Social media listening is vital for the growth of your brand. Hear and understand where you stand in conversations among consumers and competitors. Those are the keys to helping you learn and expand in a crowded marketplace.
“As you listen more to what your audience is saying, you are able to learn about their needs, problems and interests,” said senior insights strategist Christina Garnett. “Listening is an investment to understand them. You’ll know what they like to talk about, engage with and more. Then talk to their needs.”
During an Africa Tweet Chat, she looked at how consumer sentiment, brand reputation and listening work together to generate leads.
Social listening gives you the information you need to deliver a timely and smart response to important issues where you can offer solutions.
A good reference is the social media management company Hootsuite. It describes social listening as “the process of monitoring social conversations to understand what customers are saying about a brand and industry online.”
The approach is fairly basic at little to no cost.
For instance, Twitter lists are great ways to listen on social media. Group them by subject, competitors or any other subject. You can tune in any time to monitor the latest goings-on and jump into conversations as you want to offer help.
“Create a Google document with a list of keywords,” Garnett said. “Start brand specific with @, hashtags and then work your way out to keywords your audience would use about your industry, region and so on. Search natively as well as set up Talkwalker alerts.”
Knowing people’s sentiment gives you an indication of how strongly or emotionally they feel about an issue. The stronger their sentiment, the more urgent and important should be your response.
“A sentiment analysis is incredibly important,” Garnett said. “This is where you separate yourself from the brands that will take any attention and the ones that want to know how their audience really feels.
“Your customers and potential customers will read that,” she said. “Then they spread the message by word of mouth.”
Any bit of information in your sphere of expertise is a possible lead. A need you can address is a lead multiplied by the number of people in the conversation.
“I see lead generation on Twitter quite a bit,” Garnett said. “Imagine you are looking for a new pair of headphones and the Beats by Dre team is social listening and sees that. They then respond and ask to let them see if they can help. You feel seen without even tagging them. It’s powerful.”
Your brand’s reputation greatly depends on your social listening skills, which give you a feel for society’s emotions in general. Knowing when not to get involved is as important as jumping into the mix.
“Listening provides data,” Garnett said. “People will hold panels and do weeks and months of market research and then not do any social listening. Yet, the data is right there. The opinions of your customers and potential customers are right there.”
Successful marketing aligns with the opinions, desires and voice of the target audience. This leads to artificial intelligence and its benefits for a brand’s social listening efforts.
“Machine learning provides a scalable opportunity for us to learn even more about our target audiences and create predictive insights,” Garnett said. “Adding AI tools to your stack creates efficiency, cost savings and more collaborative opportunities.”
Marketing is all about listening, which social listening tools have made easier. Whatever tools you use will help make you more productive. This lets you channel your energy to the nuance of listening while the tools attend to the trivial details.
“I love a dashboard,” Garnett said. “Social listening can be overwhelming at first, but once you have a tool with a clean user interface that lets you position the widgets as you want them, you’ll be able to read your findings easily.”
Social listening can boost content creation, aided and abetted by tools such as Google alerts and Twitter lists and chats. Any of these can keep you abreast of conversations, trends and competitors.
Garnett has relied on Talkwalker, Mention, Brandwatch, Sprout Social, Awario and Agorapulse. For audience intelligence she taps into SparkToro and Audiense.
“Opinions of your customers and potential customers are right here,” she said. “Just do social listening.”
About The Author
Jim Katzaman is a manager at Largo Financial Services and worked in public affairs for the Air Force and federal government. You can connect with him on Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn.