If you have not encountered the phrase or term social media listening, then perhaps you need to explore and understand what it entails and how it can help your business to achieve success. Indeed, it is not easy to incorporate such terms in the way you do your marketing strategy if you do not understand how it works and what it can exactly do to boost your business.
By definition, social media listening is the tracking of your various channels in social media where you have created a business page. It is where you can see and check for customer feedback, mentions of your brand, or even discussions made about certain keywords, topics, industries, or even your competitors. This is also where you can find analyses that will enable you to gain insights and work on those specific opportunities so that they are more optimized for success.
Social media listening involves two specific processes in which you monitor, then analyze the information you get out of the data that resulted in the monitoring that you’ve done. It looks and feels the same as social media monitoring, but it isn’t. It simply goes beyond the metrics such as engagement rates and mentions because it also considers the mood behind those data collected if people are satisfied or not according to the ones they have shown your brand.
After being able to establish a basic understanding of social media listening, we now go to finding ways on how to integrate social listening into our Social Media Marketing Strategy:
- Recognize and determine your buzz words. These are words that people often use to talk about your brand such as product names, industry terms, catch phrases, hashtags, and so much more.
- The next step that you need to do is to initiate or develop your standards based on the data you gathered on what is the “average” or baseline for you. As you go along your business, soon you will need to level up your “average” and see how you can improve on your current benchmark to achieve success.
- Explore and discover the different pain points that consumers may have so that you can work on offering your products or services that fit their needs in such a way that gives value to them.
- Compare and contrast what people are saying about you and your competitor. In this way you will be able to determine who has the best brand or whose company is more trustworthy.
- You will have the opportunity to see the opportunities or errors that you commit in real time. You will greatly benefit from this as you can instantly correct and adapt to the changes that you need to make according to what people throw at you.
- As you gain more popularity you need to determine who are your most influential fans. Explore who are the ones that keep talking about your brand.
- To truly incorporate social media listening to your strategy, you need to maintain your focus and watch out for your social media presence across various platforms where you are actively present.
- Through social media listening you will be able to determine what your biggest competition is doing. You may then learn from their successes and failures.
- As we understand that there are different sections or segments within your company, we also need to create a cohesion in which we bring all the leaders in each segments together to brainstorm ideas on how to grow your brand.
- And because there are existing trends to follow, we need to focus on the latest trends that work and dig deeper as to why they are more commonly used and why they are effective.
If we know when and how to apply social media listening to our marketing strategies, we’ll definitely gain more advantages that can help us achieve our business’ goals. We just need to trust the process and always be open to changes and positive criticisms that will help us grow for the better.
