Social Media Listening in today’s date is barely limited to simply understanding the number of likes and comments you have received on your posts and how your campaign has performed. Innovation among social listening and CRM tools has enabled bigger and smaller brands extract much more from social media.
Most brands today have started incorporating social listening to enable customer service via social and to generate qualitative insights. Here’s a list of reasons why brands need social listening in today’s date:
1. Social Customer Care: Providing customer support on Social Media is an on-demand adaptation that brands have undertaken as a result of increase in customer population on social. This eventually led to increase in social media focused marketing strategies, providing customers a space to discuss their likes and dislikes about a brand. This interested brands to create their official pages/handles, to take care of customer concerns and queries. With more and more customers going social to raise their concerns on social media, it has become impossible for all brands big and small to do without social listening and Social CRM.
2. Reaching New Customers: Social media has evolved over the years and introduced multiple ways for brands to introduce targeted marketing campaigns. According to a research conducted by Clutch, approximately 24% brands use social listening to introduce newer campaigns based on data research to attract new customers. With increased targeting capabilities, it is also easier to segregate your audience based on your product/service categories and target accordingly.
3. Product Improvement: Social media is filled with people complaining about your product/services, asking queries as well as providing you with suggestions. Brands are constantly picking up from these instances and working towards constantly improving and upgrading their products/services. Social listening helps collect these messages and bucket them into categories based on the listening tool’s capabilities. Doing this helps brands understand the areas which require reworking and identify the areas which are require more information sharing due to its complicacy. Customers are also constantly making comparisons with competitor brands enabling you to understand where your brand is lacking and where you are leading.
4. Competitor Information: Listening to competitor brands allows you to stay updated about their marketing strategies and their latest innovations. Analysing which marketing initiative has worked for them helps you frame your strategies accordingly. It also provides you an industry wide understanding of the trends and newest developments. This helps brands come up with innovative solutions and staying ahead of other brands.
5. Finding Influencers and Brand Advocates: Social Listening also helps identify famous personalities and brand advocates who swear by your product and are willing to promote it, either for free or even for a certain benefit. Endorsements help reach a larger audience and increases the idea of dependability on the product, because word of mouth is the best form of marketing.
6. Managing Crisis Situations: With listening you get real time updates on all your social mentions. Nowadays trends are decided based on what is being spoken widely about on twitter – the number of retweets received on a certain post or the number of times a hashtag has been used. During situations where a negative concern has been spoken about extensively by a larger group of audience (eg. Maggi crisis) or an influencer has raised a concern and his/her followers have retweeted or spoken about it in length; social listening plays a key role. It not just helps in identifying the crisis but also helps understand the sentiment and urgency of the situation and taking actions accordingly.
7. Recruitment/Hiring: Did you know close to 9% of recruitment (source: clutch) in today’s date happens through social media. Social listening with the right keywords being tracked makes identifying appropriate candidates easier. Also, with LinkedIn taking the lead as a platform to connect professionals, the process has become simpler. It also comes with multiple options to conduct targeted promotions and hence reach the right audience. Listening here plays a key role, as it helps you identify your interested candidates with ease.
8. Brand Promotion: Promoting your brand is directly related to understanding your audience and talking to them. Understanding your audience allows you to break down your marketing campaign into more targeted segments. This helps reach out to the right audience with the correct content, offers, search results and more. This allows better branding with minimum spill over effect on your campaigns while increasing the shareability of your content.
9. Understanding Content Performance: A social listening tool provides you many more insights over and above the ones which your social platforms provide you with. A multi-functional software, which allows you to not just monitor your conversations but also derive meaningful insights out of it, let’s you understand how your content/ads are performing and rearrange your content marketing strategy for optimum results.