How You Can Use Social Listening to Improve Your Business

Building brand awareness and connecting to customers online requires a holistic approach. Practicing social listening is just as important as creating meaningful content. In this blog post, we will introduce you to this topic and give you some tips on how you can get started on improving your brand through social listening.

According to HootSuite, “Social listening is the practice of monitoring social media channels for mentions of your brand, competitor brands, and related keywords.” You can track any mentions online about your brand or business, which can give you insights into how people are reacting. It can also help you to quickly identify a crisis and react accordingly.

Social listening can help you:

• Understand how your customers feel about your brand/business
• Figure out what you can improve if there are complaints or other negative comments
• Find out what competitors’ customers are talking about and discover trending topics
• Complete all of this in real-time, so you can act fast if needed

Social monitoring, or brand monitoring, is when you get notified when your brand or business is mentioned online. This is useful for responding quickly when needed, but it doesn’t give you a whole picture of your brand or the industry you’re focused on.

Social listening is more expansive in that it gives you mentions about not only your brand but also conversations about your competitors, the industry and similar products. This is a more complete picture instead of just snippets related to your brand or business.

Through social listening, you can make better decisions about how to structure your marketing or social media strategy, since you have a clearer picture of all that surrounds your business.

1. Know your audience

By listening to what is being said about your brand or business online, you can better understand what customers want and how you can improve your offering/services. 

2. Respond to crisis 

If something goes terribly wrong in relation to your brand, you want to find out right away and respond quickly.

3. Build customer relationships

Social media can be a great way to talk to current or potential customers, but your goal doesn’t always have to be about selling something. Build relationships and respond to customers instead of just offering a product or service every time. Share useful information that piques interest instead of strictly pushing what you have to offer.

4. Learn more about your competitors

Social listening can keep you in the loop about what your competitors are doing and give you updates about the latest trends in your industry. This can inspire you to create new products or services.

5. Improve your social media strategy

Listening to your customers, competitors and your industry as a whole can help you create tailored content. You’ll be able to learn more about what your customers want and what content seems to resonate with them. Need help creating meaningful content for your customers? Take a look at our Content Strategies for Different Stages of the Buyer Journey article.

1. Use the right social listening tools

Depending on what you want to track, make sure to use the right tools. There are various social listening apps that can help you monitor your social channels. Make sure to do your research to choose the right one for your needs.

Buffer, Hootsuite, Google Analytics, Facebook Insights and Twitter Analytics are just a few that are worth looking into. 

2. Create a Social Listening Strategy

You should structure your social listening and treat it as a project. Aside from monitoring tags or direct messages, monitor variations of your brand or business name, and the founder or other public figures associated with your brand.

3. Monitor your competitors

And not just the happy customers from your competitors, but keep an eye out for unhappy customers. What are they saying? How can you cater to them? You could find solutions to their problems.

We hope this introduction to social listening was helpful for you and that you can get started using these tips right away. There are so many opportunities to connect to your  existing and potential customers by using social media and the various social listening tools available.

Want to connect with your audience, and get paid for it? Make sure to read more in our article Facebook & Instagram Subscriptions Feature: How to Make the Most of It.