Following our ASRE blog, we look at why social listening is a crucial part of the ‘Awareness’ stage when formulating your social media Strategy. Here’s why:
Social media listening is a fundamental tool for any business. Although many companies are not ready to dive into the social media realm to increase brand awareness and reach customers, all should be utilising these platforms to listen (or monitor as it’s often called). Although there are a variety of platforms set up to help you monitor social media usage, such as Meltwater Buzz, it can also be done manually for those smaller businesses.
Listening on social media consists of monitoring social media posts and conversations that refer to your brand, product, service or even competitor, in an attempt to aggregate the data and gain a sense of what people really think about your brand or business. Think of social listening as your way of tapping into your customer/competitor/industry psyche…in real-time and as up to date as you could possibly wish for.
The days of suggestion boxes and comment cards are long gone. In this modern and digital world, where is the first place people turn to praise or criticise a brand? You guessed it…social media! Social media is instant and so it has become the quickest and easiest way to directly contact a brand and get a problem sorted. So it is then fundamental that your businesses is listening to these comments and gaining a sense of the good, bad and ugly aspects of your brand.
Social listening comes first in any social media strategy…once you have gained a sense of your reputation online, you can then engage based upon you customer needs. Knowing what people are saying about your brand allows for better proactive and reactive posting and allows you to eventually turn your Twitter account into a fast-paced customer service channel.
If your business is reluctant to purchase any social media listening tools, then setting up social media profiles and lurking online is just as effective. Using Twitter to search your brand name will bring up all the tweets that mention your business and will allow you to gain a sense of how you’re fairing online. Not only this, but it allows you to also search your competitors and see how their brand mentions compare.
But if you’re still not convinced, stay tuned for our 9 brilliant reasons why social media listening is vital for every brand.
This article was syndicated from Business 2 Community: Why is Social Listening Fundamental For Your Business?
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