Entrepreneurs need to take feedback from their clients, be it positive or negative. It opens a room of improvements which ultimately helps in growing business. These efforts taken to know who is talking about the business and what they are talking about is known as social media listening.

What is Social Media Listening for your Business?

It is a modern tool or should I say strategy to monitor customer feedback on social media for getting a positive return to the business. Social Media Listening encourages professionals to hear about their brands and companies which can be used further. It includes analysis of specific phrases, content, keywords, process, and industries that can be leveraged for the good of one's own business.

Today, many are using this intelligent tool to survive the competition and bring in a value. It is used by startups, entrepreneurs, corporate professionals, B2B, B2C, retailers and even government.

Why is Social Media Listening So Important?

One can implement social media listening to achieve one of the following goals:

• Improve online brand reputation

• Enhance content marketing

• Track marketing campaign performance

• Get insight into current trends

• Research agency pitch

• Give customer service support

• Manage brand crisis

1. Track Brand Reputation:

Through effective social media listening, one can analyze the positive and negative sentiments of the customers associated with your brand. Not only this, it also allows you to draw your attention upon those points and find out what actually affected your brand; again in a positive and negative sense.

One does not have to wait for a crisis to happen when they are active in social listening. They get insight into data earlier by listening how people feel about their brand. So, they can act accordingly before the outbreak happens by fixing the negative sentiments first. It allows you to focus on recent trends, seasonality and new product releases.

2. Create Thoughtful Content:

Content about your brand should be spread widely over the internet. It requires a thoughtful strategy before posting anything on social media channels and other platforms. Social listening comes in here. It allows you to identify that specific hash-tags, keywords or topics that your audience really enjoys. The next step is to concentrate upon those keywords or phrases that people crave for and use it in your content for raising the brand value.

Say, for example, if you own a coffee shop and social listening suggests keywords like coffee and morning are popular among your audience. What you can do is craft a post like "Take a sip of our new #coffee flavor to power up your #morning!" and spread it on social media. A right set of search hash-tags and keywords will bring in the target audience to your business.

3. Boost Your Marketing Campaign:

Social media listening is a great way to identify the trends at the right time. Sometimes it may happen that opportunities for a new marketing campaign are right there but you don’t know about it. In that case, social listening allows you to brainstorm marketing ideas by analyzing audience’s conversation related to your brand. For examples, a brand named Adore Me used social listening as a tool to identify trend among its audience. They started a contest to find a modeling face for the brand receiving a huge number of entries. Several fans posted their videos on Instagram under this contest and the winner got a chance to sign a modeling contract. What brand received was a huge social engagement.

4. Enhance Customer Experience:

Customer experience is pivotal to a business’ growth and stability. Without achieving satisfaction from customers, it is not possible to grow in the long run. Social media listening can help a business enhance the customer experience by identifying their problems. The point here is to focus on concerns that may become a large issue in the near future or the ones that can alter a company’s growth.

For example, in 2016 Tesla identified that an overview on social media suggests customers having trouble with Tesla Superchargers. Tesla, in response, pointed out on this issue and the concerns customers were having. It took necessary step to cure the problem of cars arriving at a station to see fully charged Tesla cars occupying all the spots and getting annoyed. It introduced a fleet-wide idle fee.

Conclusion:

With social media listening, you can benefit almost every aspect of your business. The sales team can get to know the products or services liked by most of the customers. The marketing team can get insight into trends, content, and keywords prevailing over the internet. R&D team gets early access to feedbacks and reviews.