What is Social Listening?

With marketing, monitoring people's responses is just as important as creating content. It is just as important to create content as it is to monitor people’s responses. Without knowing how your audience feels about your content, the harder it will be to create engaging and relatable content. That’s where social listening comes in.

Social listening refers to monitoring social media channels for your brand mentions, competitor brand mentions, and related keywords. With social listening, you’ll get more valuable insight into how customers feel about your brand and your products, their pain points, areas of improvement, and future expectations.

How to Build Your Social Listening Strategy

It’s easy to say you’ll monitor your social media channels and stay up-to-date on what else is going on in your industry, but building an effective social listening strategy includes more actionable steps. When building your strategy, it’s best to keep these in mind:

Know your customer persona: know who you’re trying to attract and what platforms they use.
Identify pain points: discovering what problems and gaps exist in your products and overall industry will help better address and potentially solve those frustrations in the future.
Choose strategic and relevant keywords to monitor: creating a list of keywords to look for that are relevant to your company and industry will help narrow down what to look for and streamline your social listening tasks overall.
Create guidelines on how to engage: whether it’s a negative review or a positive comment, having a template on how to respond will simplify this task in the future.

Benefits of Social Listening

There are so many tasks involved in marketing for a business that it may feel overwhelming to tack one more to the list, but social listening will give you more insight into your customers and how to improve your current marketing efforts. Some benefits of social listening include:

Understand your audience: get valuable feedback on what your audience likes and what other interests they have that could help inform your future marketing campaigns.
Performance insight: learn more about how customers feel about your brand and where you could improve in the future.
Crisis management: in cases of growing criticisms about your business and/or products, you can start seeing the signs early on, preventing it from turning into a fully-fledged crisis.
Increased opportunities: monitoring social conversations around your industry will identify industry trends, influencers, and people who already love your brand and love telling people about their experiences, i.e. your brand advocates.
Customer acquisition: join the conversation your audience is having, but don’t outwardly sell; instead, develop relationships with potential customers by sharing helpful information and slowly nurture those relationships into leads.

Marketing today is about much more than just trying to outwardly sell for your business; it's about developing relationships with your customers and nurturing them into leads.

Social listening is an invaluable part of that process, and it will make your overall marketing efforts much easier moving forward. For more marketing help for your business, reach out to our expert marketing team and get started with one of our budget-friendly marketing plans.

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