platforms and has access to many different listening tools to gather data that’s most important to your business. Let’s talk about where you are and where you want to be. T.E. Digital can assist you in reaching your goals.
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