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Social media has changed the way entrepreneurs market their businesses. Everyone’s literally on a social media that you can think of – Facebook, Instagram, Twitter – and they’re talking about your brand, product and/or service on these platforms. And these days, customers tend to trust more on other customers’ experiences shared on social media.
Big brands and companies need to gather all the chatter about themselves on social media and make sense of these chatters that revolve around them on social media.
This is where social listening comes into the picture.
Social listening or also known as social media monitoring is about searching about what’s being said about your company, your competitors and other topics of interest on social media platforms.
It is the process of tracking conversations around your brand or any specific words relevant to your business.
These conversations you gather offer you insights about your customers, products and competitors with social listening.
Social listening is an essential strategy that every brand should practice. As long as you choose to put your brand online, social listening should be an integral part of your digital strategy.
There are some of the reasons why brands should emphasize on social listening.
Social Media Strategy
Like any business living in the 21st century, your business should be serious about social media. And with that said, social listening should be included into your social media strategy.
Discovering what people are saying about your brand or industry is an important for to plan an effective social media strategy. Social listening can tell you about social networks your audience is actively using and their sentiment about your brands, products, competitors or industry.
Using social listening to determine your social media strategy will save your company both time and money. For instance, through social listening, you can identify the key focus groups for different social media channels and come up with suitable engagement strategies for respective channels.
Brand Reputation
Social media has a way of making brands and companies nervous. One poor remark about your brand can go viral and crush your business.
In today’s social era, the customers has the power to determine the value and quality of your brand or product.
Many brands are learning the best practices for how to manage customer service issues on social media.
With social listening, you successfully identify harmful conversation and amend the situation before it has a negative impact on the image of your brand.
Social listening includes being aware of what people are saying about you on social media, and then responding appropriately. As you carry out social listening, you can then carefully respond to your audience and their concerns.
Product Development
One of the greatest benefits of social listening is that you are able to receive customer feedback about your products, brand or industry.
With the customer feedback, you can adjust your business strategies to fit the needs of the consumer. Do not underestimate the constructive criticism as it is valuable because you have the opportunity to improve your product and customer service. When you take customer’s suggestions seriously and strategically, you build stronger brand loyalty.
