If you don’t already know, your social media is a big deal. It can be the key to understanding and monitoring your audience. However, monitoring and listening are very different.
Social Media Monitoring:
Engaging with customers on your social media by responding to messages, comments and other direct engagement with your brand.
Social Media Listening:
Using social media to understand your audience by researching topics and conversations related to your industry, product or service. Furthermore, listening involves taking those strategies and using them to alter and optimize current campaign strategies.
With social media listening, you need to actively find what your audience is saying.
In addition to the major social networking sites, there are a handful of other social platforms that can provide an opportunity for your brand to listen. Be sure to check out other platforms such as Reddit and YouTube to search for topics related to your brand.
Here are a few tips about what you can learn from social listening:
What’s Being Said?
One miscommunicated post on social media can go viral in a split second - and not in a good way.
Whether it’s a disgruntled former employee or a bad one-off experience with a customer, things can go from good to bad at the drop of a hat.
Social media listening can help with any crisis prevention in real-time.
Track Your Engagement
Although things can go wrong quickly, social listening can also help you quickly improve a relationship with your audience.
It’s important to show your audience that you hear them online and are approachable when it comes to conflict.
Social listening helps to make you more responsive by telling you immediately when a new message or mention appears.
Whether it’s questions or complaints, these are all opportunities for you to engage and build brand awareness.
Analyze Your Metrics
We’ve reviewed the negatives and positives of social listening, but at the end of the day what are these things telling you?
Social listening helps you gain in-the-moment insights about what your audience likes and dislikes.
You have the ability to hear directly from your customers about what they want to see and if you have things to address within your business.
Produce Content and Posts
Social listening gives you the opportunity to use what you’ve learned in order to produce content.
After you have taken the time to listen and understand your audiences’ wants and needs, you have the opportunity to adjust your content in order to match what is in demand.
Producing content that your audience wants to see shows that you are listening and willing to adjust your strategy to keep their loyalty.