If you’re not monitoring social media for mentions of your brand, you’re missing out on valuable data that could help improve your business.
Almost two thirds of marketers say that social listening has become more valuable in the past year.
You can use social media listening tools to see how customers and potential customers think about you by analyzing their social media posts. You can also learn about the competition from them. As long as you know how to access it, this is incredible market research readily available in real-time.
What is social listening?
Social listening is tracking social media platforms for any mention or conversation related to your brand. This also involves analyzing them for any insights or opportunities to act that you may find.
It’s a two-step process:
You should keep an eye on social media channels for any mention of your brand, competitors, products, and keywords related to your business.
After you have learned about the different ways to put what you have learned into action, look for ways to improve your own actions. You should look for ways to improve your own actions after you have learned about the different ways to put what you have learned into action. You can improve your customer service by responding to customers who are happy with your product or service, or by making changes to your brand positioning.
How can a social listening strategy help your business?
If you’re not paying attention to what people are saying about your business on social media, you’re making business decisions without considering what people are saying. Real people talk about your brand and your industry online. You will benefit more if you know what they have to say.
If you want to know what your customers are saying, you need to listen to them on social media. Social listening can provide valuable insights about your customers, help you develop better marketing strategies, and strengthen your customer relationships.
Understand and engage with your audience
Social media listening allows you to understand what your audience wants from your brand.
An example of this would be if an existing customer tweeted about how much they love your product. You might spot a conversation where people are looking to solve a problem that your product or service could provide.
Industry and competitor intelligence
Social listening is the process of monitoring, measuring, and analyzing social media conversations. It helps you make better business decisions, understand your customers, and find new opportunities. What do people say about your competitors and your industry in general? This allows you to see how you compare to others in the marketplace.
Social listening is a process that allows you to see what your competitors are doing in real-time. Are they launching new products? Developing new marketing campaigns?
The conversations you have may reveal an opportunity in the marketplace that you could take advantage of.
This new way of monitoring opportunities and threats as they occur allows you to respond more quickly and effectively.
Product intelligence
Listening to conversations in the industry provides a lot of information about what is and is not successful for current and potential customers.
This information can be helpful for your customer service, product development, and marketing teams.
Can you create a new product or add a feature to an existing one to resolve the problems people are talking about? What you learn from this experience could inspire a new product idea.
You’ll also learn about any frustrations you have with your current products, as well as your competitors’ products. Can you modify things to help address the concerns? If you are going to do something, make sure to tell people about it through a targeted marketing campaign.
Avoid crises before they happen
Use of social media allows you to monitor the publics’ sentiment in real-time, so you are immediately aware if there is a noteworthy change in how much people are talking about you or the tone of what they say.
It’s a system that tells you when your brand’s image changes for better or worse online.
Try to find the reasons why you are getting more engagement than normal. The audience is willing to share a lot of information about their preferences. Those lessons can help guide your strategy across channels.
Social listening can help you prevent PR disasters from getting out of hand. If you notice a change in people’s attitudes, look at the social media feedback to see what might be causing the change. While you’re taking care of that problem, try to find a way to prevent it from happening again in the future.
Make it a priority to investigate why sentiment is down and make changes immediately, for example by pulling a problem post or apologizing for an insensitive Tweet.
Fill your funnel
You will typically be well-received if you offer to help solve someone’s problem. When brands try to sell something to people who are talking about them on social media, those people usually do not respond well.
Listening to social media can help you discover questions and conversations people are having about your industry. There are many chances to promote your brand or show your skills. They should not be seen as opportunists to try and sell something immediately.
Instead of looking at joining a conversation on social media as a way to make a sale, view it as an opportunity to develop relationships with potential customers. These relationships can then be nurtured over time into sales.
Reach out, make a connection, and share helpful information. If you establish your brand as a reliable resource, people will be more likely to buy your product when they need it.
Identify opportunities for collaboration
You can learn a lot about your industry by monitoring social conversations and identifying the important creators and thought leaders. These are important people to connect with.
They can have a significant impact on how people perceive you.
Remember: this is a two-way street. It is more likely that others in your industry will support you if you support them. Rather than trying to join an existing community by force, it is better to connect with people who are already a part of the conversations you want to join. This can be done through collaborations.
finding ways to organically become a part of relevant online communities in a way that is helpful and not salesy.
Listen in the right places – Social Listening Tip
You need to find out where your audience is talking about you in order to gauge their reaction to you. This means that your social listening program should include a variety of sources.
The conversations people have on LinkedIn about your brand or industry are probably different than the ones they have on Twitter, Instagram, or Facebook. Although people might talk about you a lot on Twitter, they might not say anything about you on Facebook.
To stay up-to-date with what people are saying about you and your industry, you need to track conversations across different networks. This will give you insights into how people view you and your business. This means that you should join the conversation through both organic engagement and paid advertising.
5 Reasons Why Audiences Are More Important Than Keywords
Some bloggers and content creators believe that using keywords is the only way to get higher rankings.
