Social listening is a great way to gather information for your digital marketing strategy. When performed properly, it can help you learn about your customers, what they want, and what they care about. With this information, you can develop a social media marketing strategy, and a more broad digital marketing strategy, with your customers in mind. Read below to learn about social listening and its advantages.

What is Social Listening?

Social listening is the process of monitoring social media channels for mentions of your brand and its products or services, your competitors, and ideas or themes related to your business. Social listening aims to gather information about your customers in order to better equip your company to make strategy adjustments. You will listen for potential improvements and suggestions, as well as ideas for shifting your brand’s focus in its marketing strategy.

Social Listening vs. Social Monitoring

Social listening and social monitoring are similar processes, as both tactics monitor social media. However, social monitoring is predominantly focused on figures and data, such as rates of mentions and engagement. Social listening, on the other hand, aims to gather information used to take action.

The goal of social listening is to learn about the people who engage with your brand and your industry in order to learn what your customers and potential customers want. Rather than simply analyzing figures, social listening is a more customer-focused approach, gathering information to make appropriate suggestions to your marketing strategy that will best serve your customers.

Customer Research

One of the most important things to be gained from social listening is customer research. Listen to what your customers and potential customers are saying about your brand. Social listening can help you identify aspects of your business and marketing strategy that work well and those that don’t. You can also identify products or services that are not being mentioned in order to shift your marketing focus toward these items. Social listening is the best way to learn about customers’ opinions of your brand in order to make appropriate suggestions.

Social listening can also help you learn about the customers themselves. When you monitor your customers on social media, you can learn about their daily lives and their problems. You can then use this information to develop a marketing strategy aimed at solving the problems that your customers face. Social listening is a useful and efficient way to learn about your customers because people share so much of their lives on social media.

Customer Engagement

When you monitor mentions of your brand, products, and services, you can more easily engage with your customers. You can learn about the ways in which customers engage with your brand in order to make any necessary adjustments to your marketing strategy. You can also respond to customers when they engage with your brand. Responding to customers, whether their comments are positive or negative, will demonstrate that your brand cares about its customers and their opinions. These responses will improve the overall image of your brand as well as the experience of every customer who interacts with you.

Competitor Comparison

Social listening is a great way to learn about your competitors. You can monitor what people are saying about your competitors in order to learn about their strengths and weaknesses. You can learn what people like about your competitors in order to make changes to your own strategy. You can also learn what people think is lacking in your competitors and emphasize the ways in which your brand makes up for these shortcomings. Monitoring the mentions of your competitor brands can help you ensure that you stack up against the competition.

Discover Industry Problems

When you monitor mentions of your industry, you can learn about problems that people within your industry and customers of your industry have. You can even discover problems that no other company is currently addressing. Learning about the problems within your industry will help you make sure that your company addresses these problems, making you more valuable to your potential customers. It will also help you develop your marketing strategy, focusing on your company as a solution to these problems.

Identify Influencers

When you pay attention to the social media of the people in your industry, you can discover which people are important to them. Identifying the influencers in your industry can be useful to learn what your potential customers care about. When possible, you can also use these potential influencers in your marketing strategy in order to attract new customers.

Adjust Social Media Strategy

Social listening can clearly help you make changes to the focuses of your digital marketing strategy. However, it can also help you learn new details about the way in which your target audience uses social media. If most of your customers use Facebook frequently but do not have Twitter, you will know to focus your efforts on your Facebook strategy. Social listening will help you learn which social media platforms your target audience finds most engaging and where your focus should be.

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