Source: http://www.socialmediatoday.com/social-business/4-ways-social-listening-helps-your-business
Social media listening, also known as “social media monitoring”, is the process of finding out what is being said about your company, products, brand, and team and analyzing the acquired data. When done properly, social listening can be one of the key tools you can use to gather intelligence about your target customers, intel you can use in your content, business development, customer service, research and development, and marketing campaigns.
The important role of social media listening in your business
For social listening to work to your business’ advantage, you need to find out first where all the conversations are taking place and engage with the people involved in these conversations. Engaging means responding, delivering content to people who have showed interest in your brand, product or services, helping them with problems where you can that they have mentioned, and giving them offers that can enrich their lives.
Below are some of the specific ways your business can benefit from social listening:
You can get an edge over your competition. First, set up keywords to monitor words and phrases that relate to your product. You may then find that some people are complaining about a competitor’s product or customer service. This can enable you to step in and ask them to explain what shortcomings they are finding. From there, you can show them that your company is there for them and all customers are important to you. You can then explain your products’ or services’ benefits to them. When you do social listening correctly, you can find new customers for your business since people will see that your brand cares about the people that are building the brand. And this can make you more attractive to potential consumers.
You can improve your quality of customer service. If you are focused on listening, you will hear both positive and negative feedback. If someone is taking the time to complain, don’t consider him or her a lost customer immediately. Their complaints are just a way of showing you that they still like you, your product or brand, and are open to being helped with their problem. When you practice social listening, you need to be patient, empathize, and understand the consumers’ points of view. It can be hard at first, but always try to listen with an open mind. Do not get too defensive when you are gathering data and finding out what people are saying since these won’t do anything good for your business
You can easily find your tribe. With social listening, you won’t have to guess where the best place to focus your marketing efforts might be. By practicing social listening, you can see where people are having conversations about your product and talk to them there. Find out which social media sites are these and join those conversations to get to know both your current and potential consumers.
You can identify and connect with influencers and brand advocates. Finally, finding out who’s sharing your information and organically spreading positive attributes about your product or brand is a great way to start and build relationships. Determine who your brand advocates are and reward them for their unaided help in spreading the love for your brand. A happy and satisfied consumer that talks about you without being asked is marketing gold and you need to continue to build upon these relationships.