Image credits:truelocal.com.au
You want to know what’s being said about you on the internet.
Of course you do!
It’s the easiest platform, where people turn up in huge numbers, and expresses their opinions and experience of a product or a brand. Today every organization is in the battle of creating effective viral campaigns, relevant messages for the customers. At the same time it’s important for every organization to respond to customer dissatisfaction.
Today more focus is given to social media marketing than the traditional marketing approach. There are millions of users on Facebook, Twitter, Quora, Google +, and one can get a plethora of details about a product. This is the reason why organizations have started paying attention to Social media listening (SMM), to listen to what’s being said about them. It’s the fastest way to spread a message, or a marketing campaign. Organizations want to get involved in the conversations before it creates a big problem for them. So as a marketer, one has to constantly think about strategies and innovative ideas for social media.
Today we list out 7 things which every marketer should know before entering into this field.
1) Social media listening isn’t complicated: Sometime numbers and statistics might appear to be a bit confusing. But it isn’t really that complicated. Marketers can get an idea about the product by just analyzing numbers on Twitter and Facebook. Number of followers, fans, retweets and shares will give you an idea about how well you are performing in the market.
2) Social media listening covers everything: Generally, the term Social media listening gives you the impression that you will get the statistics of only social networking sites. But that is not the case; SMM covers a wide range of online platforms which includes blogs, reviews, forums, news, and interactions along with the major social networking sites. But listening to all these platforms depends on their policies; if the site does not give permission to access data then it’s impossible for any tools to cover all the content (e.g. Private groups on Facebook).
3) Finding the trends: For a marketer it’s extremely important to know about the target audiences before launching a campaign. Therefore, spotting the trends is very important, understanding past data, conversations, peak times, emotional connect with the audience becomes a necessity. So for a marketer to plan things accordingly, SMM can help you to understand and spot the trends, so that a successful marketing campaigning can be launched.
4) Finding the influencers: This reminds me of an incident in Oct, 2013 about a restaurant in Gurgaon, which became a viral buzz because of a customer lashing out in frustration with the service he received at the restaurant in a blog. This blog created a huge buzz, when people started sharing it all over the online media. The restaurant’s credibility came under question and people started warning of going against the restaurant.
This example shows the power of an influencer, what he/she can do to an organization. Social media is definitely changing the way people communicate over internet and today before buying any product people definitely look for reviews and opinions about it. Thus, it’s also very important for the marketer to find the influencers or creating opinion leaders who can influence people, which is positive from product’s point of view.
5) Crisis Management: Marketer can also create crisis management strategies before news comes out in the market outlets. With the help of social media listening, you will get to know what’s creating problem for your customers, and what’s hitting your business the most. This is where real time social media listening comes in, marketer will get to know when a crisis is making its way through social networking sites, and they can prevent such situations or manage it efficiently.
6) Manage your competition: One big question lies in front of a marketer is what’s so good about them, which makes them different? Right, everyone in business wants to know about their competitors. With social media listening you will not only be able to monitor opinions about your product but you can also monitor your competitors. One can learn about the customers’ experience with the competitive products, what supplements they are expecting with them, where they can gain extra edge over other players in the market. This will benefit every department in the organization, right from sales to customer service and marketing.
7) Complaints and Compliments: If customers have some issues related to your product and started posting complaints on social media, SMM will help you to stay on top of such situation and will also help you to respond to the issues in real time. This way you can prevent a small issue from becoming big news in the marketing outlets.
At the same time don’t forget to share the compliments you receive from customers, because there are millions of people present in social media, and today sharing things in online media is similar to word of mouth marketing. The more the number of people will share your content, the more fan base will increase. This way an organization can position itself as a trusted brand on social media.
Social media has created a platform where millions of people communicate. So if you are wondering what Social media marketing is all about and how you can use analytics effectively, a marketer should know and understand what social media listening is all about and in what way it can help them. Real time analysis and response is necessary for a marketer and social media listening is the key to get the relevant information so that you can proactively act on the situation.
