Why Social Listening is Important

Thousands of conversations happen through social media everyday. It could be a customer complaining about service they received or giving your business praise, but if they do not tag you, how are you supposed to hear about it?

Social listening gives you the ability to take conversations that are happening regarding your brand and uncover meaningful insights and opportunities from them.

What is social listening?

Social listening is the process of monitoring digital conversations and interactions on social media to evaluate your brand perception and customer feedback. - mycustomer.com

The feedback is then analysed to find trends and useful insights. These insights can be used to influence a wide range of processes including business operations, product updates and advertising approaches.

3 reasons to start using social listening

It's important to promote a customer-centric mindset in your company. Rather than making assumptions about what your customers want or need, you should hear exactly what they are saying. It's common for people to speak publicly. Especially since the 'review' culture is so popular.

Customers like when brands respond

Sprout Social recently completed research where they found that 68% of consumers want brands to participate in conversations they're mentioned in and 83% want brands to respond to them. Being responsive on social media clearly makes a difference to how customers perceive you.  By responding to your customers, this gives you the opportunity to build relationships and create a loyal following.

You can discover new opportunities

Business is ruled by demand, people put money into things they want. For example, you own a cafe and you over hear two of your customers discussing your pastries. One mentions how much they love your croissants but dislikes your brownies because they're too dry. You start to ask around and you find out this is why your brownies aren't your biggest seller. This gives you the opportunity to improve your brownie recipe and make them better in order to sell more!  

Find new clients

Social media is one of the best ways to market, with 74% of consumers now turning to social platforms to help guide new purchase decisions.

Using social listening for your industry, you are able to position yourself in front of potential customers when they ask a group or a forum a question. For example, you are a hairdresser in Canberra, you are also a member of some Facebook groups in your local area. When someone asks a question such as 'has anyone any recommendations for hairdressers around the area?'. You will have the opportunity to present your business and direct them back to your website or social media page.

3 Social Listening tools you can use

Hubspot

Hubspot is a CRM software which helps organisations execute their inbound marketing strategies. With hubspot, you are able to create custom keyword monitoring and trigger email alerts so your team know when someone mentions you online. 

Sprout Social

Sprout Social is a social media management platform. Like Hubspot, you are able to customise keywords, locations, hashtags and branded words across social media platforms.

Mention

Mention is a social media monitoring platform which pulls activity from social media platforms onto a single dashboard allowing you to interact and reply from one place. 

Before you go

Social listening can act as market research, customer insight and competitor analysis for your brand. But if you don't monitor and act on the data, you will miss great opportunities. Engage with people mentioning your brand on social media, spot trends and adapt your marketing before your competitors do.