January 11, 2017

How Social Media Listening Can Help Your Brand

Are you listening to what people are saying about you and your competitors in the digital landscape?  If not, you are missing out on opportunities to protect your brand’s reputation, drive traffic and obtain valuable intel on your competitors. You can use information obtained from social media listening to enhance your business by gathering insights about your customers, prospects and services.

Social media listening is the process of searching the web and social space to monitor what is being said about your brand, your competitors and your industry. It tracks conversations around specific phrases, words or brands. To take full advantage, it is imperative to spread your monitoring across several social media platforms. Leverage online conversations to discover opportunities to attract and connect with those audiences.

Below are a few reasons why social media listening is important.

Listen Before You Post
Listening to what people are saying about your brand, your competitors and your industry before developing your social media strategy will assist you in connecting with your target audience and gain engagement.

Performance Measurement
Social media listening measures and evaluates tactics for short term goals through quantitative and qualitative analysis. The analysis provides valuable insights in measuring your social performance that provides data to adjust and pivot your social media strategy as needed.   Be sure to measure the volume of mentions about your brand before, during and after a social media campaign and pay close attention to the content with the greatest and least amount of mentions. Understand which content was effective and which content failed to perform.  Measure, analyze and adjust your social media plan accordingly.

Drive Traffic and Acquisition from Influencers
Identify if there are social media influencers who may be speaking about your brand or your industry. Leverage brand influencers who are praising your brand by amplifying their message and encourage them to continue to sing your praises.

Protect Your Brand’s Reputation
Use social media monitoring tools to protect your brand’s reputation by actively monitoring potentially harmful conversations and situations before it drastically damages your brand. Manage client service issues on social media by creating a management plan that requires direct action when customers provide positive or negative feedback on social media. Today, customers are determining conversations about the brand and they are using social media to influence their followers’ decisions.

Know Your Competition
Stay up to date with what your competition is doing through social media monitoring tools. From their posts and social media campaigns, you can learn how your competitors are engaging with the community and what posts are working versus ones that are under performing.  Use this to benchmark yourself against your competition and get a better sense of your social media metrics. Remember to not only monitor your competitors, but your industry as well.

Benchmarking
Measure the volume of conversation about your brand and your competitors to benchmark your social media performance. The amount of mentions your brand receives reflects how likely a customer will choose your services. If there are no mentions, or irrelevant mentions about your services, your potential client may look for another company that has generated more social media conversation. Build your influence and volume of conversation by actively engaging in discussions on topics relating to your industry.

Social media listening can help boost your brand’s image if used appropriately. Strategize a social media plan after careful listening, and adjust as needed. Stay in the know and don’t let the competition pass you by.