5 Reasons Why You Should Incorporate Social Media Listening Into Your Marketing Strategy
Imagine a world where you can read your customers’ minds to find out what they think about your products or services, what their needs are, and how you can you make them happy. Thanks to social media and social media listening tools, the superpower of mindreading is no longer fictitious.
In the marketing world, we distinguish between social media monitoring and social media listening. Sometimes these two terms are used interchangeably, but actually, they represent two different concepts, and you need both in your marketing strategies. In a way, social media monitoring is used to put out fires, while social media listening is the weather forecast helping to predict or prevent fires.
Brands implement social monitoring to improve short-term interactions, mainly by responding faster to customer feedback and complaints online.
Social listening, on the other hand, is used to anticipate future trends, measure customer satisfaction, and improve overall engagement by collecting data from social media mentions and pulling key insights from these mentions. This activity is crucial and impacts your long-term business decisions and strategies.
FitBit, a company that produces activity trackers, was interested in identifying new and different ways customers used their products. With the help of social media listening tools, they discovered activity trackers were utilized in clinical studies and even in court as evidence when prosecuting criminals. Thanks to their curiosity, FitBit successfully discovered new potential markets to thrive in.
Below are the top five benefits in utilizing social media listening:
- Identify future industry trends
- Find brand advocates
- Discover key channels
- Monitor real-time mentions, improving engagement
- Measure social sentiment around your brand
As you can see, social media listening opens doors to a wide range of new opportunities. Let’s have a look at a case study to gain a better understanding.
Ben & Jerry’s conducted one of my favorite studies that showcases the benefits of using social media listening. Common sense would suggest most people prefer eating ice cream in the summer when it’s really warm outside and you just want to cool down. The data gathered from social media listening, after analysing the posts and comments of fans, disproved this assumption. The results showed that even on a cold winter’s day, folks still get cozy, cuddle up with a blanket and enjoy some delicious ice cream.
An important takeaway is that in marketing you should not assume what your customers want. You have to go out there, test your theories and find evidence to confirm or contradict your initial assumption.
If you want to implement a social media listening strategy, here are some tools to help you get started:
- Google Alerts is an easy way to follow updates related to your brand. Choose specific keywords and receive relevant articles via email.
- Hootsuite allows you to follow conversations related to your business, industry, and product or service by tracking keywords, hashtags, and locations.
- Brandwatch helps you track mentions all over the Internet, such as social networks, forums, blogs, news websites, videos, and review sites.
- TweetReach is mostly used to discover your most influential followers, which can help you find your ideal target audience.
- Social Mention functions more like Google Search. Not only can you look for mentions, keywords, and reactions related to your brand, you can also specify the platform you want to search.
Remember, not every consumer will come to you and express an opinion about your brand and product. Listen whenever and wherever someone voices views on your brand.
By using social media listening you are able to find patterns, uncover trends in your industry, get insights into your competitors’ strategies and receive 100 percent honest customer feedback. Knowing this you can then not only reach your business goals but also stay ahead of the competition and give your customers what they want.
