It has become critical for brands to build a sound reputation and large following on social media. Once everyone starts talking about your brand on these platforms, that’s when you have accomplished a high brand awareness. Customers these days believe in sharing their brand experiences, good or bad, on social media, blogs or discussion forums. This can turn out to be a boon or a bane for any brand depending on how they use it.
You don’t want your brand to develop a bad reputation for all the wrong reasons. Hence, you need to consistently analyse and respond to conversations about your brand on social media.
Let’s talk about 21 reasons why social listening is important!
1. Better Content Creation
To truly understand what your customer likes and what information they want to read, you should implement social listening to find out what you should talk about and which hashtags to use to reach as many people as possible.
2. Social Media Strategy
To devise an effective social media strategy, you should know what people are saying about your brand. Targeted listening will help you figure out which platform is being used extensively and to analyse the public sentiment about your brand.
3. Performance Evaluation
Social listening also enables you to keep track of quantitative (volume) and qualitative metrics (sentiment). Through these metrics, you’re able to determine the performance of your campaigns.
4. Customers Appreciate Two-Way Conversations
Everyone wants to feel heard, especially on social media. You need to considerately draft responses that provide real value by socially listening. Such responses will generate brand loyalty and encourage your customers to stay connected.
5. Brand Reputation
Customer service issues can be smoothly tackled on social media. By actively listening to interactions, a brand can identify harmful conversations and work towards improving it before it can harm your brand’s reputation.
6. Learn about Customers
Social listening can help you find out information about your customers, such as the social platforms to target, topics to discuss and problems they’re facing.
7. Identify Selling Opportunities
Through social listening, you can find leads which will, in turn, lead to social selling. Build relationships with prospective customers which you can then nurture to generate revenue.
8. Customer Engagement
It gives you an excellent opportunity to engage with your customers and find out what they like or dislike about your brand.
9. Crisis Management
Track the sentiment about your brand in real-time. In case the sentiment is negative,you can tackle issues before they get out of hand.
10. Competitive Insights
Find out what people say about your competitors. This will give you clarity as to where you stand vis-à-vis your competition and find out what your competitors are up to.
11. Track Progress
Suppose your brand has recently faced some serious issue. In that case, it is judicious to indulge in social listening to check if negative sentiments have led to any decrease in the number of followers, sales or any other suitable metric.
12. Find Pain Points
Social listening can be a gold mine to figure out what’s working and what’s not. Listen to what the customers want and don’t want, and give them exactly that.
13. Identify Influencers
Connect and build relationships with people who enjoy a huge influence in your industry. Reach out to them for collaboration opportunities.
14. Identify Brand Advocates
Similar to the above point, you should also be on the lookout for people who love your brand and say great things about it on social media.
15. Increase Customer Acquisition
Social listening can be used to find out the content that your followers enjoy and react to, and then create relevant content accordingly to turn them into customers.
16. Product Feedback
You can receive customer feedback about your products via social listening. Analyse their input and work towards improving your offerings as per the insights offered.
17. PR
Monitor when news items mentioning your company get published and track mentions of competitors and keywords across social media to find journalists & platforms to target.
18. Competition Benchmarking
Check the volume of conversation of your brand and competitors to benchmark your social media performance.
19. Humanise Your Brand
Through social listening, you can create a warm, engaging relationship with your target audience, which might lead to brand loyalty.
20. Market Analysis
Develop an understanding of the market, find out the trends that are popular and how you can stay ahead by innovating.
21. Customer Service
Customers expect prompt responses to their conversations, and by ignoring social listening, you’re ignoring the majority of conversations about your brand.
Takeaway
As stated earlier, social media is a gold mine. You need to pay attention to what is being said, done or heard on social media; else you will stay behind in the competition. To offer product/service and experience that is appreciated by customers, you have to take up social listening.