68% of customers leave a company when they feel the company does not care about them. Given this statistic, would you take the risk of not listening and attending to your social media followers?
Good business requires customer respect, company responsiveness, and timely communication. It may seem impossible, however, to stay responsive to your online audience. If so, keep reading.
The tools and strategies for social listening in this article make it possible for you to stay abreast of it all, keep your audience feeling heard and involved, and prevent you from losing your biggest asset—your customers.
What Is Social Media Listening
Marketing via social media is not just getting the word out about your product and services or increasing your audience.
When thinking of social media marketing, it helps to focus on the word “social.” Your marketing process involves a relationship between you and your audience. That relationship requires the very things important in any relationship: listening, providing open communication, and giving respect.
It is important to listen to your audience across all social platforms, learn from them, and keep them involved. From listening, you are aware of what your customers feel, want, need, and prefer.
Social listening goes beyond noticing comments. The process involves tracking, evaluating, and responding to mentions and conversations about your product or service, your brand, or your competitors.
Make sure your content drives your brand, that you hire a skilled content strategist, and involve marketers who can track your social listening.
The aim is to assess what your next steps might be in your reaction to those conversations and mentions. A reaction might be as simple as a response. Another response might be more pronounced, such as changing your products or services or adjusting your brand and positioning within your market.
The Difference Between Social Listening and Social Monitoring
Social media monitoring and social media listening are not the same.
Social monitoring looks for mentions and conversations using metrics. The metrics of social monitoring may pay attention to hashtags, conversations or mentions about your company or competitors, trends in the industry, or mentions about brands. Social monitoring is a type of noticing without responding.
As opposed to just looking out for those mentions and conversations, social listening actively tracks mentions or conversations and analyzes how your company should respond. The data leads to an understanding of how and when to act and what the action should be.
Social media listening and monitoring go hand in hand. Engaging in both allows a business to maintain a relationship and connection with its customers and make them feel heard, understood, and a part of the conversation about your brand.
Why Social Listening Matters
By tracking and analyzing social events, your business has the direct power to manage and adjust what unfolds from there. Consider some benefits of social listening. Social listening allows you to:
Directly communicate with your customers
Make product developments or create new products
Follow competitors’ developments, pitfalls, or product failures
Manage your reputation by how you respond or react
Test the success of your social marketing activities
Set future marketing goals
Prepare for and respond to social media crises
Identify your fans and followers to use their influence
Gain new customers from those unhappy with competitors
By appropriately responding and reacting to your audience, they feel heard and appreciated. This builds your business, your audience, and your customers’ loyalty.
The Data Says It All
Not maintaining your responsiveness to your social audience can be risky.
Data proves the importance of social listening. These statistics, presented in HubSpot's courses on social media marketing, prove the point:
83% of customers appreciate when brands respond to their questions
68% of people like it when a brand joins a social media conversation
78% of online consumers in the US feel influenced by posts of a brand they follow on social media
Nearly half of online customers surveyed make a purchase from a brand responsive to their online audience
56% of customers unfollow a brand on social media if they received poor customer service
40% of online consumers expect a response within one hour of a complaint made on social media
With these statistics, the importance of social listening is clear. Let’s consider the tools and tips that will help you make the most of your listening efforts.
Social Media Listening Strategy Tips
A good social listening strategy involves time, research, staff, and investments.
Whether you decide to take on the adventure on your own or outsource help, here are some strategy tips that will help you along the way:
Remain available to customers and responsive to their comments in real-time
Listen and respond on all social channels
Learn from competitor successes and failures
Pay attention to your audience more than your competitors
Humanize your responses and use a genuine tone
Remain helpful, informative, and resourceful
Plan for social media crises
Provide customer service and resolution at all times
Follow sentiments of your brand, not just mentions and follows
Respond to customers who are unhappy with competitors
Pay attention to industry trends, changes, and patterns
Use social mentions and conversations to adjust your online content
These tips will help you stay involved with your audience, adjust or refine your product or service based on the wants, needs, and ideas of the consumers, and stay ahead in your industry.
Where to Turn for Guidance
Social media marketing is powerful. Without it, it is challenging to survive in today’s market.
Improper use of social media, however, might risk the loss of your online audience or your overall clientele. With the number of social posts needed across many social channels, staying on top of your social listening game might feel difficult.
Contact me if you have questions about how to create a social listening strategy. With the right strategy in place, you will provide the customer service and responsiveness that your online audience expects and needs!
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