December 2, 2019
Social media marketing benefits businesses in many ways, not least as it facilitates a unique, direct relationship with your customers. However, many businesses, despite having and managing a social media presence, are failing to recognise one of the key benefits of this media – social listening.
What exactly is social listening?
Social listening is the opportunity to adequately monitor customer engagement and references to your brand. Yet less than half of all businesses monitor these social media discussions closely.
What are the benefits of social listening?
Dependent on your objective, social listening can support you in a myriad of ways. Here are just a few to get you thinking.
- Do you want to know what your customers really think, not just about your brand but the world at large? Monitoring the conversations online is crucial for this – in fact many people take to social media vs any other platform – so it will give you a better perception of customer sentiment. This in turn can then influence what content you create and post, knowing you are joining and leading real time conversations.
- Are you launching a new product or app? Despite all your testing and market research, it is only when the product or app is live in the real world that you realise your target audience may have a new or different take on things that you may never have thought of.
- And how about supporting sales by identifying and following up on leads? When potential customers ask about a service or mention they are considering buying a new product, the social media monitoring or customer service team can respond with information. Many sales and marketing leaders predict this kind of social selling will become the dominant avenue for B2B sales with socia listening the essential first step in the process.
- Sometimes a social listening campaign can be necessary to get insights about a one-time event, especially if the company is breaking from its traditional approach. This way you can determine whether your new approach had a positive or negative impact on your brand before proceeding with similar activity.
Wow! Anything else?
Well we haven’t mentioned social listening is also good for responding to complaints, finding user generated content and sussing out what your competitors are up to along with other PR and marketing benefits.
We’re convinced! What should we do next?
Crunching social data to deliver reports, dashboards, insights and recommendations is one of our favourite things to do so contact us to find out how you can get started https://immediatefuture.co.uk/contact/