July 16, 2018
The key to every great relationship is listening, am I right? Whether that’s boyfriend and girlfriend, teacher and student or brand and consumer – everyone wants to be heard and listened to. Right now, on Facebook or Twitter there could be a customer or potential customer of yours asking a question and if you’re not listening that relationship can never be built.
Social listening is an invaluable tool to any brand or business. As a brand, you shouldn’t just be shouting out about what you do and why you’re great, you should be tuning into relevant and trending conversations and getting involved when you can.
So why should your brand be putting an ear to social?
Nail your customer service offering
You’re probably doing the best you can at offering a high level of customer service, but why not take it up a notch? We all know (I’m guilty of it too) that when something goes wrong or we have a bad brand experience we’re the first to jump on social and tell the whole world about it. If you’re using a social media tool, you’ll be able to respond to these public complaints at lightning speed and react before a situation can spiral out of control (hopefully).
Opportunities are aplenty
Social listening opens the doors for you to find people talking about your brand in a positive way. Word-of-mouth is power and by listening you can identify influencers within your community and start to build relationships with them online and maybe eventually offline. Other opportunities arise from listening to what people are saying about your biggest competitors, is there an issue or a problem that your brand can solve that your competitors, haven’t been able to?
Better understanding the needs of your customers
As a brand, you probably already have an idea of what your audience looks like, but social listening enables you to gain more insights into the things they really care about. When studying conversations, you can look at the language they are using with each other and better understand how to communicate with them on their level with your own brand communications.
So, there you have it, if you’re not using a social media listening tool already, perhaps you should, it clearly is an indisputable way of better understanding your customers and finding out how to win yourself some new ones while you’re at it.
It might not always be what you want to hear, we all know the truth hurts sometimes, but honesty from the people you care about the most can only be a positive thing.