David Smith
Social media is pretty unavoidable for most businesses in 2022. It is where your customers are talking and reacting to things they like and things they don’t like. Social media offers people a chance to be heard, and it has come a long way since the early days of top friends lists and profile songs that were probably something by Linkin Park.
The point is, 2000s rock bands are awesome. The point of this article, however, is that people are speaking up on social media and a lot of that talk is about what they want or like from companies they support. As a business, you can gather a massive amount of helpful data simply by listening to what your consumers have to say. In this post, we will take a deeper look at what exactly social listening is, how to use it, and what it’ll do to take your brand up a notch.
What is social listening?
First and foremost, you need to understand what social listening actually means. In a nutshell, social listening is the monitoring of conversations and mentions pertaining to a chosen topic on social media platforms, then analyzing this information to understand what you can do to improve customer experience and satisfaction. One of its key functions is as a form of active reputation management.
These conversations and mentions don’t have to be directed specifically at your business or one of your products, either. Paying attention to what people are saying about the industry as a whole or some of your competitors can be just as valuable as listening to what they are saying about you specifically. It will give you some crucial insight into how to interact with customers and make every interaction a benefit to your brand. This is where the difference between social listening and social monitoring comes in as well.
Social monitoring is a passive function of social listening. It is a practice that essentially just gathers the data of what is being mentioned and reacted to. Social listening is the practice of using that data to take action. Social monitoring is the foundation of social listening. Action is the key here. All the data in the world won’t help anyone unless something is done with that data. So, what do you do with this information?
How this can benefit your brand
It’s important to remember that social listening is a form of reputation management. It isn’t just quietly analyzing data behind closed doors and changing things about your brand from the shadows. It’s about using that data to understand how to better engage your audience, and that includes keeping an eye on the anarchy that is the comment section.
Communicating with your customers in the comment section is a scary thought to some, but with social listening, you can humanize your brand, identify critics and advocates, and provide better support. Wendy’s Twitter account is an excellent example of what engaging customers directly can do for your company. Sure, not all brands can benefit from cheeky responses on Twitter like Wendy’s but their change in social media voice came from effective social listening.
Your brand reputation is intrinsically tied to social media in our day and age. By keeping tabs on which way your brand sentiment is trending, you can identify when and where the customer experience is falling short and fix it quickly. By minimizing experience gaps (when a brand fails to meet customer expectations) your customers will continue to spread positive opinions of your company.
You can also use social media listening to keep track of competitors. In all the same ways you can identify how to improve your own brand, you can track what aspects your competitors are coming up short with, and ensure your company is addressing those issues in your own brand. Customers will notice that your company actively addresses the pain points that your competitors aren’t actively addressing and likely choose to do business with the company that has its finger on the pulse of the people’s needs.
Social listening in action
All of this information is helpful in theory, but there isn’t much here on how social listening might actually look in the wild. What can you do to better your company after all of this data collection, analysis, and engagement? The short answer is to create the ultimate customer experience. What this looks like is different for every company, obviously, but all the answers can be found via social listening.
Chatbots and other AI-powered tools have begun taking an active role in many social listening strategies. These days, it seems most B2C companies include a chatbot on their website to get customer feedback and track FAQs in real-time. If you’re noticing negative feedback on a recently launched product, look deeper to find out why it isn’t being received well.
You can use this information to assign tasks to the appropriate departments and then respond to the community to let them know you hear the feedback and are actively improving the product. Whether it’s product issues, content issues, or customer service issues, social listening will give you the information you need to fix the issues before too many customers have to experience the pain points for themselves.
If you start to notice a downward trend in customer response to your content, it might be time to call in the experts. Content Cucumber has a team of highly trained content experts ready to take on any and all of your content needs. Click here to schedule a demo today and find out how top-tier content can change the game for your brand.
