Four Ways to Use Social Media Listening in Your Business
We live in an era where nothing posted on the internet is private. Social media listening allows businesses to use online platforms to their advantage by collecting information on how consumers react to their company, their competitors, and the industry overall. Analysing key aspects of data can inform future decisions that benefit many facets of your business.
Are you wondering how you can utilise data you collect? Here are four ways you can capitalise on social media listening:
1. Understand your competitors, and your Industry
Many industries adjust over time to keep up with consumer expectations and demand. To remain relevant, it’s essential your business does too. Keep up to date with trends by following relevant pages, groups or accounts, and investigating consumer reactions. Analysing consumer responses to key player's posts within your industry can provide insight into what services and product are likely to succeed. Similarly, monitoring your competitors’ social media approach can enlighten you on effective strategies that can also benefit your business.
2. Customer Service
Customer complaints and queries have changed significantly since the emergence of social media. Instead of waiting on the phone, or worse holding out for an email reply, customers use other platforms to garner a response. As these posts are often on public forums, regular monitoring of all your social platforms for questions and complaints is essential to maintain a positive brand perception.
Responding promptly and professionally can benefit your brand as it portrays a company that is eager to resolve a problem or answer a question, not just to the individual but also to everyone who comes across the response. Just don’t forget to monitor hashtags or company mentions, as not all complaints are written on your page or explicitly to you.
3. Drive Innovation
Customers frequently provide reviews on social media platforms about purchases and services they are satisfied (or dissatisfied) with. Listening to customer reviews concerning both your own or your competitor’s products or services can inspire improvements or future creations. Additionally, as these reviews are written without coercion and the intended audience is not the company, they tend to be accurate and unbiased feedback on a product or service.
4. Understand your Audience
Maintaining an engaged audience is a challenge faced by all marketers. But, this is where social media listening excels. Monitoring your audience removes the guesswork from marketing, by providing insightful metrics such as demographics, peak activity times and topic engagement levels. Social listening data is critical when creating a marketing campaign and even more so when implementing one. Save yourself time and money by using social media listening in advance and structuring a campaign around your findings.
Get Listening!
Social media listening is an incredibly powerful tool that can benefit many aspects of your business from product development to campaign engagement, customer service and more. The first step is to decide what you want to learn from your audience—the list above is a good place to start. Next, begin listening, watching, and analysing the wealth of data available through social media platforms.
The best time to start? Now! Social media provides a constant stream of information, so it’s never too late to begin listening and collect unique insights to inform and improve your strategies.
If you're still not sure how to make social media work for your business, speak to BabbleHub TODAY for a FREE consultation to help your business grow!