The author of this article, Nikita Vora, is a digital marketing trainer and founder of SMM Unleashed.
But before we dive into the topic, let me explain what social listening means to the uninitiated. Simply put, social listening, also referred to as social media listening, is the process of identifying and assessing what is being said about a company, individual, product, or brand on the internet.
Social listening should be a top priority for product companies as it helps uncover and aggregate all the information you may be missing out on if you are only focused on your likes, shares, and mentions of your social media posts. After all, social is not just about brand communication, but it also covers listening to what consumers have to say, and this is only possible when you actually ‘listen’ as a brand.
So, if you care about your customers, you must also take care of the insights you can get from social listening. Ultimately, the main aim of social listening is to provide a broader outlook of your brand’s overall social landscape.
Let’s examine what social listening offers product companies and their sales teams.
1. Tracking Your Brand’s Health
Sentiments often drive customer behavior, and tracking these sentiment values linked to your products can help you understand their impact.
2. Understanding Your Prospects and Their Behaviour
Social listening helps you know who your prospects really are, what they want, and how to target them through conversations and ultimately convert them to paying customers.
It also helps you gather industry information, challenges, and overall interests of prospects, allowing sales teams to tune their content to address them. Sales teams also benefit by becoming closer personally to prospects and tailoring their communication and interactions.
This creates a chain reaction of finding more prospects from your initial prospect list. Social listening can uncover previously unidentified prospects and generate more sales opportunities.
3. Tracking your Competition
Understanding your competition is a major advantage of social listening. It helps gather information on their products, sales strategies, content, effectiveness, interaction with social media, etc.
4. Optimizing your Social Content
The purpose of the content you create is to drive engagement and conversion, and ensuring your content is appropriate is highly important. Keeping track and listening to the trends of your brand on social media helps you tailor future content based on the specific channel, the customer group, using the right hashtags or keywords, etc. Humanizing your content is a definite way to create meaningful connections with your customers and prospects, by targeting what they value the most.
So, how can you carry out social listening in an effective manner?
- Goals setting: Make sure your required goals are predefined so that you are not distracted with the vast data that you would get from social listening.
- Choose the right tool: Carry out proper research to ensure you have the appropriate tool to carry out Social Listening to meet both your short-term and long-term goals to get a holistic view from across the internet.
- Track using relevant keywords: With fast-changing consumer trends, you will find that keywords and topics keep evolving rapidly daily. Ensure you understand the tool you chose, as that will help you know the most beneficial insights on various keywords, buzzwords, hashtags, and catchphrases for your brand and your competitors.
- Determine the busiest channels: Knowing this is important so your sales strategies can target the proper channels for campaigns, messaging, and engaging with your audience.
- Competitor Tracking: Along with internal learnings, you also learn a lot from tracking your competitors. Their success and failure stories also provide many insights for your sales teams wherein you and your team can target the consumers by providing alternate solutions.
- Be Alert: Stay alert to consumers’ fluctuating requirements. Along with the positive information about your brand flowing around, be aware of the perceived online threats related to your brand.
So, are you ready to boost your social listening to take your brand to the next level? Do it to keep your sales teams on their toes while also increasing the reach of your products and improving the loyalty of your customer base.
It will help you serve your existing customer base better and ensure your sales strategies are more focused and directed to conceive and launch new products while improving your existing product base.
At the end of the day, social listening will transform your brand, its sales strategies, and its product portfolio from a good one to a great one!
About the Author:
Nikita Vora is a Digital Marketing Trainer. With the Mission to Arm 10k Women Solopreneurs, she started SMM Unleashed, a digital marketing agency. She has trained 750+ women entrepreneurs so far via webinar series. She specialises in helping businesses find digital solutions to their problems.