Some people do not understand that it is more beneficial to focus on a particular group of people instead of targeting specific keywords.
People should always come first, before words. Here are 5 reasons why.
Finding keywords depends on knowing your audience
Yes, there is value in keyword placement.
If you don’t use the right keywords on your website, it will be difficult to reach your target audience.
If you want to know which keywords to focus on, you need to first understand your audience.
The worst thing a marketer can do is to target everyone with their content. By targeting everyone, you target no one.
The first step is to figure out who your target audience is, and then identify which keywords are essential for reaching them.
The more keywords you try to target on one page of your website, the more difficult it will be for readers to find what they’re looking for.
After narrowing down your candidates, select the most specific ones to help direct your marketing strategy.
This text is saying that the phrase “shoes for sale basketball” would be a good choice of words to use for a landing page about basketball shoes.
One way to do keyword research is to use Google’s suggest software.
The more specific your audience and keywords, the better.
There’s a lot of content online. If you want to be successful, you should focus on a specific audience and use relevant keywords.
Audience engagement is more valuable
Visitors who come to your website as a result of a search engine optimization campaign are generally more engaged than those who find your site through other means. This is because they are actively seeking out the kind of information or product you have to offer, rather than coming across your site by chance.
The amount of traffic your website gets is not as important as how engaged that traffic is.
The most important thing is not how many visitors you have, but how many of those visitors engage with your message.
In other words, an audience.
When discussing audience engagement, digital publishers are least concerned with traffic stats.
And usually, keywords only drive page views and visitors.
But an audience won’t just view your page. Your audience will interact with your content because they already have faith in your brand and find it enjoyable.
It is better to have an engaged audience that is likely to share your message than to just have a larger audience that may not be as engaged.
And in the world of marketing, engagement is everything.
Audiences are loyal
The main source of traffic for most websites is from Google sending people your way.
If people are not interested in your website when they first see it, then the traffic was not worth anything.
Providing users with a poor digital experience will cause them to seek out alternatives. This is easy to find with millions of results available.
While a general audience may be less likely to be loyal to your brand, a targeted and defined audience will be more loyal because they feel a closer connection to your brand.
People who come to your website after doing a search are more likely to be interested in your product or service if it’s what they’re looking for.
Social media platforms have become increasingly popular in recent years.
A number of social media networks boast user numbers in the billions.
Twitter has a lot of influence in the world of audience building.
So does Instagram. And Pinterest. And LinkedIn. And YouTube.
The point?
Social media is successful because users can target specific audiences and then receive feedback from those audiences.
Your website should do the same thing. An engaged audience is a loyal audience.
Audiences make more purchases
Who buys more of your product?
Are you looking for ways to connect with new people who have just arrived on your website? Google can be a great resource for finding new potential customers.
What about your loyal customers who have stuck with you since the beginning?
Loyal customers pay significantly more than new customers.
But they don’t just pay more.
Loyal customers are much more likely to repurchase from you, forgive you if you make a mistake, take advantage of a new offer, and refer your business to a friend.
Loyal customers are valuable because they help promote your product or service to other potential customers.
Focusing on improving customer retention is a great way save money. If customer retention increases by 2%, then costs will decrease by 10%.
Keeping customers engaged with your brand is key to maintaining their loyalty. You save money by getting more people to stay for a longer amount of time.
But engaging with your customers doesn’t just save money. It makes money. 40% more to be exact.
The most valuable asset for marketers today is trust.
But trust takes a long time to build. Loyal customers are more profitable than new customers because they are more likely to continue using the company’s products or services. They already trust you.
This is why online reviews are so powerful. They are trustworthy.
For example, if customer support is poor, this will damage the trust that a buyer has in a company.
According to a recent study, 60% of organizations believe that customer service will be the deciding factor in whether companies succeed or fail over the next three years.
Another benefit of having a good omnichannel customer engagement strategy is that companies tend to retain 89% of their customers. Those who don’t only retain 33%.
Building an audience relies on engaging with that audience.
If you spend time and money engaging with your audience on social media, asking relevant questions, and creating personable content, you’ll get a return on your investment.
Just using keywords will not result in an engaged audience, meaning that there will be no return on investment.
Keywords alone are useless
If you use keywords in an incorrect way, your ranking could be negatively affected.
How?
Imagine you Google, “how to screw in a lightbulb.”
After the results come up, you click on one of the first few links.
After clicking on the article and reading through it, you realize that it does not provide the answer to the question you were looking for. It’s just trying to sell you a lightbulb.
You click off the website within 10 seconds and browse through the remaining results.
What just happened?
Your actions have just reduced that website’s domain authority.
One click won’t do much damage, but if thousands of other people do the same thing it can be harmful.
That’s a lot of harm to their rankings.
If you’re only focused on keywords and rankings, you’re not going to get anywhere.
If you do not have a specific audience in mind, people will come to your website and leave quickly. This high “bounce rate” will cause your website to rank lower.
What’s more, the negative brand image you’re creating is also worrying.
If you are not using keywords to target an audience, it is best not to use them at all.
