What Does Social Media Listening Mean to Your Business?

You are on social media and have garnered a following.  You have a company Facebook page and Twitter account. You may also have an Instagram account. People are out there using social media (over 2.62 billion use social media daily) and you hope that people will talk about your brand by mentioning it or following you and thereby increase brand awareness.  After all, about 96% of people discuss brands on social media. But how do you really know what they are saying about you?

What is social media listening?

Social listening is more than simply checking statistics and replying to questions, or or responding to comments, about your brand. It’s about gaining insights from social media conversations, which may not even involve you, that you can then use to refine your social media strategy.

Not only do you need to listen to what people are saying about your brand across all social channels, you need to listen for broader conversations which you can become part of.

How to start social media listening

Social listening needs to focus on trends, which in social media terms, are keywords and hashtags, so you need to gather and analyze data to isolate keywords and hashtags helpful for your goal.

First you need to make list of keywords and hashtags  relevant to your own business:

• your business name, including abbreviations and acronyms
• perhaps your tagline (just do it)
• your services and product lines,

all of which should be already part of your SEO strategy.

Then you need to add your own social media hashtags into the mix.  Again these should be part of your social media strategy.

Finally, you need to look outside your business, in terms of:

• Your competitors
• Your industry
• Industry influencers

to gather more keywords and hashtags.

Once you have this list, you might need to extract from it what you consider primary terms and start to “listen” for their use.  Google email alerts is a simple tool to use for this purpose. So is Google Trends. But let’s not forget simple weekly searches for these terms to see the results in situ which can often be an eye opener.  Undoubtedly there are paid services that can do the heavy lifting for you if your list is long.

Social media listening can improve your business

Social media listening not only helps you keep your social media strategy on point, it can improve your entire business.

By analyzing what you hear, you can:

• Generate leads – learn who interested in your brand and/or what you sell.
• Improve customer service – find out what your customers really think of you and your competition.
• Protect your reputation – by strategically dealing with customer reviews
• Refine your product or service offering – according to indirect feedback on customer preferences.
• Do a pivot – if your offering does not match what customers of your industry actually want.
• Create ads that convert – change content or  targets.
• Identify new social channels –  identify industry influences to utilize for  broader social reach.

Sounds like a lot of work, but it’s worth it!