What Is Social Listening and What Are the Benefits

One of your customers just praised your brand in a tweet. A few minutes later, another customer shared feedback for improvement on LinkedIn. After a few hours, your competitor launched a new feature to attract more business. A thousand miles away, a news article featured your brand.

Imagine how useful it would be if you could know about what’s happening around you and about your brand in real-time!

Social listening can make it happen.

What Is Social Listening?

Social listening is a combination of processes that includes monitoring brand mentions across social media and online forums, and tracking hashtags, keywords, queries, and topics that you can analyze for insights to discover opportunities to act.

Benefits of Social Listening

Possibilities with social listening are practically endless. It lets you participate in conversations, connect with your customers, delight them or solve their problems, analyze competition, improve retention, and stay up-to-date with trends and topics that matter to you most.

Let’s dig deeper and see what’s in there for you.

1. Manage Brand Health and Reputation

Your customers are talking about you. On social media, forums, and blogs they’re discussing how they like or dislike something you offer, which, in turn, influences your revenue, growth, brand health, and reputation.

With social listening, you could jump into conversations quickly and take charge of the situation before a potential reputation crisis occurs.

2. Gain a Competitive Edge

By tracking your competitors, you'll understand more about their marketing activities, approaches, new product launches, and most importantly, how their customers are reacting their marketing efforts.

When you put all this information together, you'll know more about:

1. Why their customers don't like something;
2. What solutions they expect;
3. Messaging and communication across social media and the web (so you'll know what type of messaging might work better with your target audience);
4. New products or solutions they're offering;
5. Audience sentiment and behavior toward those products.

Once you have this information, you can use it to create a killer marketing strategy.

3. Improve Customer Service and Retention

Social media is pretty mainstream when it comes to customer service. Like it or not, your customers are publishing reviews, feedback, questions, and comments about you on social media – and they're expecting lightning-fast resolution to their queries and concerns.

Failing to answer them at the right time might cause loss of business from existing customers, hurt your brand reputation, and drive away potential clients.

Social listening makes you more vigilant so you can ensure a timely response, while improving customer experience and retention.

4. Track Customer Sentiment

Social listening and monitoring empowers you to gain in-depth insights into consumer sentiment. You can track what your customers are saying about you, whether they appreciate new changes in the products or services you offer, and how they feel about it.

This will help you make better and more informed decisions about how you can make them more receptive to using your products, improve messaging and marketing, and boost revenue.

5. Identify Your Target Audience's Pain Points

Tracking pain points of your ideal customers will tell you about the solutions they seek. This information is a gold mine because it can show you a path toward building solutions that attract your target audience.

Social listening is one of the best ways to identify customer pain points and opinions. By collecting data from feedback and reviews on similar products, you can find out what bothers them and come up with ideas to solve their problems.

6. Engage with Your Audience

We can’t stress enough how important it is for you to engage with your audience on social media. Social listening gives you opportunities to start or join conversations, reply to your followers, answer questions, show some love, or empathize with them.

Through this, you can entertain your audience, develop relationships with potential customers,  nurture leads, and establish trust ... all of which are important pillars of social selling.

To sum up ...

Social listening is one of the most important aspects of audience research. Hopefully, this article has helped you understand how social listening can empower your and your marketing team so you can create a more effective customer acquisition strategy.

Get yourself Sprout Social, Hootsuite, or any other tool for social listening. These tools will help you track, analyze, and respond to conversations and gain meaningful, actionable insights into competitors, all under one roof.

If you really want to grow your business and reach new consumers, get started on social listening today!

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