Use The Power Of Social Listening To Grow Your Brand

Does your company actively listen to what its customers have to say about it?

We all know that the customer is the king and what they have to say about a brand can make or break the brand. Thus, every company must monitor the conversations that happen on the Internet about its brand, products, and services, campaigns, management, key employees, etc.

Though this sounds obvious, very few companies and marketing teams take Social Listening seriously. They are yet to adopt it as an integral part of their overall marketing strategy.

Incorporating Social Listening into your overall social media strategy can make your company more agile, and responsive to customer needs. This will help grow your brand image exponentially.

What is Social Listening

Social Listening is the strategy of tracking the mentions and discussions about brands, topics, and key phrases on the internet, and then utilizing the information to the advantage of a company.

The best thing is that it is a very flexible strategy. It can be used in a variety of ways and can be customized as per the requirement of the company. You can decide what you want to monitor and for how long. Thereafter you can utilize the data that you have collected to your advantage.

The benefits of using Social Listening

Social Listening can help the company to learn many new things about what its customers want, what the competitors are doing, how it can improve its products and services, and what it needs to grow in the future.

• Social Listening can be done discreetly without getting noticed by others. This is especially important as people might find you to be sneaky otherwise. This is a key difference between social listening and other digital marketing strategies which you implement to get noticed by your customers.
• In this age of viral marketing, it is the dream of every marketer to catch the attention of its customers. However, sometimes things do go wrong. Even a small mistake made online can snowball into a huge controversy that in turn may damage the reputation of the company. By doing Social Listening, companies will be able to catch the negative mentions very easily and take corrective actions to rectify the situation before things get out of hand.
• Social Listening will help you to strengthen your online presence and improve your brand recognition. You can contribute to discussions related to your company and be perceived as an authoritative and trustworthy brand that your customers would want to do business with.
• Social Listening can be a great tool for generating leads. People extensively use social media to look for products and services that solve the problems that they are facing. If you do Social Listening properly you will be able to identify such questions. Respond, and voila! You have a new lead!

How To Do Social Listening

Social Listening is a two-way process:

Step 1: Real-time monitoring of mentions of brands, keywords, etc.

Some of the keywords that you can monitor are:

• The name of your company
• The products and services offered by your company
• Advertisements and social media campaigns of your company
• Feedback, reviews, and experiences posted by your customers
• Names of your competitors and the brands of the products and the services that they sell
• Keywords relevant to the industry your company belongs to
• Social media hashtags that you commonly use and follow

Step 2: Collection of Data and Development/Tweaking of Strategies

Data collection and analytics is a key aspect of Social Listening. It will help you to understand how the popularity of your brand is increasing or decreasing. It will also help you to get early signals when things start going wrong so that you can start your firefighting efforts quickly.

You should use the insights from data analytics to improvise your marketing strategies to make your brand more recognizable, stronger, mention-worthy, and favorable in the eyes of the customers.

Make Social Listening A Habit

There are some brands that only use Social Listening only occasionally when they come out with new products, services, or campaigns. This is not the right approach.

You need to make Social Listening an integral and continuous part of your Social Media Marketing strategy. Please remember that mentions of your company, both positive and negative, can be made at any time and day. Therefore, it is especially important that you make Social Listening to be a continuous process and there should be people who should be assigned the responsibility of monitoring the mentions every day, if possible, in real-time.

Some popular Free And Premium Tools

As you might have understood by now, you can’t do Social Listening manually. It is a complex and time-consuming process since the monitoring has to be done in real-time. You will need a tool that will do the job for you.

There are a large number of tools available in the market currently and the choice of the tool which is perfect for you will depend on your needs, social media networks that you want to monitor and budget.

Here are some of the top Social Listening tools available in the market:

Social Listening can generate significant value for your brand if you do it correctly and consistently. Use a tool to monitor your keywords, collect data and then design/ optimize your growth strategy. Do this consistently and you will continue to gain incredible benefits from Social Listening for a long time.