Do you monitor what people are saying about you online?
Are you using this information to enhance your business?
The insights you gather about your customers, prospects, products and competitors with social listening can be valuable.
In this article you’ll discover eight ways to use social listening for your business.
Why Social Listening?
Social listening (or media monitoring, as some people like to call
it) is about searching the web and the social space to see what’s being
said about your company, your competitors and other topics of interest.
Discover 8 ways to use social listening for your business.
Listen to this article:
With a little time and creativity, you can go beyond just monitoring
your brand and use social listening to enhance content marketing,
business development, product management, human resources and customer
support.
Here are eight ways social listening can benefit your business.
#1: Generate Leads by Solving Problems
One way to find new business opportunities is to monitor keywords that relate to people’s problems and needs or their frustrations with a competitor’s product.
Monitor terms like “[competitor’s brand name] can’t” or “[competitor’s brand name] won’t” to identify pain points.
Once you identify these potential customers, reach out to them.
Ask them what their expectations are for the product and where it’s
falling short. Then explain your product’s benefits and added value, and
make yourself available for questions. You may also want to provide a
demo of your product.
#2: Attract New Customers
To generate new leads for your business, brainstorm for keywords that people might use when researching a product and track these terms across forums and social groups.
Join the conversations and find out more about any potential customers’ needs and expectations. Be genuine in your interactions.
Later, check your database to see if anyone from the forum signed up to try your product. Send those new customers an email offering to personally help them get started.
#3: Identify Influencers and Advocates
After a big product launch or update, track the link to or the title of your press release to see who’s sharing it. This information helps you identify influencers in your industry. Reach out to them to start building relationships.
You’ll also want to identify your biggest brand advocates. Find and reward them with giveaways or special offers. Continue to keep them engaged as your brand grows, because satisfied customers are one of your greatest marketing resources.
#4: Discover Where Your Community Hangs Out
Social listening enables you to find out where your potential and
current community members carry on important conversations—Twitter,
Facebook, Quora, comments on blogs or somewhere else. Track these conversations, and when the time is right, join in.
Knowing which platform to focus on also helps you improve your social media marketing.
#5: Improve Customer Care
With social listening, you can instantly identify both positive and negative feedback.
Monitor your brand name with and without the @ symbol (many people forget to add the @ symbol when communicating on Twitter).
Also, track common auto-correct misspellings for your brand name and monitor your website mentions (for example, www.yourbrand.com and yourbrand.com).
This gives you the opportunity to show your appreciation for positive comments or to find and respond to disappointed customers, turning potentially negative experiences into positive ones. If people take the time to write about issues with your product, they’re open to your help.
#6: Get Feedback on Products
Social listening also helps you identify potential issues early in a product’s life cycle.
Use mentions like this one to address issues with your product.
Then, respond directly to your customer to nurture transparency. If feasible, use your personal email account rather than your company account to show the human side of your business.
#7: Find Top Talent
Your human resources department can benefit from social listening,
too. Hiring top talent is frequently a challenge, but tracking
conversations in forums, in social groups or on blogs can help you identify key candidates with remarkable skill sets.
#8: Drive Innovation
Asking your customers what they want, as tempting as that might be,
can result in skewed answers, misinformation, and potentially, failed
products.
Henry Ford famously said, “If I’d asked my customers what they
wanted, they’d have said a faster horse.” It’s often easier for people
to comment on something that is in front of them than to imagine
something that doesn’t exist.
Find out what new features your customers are asking for.
With social listening, you don’t have to ask people what they want; just listen in on their conversations and use these insights to figure out what they need.
Tools to Monitor Your Brand Reputation
Google Alerts
is a powerful tool for tracking your brand’s mentions, trends and other
interesting topics across the internet. To create an email alert, type
in your company’s name or the keyword you want to monitor. You can even use advanced operators in the search box for better results, just like you would in Google Search.
Quora
is another free resource to track what people are saying about your
product or other relevant topics. However, you can only monitor
those mentions within the site itself. Search for specific questions or
topics related to your target market’s needs and follow those relevant
to your business. You’ll receive updates in your Quora feeds and
notifications by email.
Twitter Advanced Search is often overlooked, but it’s a valuable tool for refining Twitter search queries
and zeroing in on the people talking about your brand or competing
brands. You can use operators—and exclusion operators—to filter your
results. There are also options for targeting a specific group of people
or a geographic location.
Social Mention works
in a similar way to Twitter’s Advanced Search, except you get the
results from all over the social media space, in addition to Twitter. To
get started, enter the keywords or topic you want to search and select
the type of results from the drop-down menu. Use the advanced settings
for more filtering options like geo-location and language. On the
results page, your influence score is divided into four categories:
strength, sentiment, passion and reach. You can also see your top
keywords and brand advocates.
Tools to Create a Keyword List
Rather than just compiling a list of keywords by trial and error, use tools like these to make the process quicker and easier.
Keyword Tool
gives you keyword ideas based on what people type into the Google
search box. For example, want to track conversations about “social
monitoring,” you may see suggestions like “social monitoring software”
or “social monitoring service.”
Use free tools to research keyword ideas.
Google Trends analyzes search queries, looks at the number of searches for keywords and shows how trends evolve so you can find out how people search for your brand or competing brands. You can compare trends by adding a second search term, plus it suggests a list of related search topics you might add to your keyword list.
Get More Out of Social Listening
Social listening goes well beyond just monitoring your brand’s reputation. You can use
social listening insights to improve many aspects of your business,
including business and product development, human resources and customer
care.
Now you need to find out how to make social listening work for your
business. If you’re interested in how to build a social listening
dashboard, be sure to check out this article.
What do you think? How are you using social listening to improve your business? Please share your thoughts and tips in the comments below!
Source: http://www.socialmediaexaminer.com/8-ways-to-use-social-listening-for-your-business/
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