Yes, there are people on social media who are looking for something you offer, or asking a question you can answer, but you can only connect with them if you are listening effectively.
Social media listening is a powerful tool because it turns traditional social media on its head. Instead of using it as a megaphone, you can use it to listen in on conversations.
Social listening can be very powerful, providing real-time actionable insights into your business and marketing approach. In this post, I will outline 5 key benefits of listening.
5 Key Benefits of Social Listening
1. Listening makes you accessible
To provide good customer service, you need to be able to listen to a complaint (or a compliment), no matter where it occurs.
Sprout Social found that 34.5% of people prefer to communicate gambling data taiwan via social media, outperforming other channels like live chat (24.7%), email (19.4%) and 1-800 numbers (16.1%). The problem is that nearly 90% of social messages directed at businesses are ignored.
When you truly listen, you can respond to queries and interactions faster, so people feel heard.
Advice:
You're probably already reading posts where people tag your business, but listening carefully means looking for posts where your business name is misspelled or not specifically tagged.
2. Listening brings you to the full conversation
Listen not only to what people are saying about your brand, but also to the ideas and topics that arise in the conversations you want to be a part of.
By identifying relevant keywords on social media and following conversations related to your company's mission, you open yourself up to new discussions, blogs, and social media post ideas.
You listen so you can find conversations to join, and when you join a conversation, you can build relationships and trust.
3. Listening teaches you the language of conversation and how people talk about problems
Your business needs to know who its audience is, and social listening obviously helps with that. But it can also provide deeper insights into who those people are.
What do they care about? How do they talk about these things?
A personal example was that I noticed while running a social media campaign for a line of organic body shampoo that conversations about organic skincare often included concerns about whether the product was gluten-free. Neither I nor the company I was working with knew that gluten was a concern for many of their customers, but luckily the products were gluten-free so I was able to engage in the conversation with another outlet.
Even just noticing what kind of words people use can be helpful. People within a community often use specific vocabulary, terminology, and idioms as a sense of belonging. If you want to show that you're part of that community, your business might need to show that you literally speak the same language as the people you're trying to reach.
4. Listening allows you to meet the key people in your industry, influencers and loyal followers
Would you like to ask questions to your biggest fans and most loyal followers? What about the thought leaders in your industry?
If you use social listening, you can easily engage with top fans and leaders. You can ask them for their feedback and support, you can include them in your communication efforts. You can learn about them and what they care about.
Sometimes your best followers are your best advocates and can communicate better about your organization than you can. Listening helps you empower them. These brand advocates often educate others about your company, and this type of “word of mouth marketing” is powerful.
In fact, word of mouth is more powerful than most other types of messages because it comes from real people and not directly from a company.
Advice:
Once you've located key people online, you'll have the opportunity to build relationships with them that span different social media platforms, and perhaps even extend to interactions outside of social media.
5. Listening shows you what's working
You can also monitor what other companies are doing and see how people respond. This could lead you to realize that your company has an opportunity to do something that others haven't been able to do.
Advice:
Getting feedback about your business through social listening can be “extraordinarily informative.” Like any type of feedback, listening can lead you to learn that you’re not doing something right. But think of it as an opportunity for positive change, because it is.