Social Listening and its importance

Nowadays people use social media to react and respond to everything, more than having real-time conversations. Social media listening is relevant if you care about your customers. Finding the root cause behind social conversations is what social listening does. The customers provide both positive and negative responses to the brands they love.

There are many ways by which social listening can benefit your brand. One way is through customer engagement i.e by personally responding to every customer’s queries. If given the proper response, people will suggest your brand to their loved ones, which helps in promoting the brand. The reason why people use social media is that they receive an immediate response to their complaints or needs. They provide negative reviews when they get a delayed response and also when they don’t like something about the service provided.  First, you must understand your audience, what they expect from you and how can you provide better service according to their requirement. To effectively balance this, it is necessary to use social listening.

The second way is understanding what people talk about you. You should understand your audience, even before receiving a response from them, a kind of sixth sense about how this can turn to. You should stand in their shoes and then predict their response. Thus you will be able to bring about better responses while analyzing your own brand’s position and your competitors. Understanding your competitor is also important, whether they are launching any new products or developing marketing campaigns etc.

User-generated content is an enormously effective marketing strategy. Most of the consumers rely on the information provided by acquaintances, other consumers and influencers about a brand. They won’t completely believe what the brand says. So It is very effective to use user-generated content.

Now you know how important social listening is for the growth of your brand. So provided are some of the best social listening tools:

Hootsuite

Through Hootsuite, you can view your messages and comments from all social channels in one concise dashboard and then respond to all. Another feature of Hootsuite is sharing the information about the influencers and leads, which can be shared with other members of the company.

Social Mention

Through social mention, you could search a keyword from any social platform you prefer. It will direct you to anything connected to that keyword – it can be brand names, a person or anything related to this. It also shows the strength, sentiment, passion and reach of your brand.

Sprout social

It mainly helps in improving your interaction with the users. It uses twitter dashboards to analyze your presence. It also takes notes of any direct messages sent to you and also on any keywords related to your brand.

Tweet reach

As the name suggests this focuses mainly on twitter and is for those companies wanting a twitter to analyze. It can also provide information about the reach of your brand in various twitter accounts and also about your followers.

How sociable

It provides you with many social media platforms – almost 12 sites for free which include Facebook, Twitter and other platforms like WordPress. It also provides you with a numerical score of each platform, thus making it easy to understand the performance of each social sites.

Buzz sumo

It is a great tool that helps in analyzing your brand’s facebook. It shows your performance based on each post you create. It also keeps you notified as to when to share a post and at what time.

If you have the right tools then it will be easy to manage your brand’s content and also to provide a timely response. Social tools can be used for analyzing both positive and negative feedback. Here are some tips which can help you in the long run:

• You have to keep in mind what you are trying to achieve through the social listening process and try to improve your performance.
• The first step of social listening is identifying your audience. The customers you get won’t be the ideal customer you formed in your head.
• It is important to find people who are interested in your products. At first, it will take some time, but once set it up, it will be easy to keep a list of potential leads.
• Next thing to do is identify people who are unhappy with your competitor’s product.
• Responding to people’s questions and complaints quickly. One thing people hate is waiting. They expect a response within one hour of informing if taken more time to respond one can expect negative feedback.
• In order to keep good relationships with your customers, make sure you are listening to them and even respond to the positive mentions.

Social listening doesn’t completely take you to the top of marketing but eases your job in maintaining customer responses. The brand should be able to hear the needs of the customers. It can be effective only if it meets the needs of its customers.