Today’s consumers are extremely aware and astute. They don’t miss out on any opportunity to share their experience of a brand, whether good or bad, with other people online or via word-of-mouth. Social media plays a major role in how consumers perceive and judge brands in today’s world.
“Content” has been a trending buzzword for a long time and it is extremely crucial to your brand’s marketing strategy. The only drawback is that not all content will work; you need to ensure that your content is engaging, relevant, and valuable to your audience. This is where social listening comes into play. The easiest and quickest way to discover content that will resonate with your audience the most is by listening to your social media conversations.
What is social listening?
Social listening is the process of tracking, analyzing, and learning what customers are saying and feeling about your brand, competition, industry, and other relevant topics on social media. Through social listening, you get ample information about your prospective customers and understand the range of their experiences. And as we all know, information is power.
Now, let’s look at the different ways in which social listening can help you craft an effective content strategy:
Understand your audience better
Discover the right keywords to collect the data you need about your target customers. Find out what topics and hashtags your audience uses the most. This way, you know what you should talk about and which hashtags will help you reach as many people as possible. Targeted listening will help you figure out which platform is being used most extensively, topics that interest your audience, and problems they’re facing with your brand.
Advanced social listening tools such as Konnect Insights enable your brand to fetch conversations that happen all across the internet and social media platforms, not only related to the brand but also the competition or the industry at large. With its powerful search engines, Konnect Insights crawls millions and millions of sites and portals to pick up every article, blog, review, comment, tweet, post, or brand mention that is of interest to you. This ensures that you will not miss a single conversation that is relevant to your interests.
Analyze your competition and the market
While employing social listening, you do not just want to know what your customers are saying about you. Instead, you must also look at what customers are saying about your competitors. This will give you a clear idea of where you stand in the marketplace. Monitoring your competition will provide you with information on the different kinds of content that bring in engagement from your customers and generate traction. Through social listening, you can identify the most viewed, liked, and shared social media posts over those that were not successful. Analyze and understand the reasoning behind this. You can also develop an understanding of the market, understand trends that are popular, and learn how to stay ahead by innovating.
Learn from influencers and brand advocates
Closely monitoring your brand and the industry’s social conversations will help you identify the most important influencers. These social media users have a huge influence on how customers feel about your brand or your competition. There will also be people who are already praising your brand on social media and saying wonderful things about it. Such people are called brand advocates. Influencers can guide your content marketing decisions. Keep tabs on what they’re talking about, as they are a natural indicator of the type of content your audience likes to see.
Create user-generated content
User-generated content is one of the most effective content strategies that resonate with your audience. It can include almost anything from an image to videos to blogs, and it is genuine and unbiased since an actual user of the brand creates it. This type of content generates trust among social media users. It is a win-win situation. People are much more likely to trust feedback from other customers and the clients you’re obtaining the content from will feel valued as a customer.
It is much easier to find user-generated content as you don’t have to think of crafty keywords to target your search. You just need to keep track of your brands and products.
Manage Crisis
Tracking customer sentiments in real-time is invaluable. If you’re getting positive feedback, figure out the reasons behind it and promote similar content. If the sentiment is negative, review the feedback on social media, make necessary changes right away and ensure you do not share disliked content again. Through social listening, you can also prevent PR disasters before they slip out of hand.
Conclusion
Social listening is a great way to create content that connects with your audience. It is a gold mine that will tell you everything you need to know to create the perfect content to meet your goals. It isn’t always the best idea to just rely on your gut instinct. Use social listening tools such as Konnect Insights to extract hard data that show topics and types of content that your audience finds interesting.
Tags: Content Marketing, content marketing trends, Content Startegy, Digital Marketing, Listening Tool, Marketing, Social Listening Tools