Social listening is the foundation of your digital marketing strategy. Social media listening is the act of using a tool to monitor what it says about a brand across the social web. Effective social listening identifies the right keywords and terms you need to stay on top of. It helps you to know what the people are saying about your brand on social media, forums, blogs, and other websites. There are many tools available that help you with listening.
A tool like Awario (primarily a social listening tool. It allows you to monitor brands, competitors, carry out social selling and, of course, discover influencers in a chosen niche.) enables you to monitor publicly available information not only on blogs, forums, newsletters, websites, and social platforms. This could be something simple as setting up a Google Alert for your name or brand, or powerful as a specific tool for social listening in digital marketing.
By the usage of the right tools, you can use social listening to enhance your business. Below some of the ways of social media listening are mentioned.
Learn more about your clients
To satisfy your customers, you need to know them first. Through customer research, you can find some ideas and inspiration for your marketing campaigns and brand building projects.
The traditional way to get feedback from customers is to ask them through a survey or questionnaire, which is not always the case, as few people prefer to spend time answering questions that are not directly related to them. Moreover, it is practically impossible to get a completely biased opinion from a survey
Here is another way which social media marketing is beneficial – through social listening. By this you can get impartial opinions of your customers from the minimal effort. You can also analyze large amounts of data and view specific comments using your social media listening tools.
Keep an Eye on Competitors
This may sound strange, but social media listening is a great way to track your competitors. It gives you the opportunity to monitor their brand-building performance and to get inspired. You can see what kind of content they are posting and how they engage with their followers in digital marketing. it can also help you to learn from your competitors. There must be a good reason why your competitors are doing better than you. So try to understand their brand marketing strategies and make sure you don’t copy and follow them. The best for them is not always right for you. Instead, adapt their ideas and convert them into your ways to increase your brand value. Competitive analysis of social media is all about learning from the successes and mistakes of your competitors. It is also useful and important to analyze yourself and see where you stand compared to your competitor. So through this, we can track the competitor’s move and get inspired by it.
Social listening helps to protect your brand reputation
Protecting your brand reputation is the most common, important and obvious social listening use case. Often, a quick response to a negative review or a false opinion prevents a brand reputation crisis.
For example, brandjacking is when someone is impersonating online with malicious intent, and if you haven’t found it before, it leads to damage to your brand reputation. These virtual fraudsters can post anything they want to hurt your business and make you look bad in front of your customers.
if you detect a fake profile, you can immediately correct the situation and can avoid a social outburst from the bud itself. Otherwise, it leads to create unsatisfied customers who complain about your service or brand. If you found their public comments before seeing too many people, you can try to solve the problem before it gets out of hand. Engaging more and more on our website actions can protect your brand and can lead to increased brand reputation.
Identify influencers
By tracking who is talking about your brand and how often, you will be able to identify real fans who can become influential advocates for building your brand. If once you have identified them through social listening, you will be able to connect with them and develop a relationship with them. When you search yourself on sites, you can program a social listening tool to find influencer based on the keywords or hashtags you use. Observing social conversations about your industry will help you to understand who the key influencers are, and these are the key people who we can connect with. You can also find the people who already love your brand and who say the best things about you on social media. They are natural brand influencers towards your brand. So this helps to contact them and find better opportunities to engage leads to higher your branding.
Be proactive in social listening
The best way to provide customer service is to solve their problem before they know about it. If we find a problem earlier than the customer, then we should give them a hint about the issue. And a sorry should be asked about it.
While opening some sites we can see that it is written as – sorry for the inconvenience site is under maintenance we will reach you after some time.
Interacting with prospects and customers in digital marketing can create a stunning positive customer experience towards your branding. It also provides marketing benefits such as brand awareness and saves on service costs. Actively being attentive to prospects and clients on social media can identify key trends, new product opportunities, and consumer ache points.
