Social listening allows brands to monitor, analyse and reply to conversations about them online across social media, websites, blogs, and several other platforms. These conversations may be centred around specific keywords, topics, brands, and phrases. Brands use insights from social listening to find growth opportunities or develop more content that their audiences are looking for.
According to recent statistics, half of the world’s marketers have adopted social listening to understand their customers’ preferences that have changed ever since the pandemic.
Let’s now look at a few reasons why you need social listening for your brand.
- Learning about your audience
Today, most brands use social media to connect with their audience, but do they consider social listening to build their social media strategy? There are a few successful companies that have used social listening to achieve their goals, and one of the best examples is Netflix.
Netflix uses social listening to know its target audience. They know their key audience factors like millennials who crave attention, people who research before buying, and the ones with sarcasm. Their marketing team keeps everything in mind and makes sure to re-tweet opinions or post funny tweets to keep their audience engaged.
Through their social listening strategies, Netflix found that many of its viewers who were binge-watching their shows were falling asleep. Netflix took this opportunity to show its viewers that they listen and care about them. Netflix Socks was invented to detect when a viewer is dozing off and soon sends out a signal to the viewer’s TV, thus pausing the particular show. The product went viral and also got a lot of coverage. It also won a Shorty Award for the same.
Hence, social listening will not only help you learn about your audience but will also open doors to new ideas and content that you may have never thought of before.
- Tracking your brand
More than 3.6 billion are estimated to make use of social media globally, and this number is expected to grow to almost 4.41 billion by 2025. This is one of the main reasons why you must implement social listening as part of your marketing strategies. It allows you to keep track of your brand across all online social channels. It helps ensure that you do not miss out on brand mentions or of any other parties associated with your brand.
This is essential as you need to reply to comments as soon as possible. As a brand on social media, it is your responsibility to acknowledge positive remarks and react to negative comments promptly. Replying to customer queries and taking feedback seriously are essential factors to improving a brand’s image.
- Recognising social media influencers and brand advocates
The market for influencer marketing is expected to grow to about $13.8 billion in 2021. So, if you’re a brand looking to find the best influencers in your niche, then social listening can definitely help. One of the best ways to identify the right influencer is to monitor all the conversations in your particular niche, including content that is shared the most.
This will help you understand who the best influencers are, based not just on followers but also on their online engagement. Another important thing is to identify audiences who are discussing and talking positively about your brand. Identifying your brand advocates and collaborating with them, and also rewarding them whenever possible are good strategies.
- Identifying new audiences and selling opportunities
Social listening can also help businesses identify new audiences and find selling opportunities. Tylenol is one such medication brand that used social listening to discover that it helped them identify new audiences that it had no idea about. Most pharmaceutical companies find it challenging to figure out a proper solution to help their customers deal with their ailments. Tylenol was looking to identify the sources of frustration and pain from individuals who have headaches and migraines.
They found that a considerable number of people complained about certain hobbies that required one to focus. They found that there was a high volume of conversation going on, particularly on some knitting websites. They realised that many people were saying that knitting puts a lot of strain on the eyes, thus causing headaches and migraines. Soon Tylenol took advantage of this to shift its SEO and marketing strategies, resulting in increased brand visibility and website visits.
Now, if you’re convinced about the importance of social listening for your brand but are wondering how to start with social listening, Konnect Insights is the way to go.
Konnect Insights offers a leading SaaS product that many brands across the globe use for social listening and analytics. It is an all-in-one customer experience management platform comprising many modules, including listening, analytics, social media management, and social CRM. It enables your brand to fetch conversations from across the web and social media platforms.
Tags: Brand Marketing, Listening Tool, Social Analytics, Social CRM, Social Listening, Social Listening Tools