Chances are that constant check-ups of social media networks and platforms are a very regular part of your day. And we don’t mean just posting regularly; we mean scouting trends, peeking at your competitors’ posts, and, most importantly, communicating with your customers. And if the last bit sometimes finds you swamped in hundreds of tweets, DMs, and emails, just think how many conversations there are about your business without direct mentioning.
We are one hundred percent sure that plenty of conversations are happening without actually mentioning (e.g., tagging) your business. But, exactly because of that, you might be missing tons of useful insights that could allow you to help to exist and find potential clients, as well as resolve the problems your past clients might’ve had. Furthermore, these conversations might give you a chance to see your business from a client’s perspective and learn how people are feeling toward you. This is what social listening is all about, and it plays a vital part in improving your business’s social presence.
Keep on reading to learn more about social listening and ways you can apply it to your unique case.
What Is Social Listening?
Social listening is the process of actively following conversations that are taking place on social media platforms regarding your company, its products, its rivals, or other pertinent and business-related keywords. Then, you look for practical responses to these discussions. These reactions could take the shape of a direct reply to a social media post or a change in your marketing approach as a result of feedback you received.
Social listening is a powerful tool for keeping up-to-date with what’s happening on social media while also allowing brands to be proactive in conversations about it, improving reliability, relevance, authenticity, and building trust.
In addition, social listening allows you to glean information on how your customers feel about your business by ascertaining whether the responses you get on particular posts or on your account as a whole are positive, neutral, or negative. Knowing this would allow you to tweak your strategy by changing the wording, tone, and more, so you can increase positive reactions from your customers.
Social Listening vs. Social Monitoring
While “social listening” and “social monitoring” might seem like one and the same, they are, in fact, two different things with their own purposes and benefits, sharing just a little of similarities.
Let’s start with social monitoring, which is an act of responding to customer comments, questions, and issues they might’ve encountered. This is a reactive approach where the main goal is to help the commenter to get from point A to point B. Here, point B might be a how-to guide, an article that solves the issue, or information on how to reach support. This type of interaction is absolutely vital for your customers and plays a huge role in your social media branding, too.
So, if social monitoring is a reactive approach, then social listening is proactive as it allows you to take a look at the bigger picture: How are people talking about your business in conversations it has not been tagged in? For many businesses that choose not to participate in social listening, these conversations are unknown, and the data that might be gathered from them is lost. And it’s not about your brand, really, as social listening zooms out to your entire industry, allowing you to take a look at existing and emerging trends, giving you insights on what your competition is doing, and letting your customers know you are there when the need arises.
P.S.: WE HAVE WHAT YOU ARE LOOKING FOR
Why Is Social Listening Important?
With the differences between social monitoring and social listening cleared up, it’s a little easier to see why listening is important. To sum it up, it provides insight social monitoring can not and wasn’t intended to do. Now, that’s not to say that social monitoring is not important by any means, but here are some things you can find with listening but won’t with monitoring.
Proactive tactic – allows you to take the initiative and create opportunities instead of waiting for them to arise.
Identify satisfied customers – delight your happy customers with surprises or special offers catering to their specific needs.
Find unsatisfied customers – address them and help them find the solutions they seek.
Look for industry influencers – pinpoint the people who are looked up to in your sphere.
Outline industry trends and deliver relevant content responding to the things that are trending around you.
Look for potential customers – step in when you see people looking for suggestions in your industry.
Step up your customer service – provide people with assistance or just let them know you’re there when they need you.
Avoid sticky PR situations – address brand image-threatening situations before they happen.
Get a sense of how people feel about your brand – people will often talk more freely about your business when they aren’t specifically mentioning it or naming you in a post, giving you a sense of how people feel about it. Customer feedback of this nature is priceless.
Understand your audience – social listening helps you understand better what your audience actually wants from your brand. That, in turn, gives you a chance to provide world-class customer service, build loyalty, and improve your product.
Brand and product intelligence – gleaning invaluable information from the conversation around the industry uncovers tons of information on what is working and what’s not for existing and potential customers.
Competitor monitoring – looking deeper into what your competition does and what works for them might give you a key to your own unique social media strategy.
What Does Social Listening Look Like?
Although the benefits of social listening should be pretty clear by now, sometimes you need to see it in action to understand why it matters as much as it does fully. So, we’ve rounded up a couple of examples showing some of the best social listening tactic applications on social media.
AGENIC CONTROL – THE ULTIMATE SOCIAL LISTENING TOOL
Netflix
Sometimes just showing that you’re listening wins in a big way. Take, for instance, Netflix – the streaming platform that has listened to people who complain that they often find themselves snoozing through the series or movies they chose to watch, waking up just as the credits start rolling. So, Netflix came up with an ingenious ad addressing this problem and offering people to wear special socks that automatically wakes them up.
And although falling asleep while watching movies is absolutely not Netflix’s problem, their response to users’ comments granted them tons of positive reactions and even landed them a Shorty Award for exactly this project.
Samsung
Social listening isn’t limited to customers as it allows you to take a look at the industry as a whole, adding your competition into the equation, too. So, when Samsung noticed that one of its competitors, Huawei released a new smartphone and focused its promotions on the phone’s camera and slow motion capture abilities, Samsung was able to tweak its strategy and focus on its own smartphone camera slo-mo features.
Morton’s Steakhouse
Now this one is an oldie but definitely a goldie. In 2011 Peter Shankman tweeted out to Morton’s Steakhouse, asking them to deliver a porterhouse steak to Newark airport when he’d reached his destination. Well, Morton’s Steakhouse saw the tweet and the opportunity, and a man wearing a tuxedo and holding a bag with the order was waiting for Peter at the airport just as he had landed. There’s probably no need to mention that Morton’s Steakhouse gained tons of positive exposure with this example of social listening being discussed years after it happened. And if it’s your first time hearing of this, you can read the full story here.
Social Media Listening Tools
Now, if you’re convinced that social media listening is the thing that was actually missing from your strategy, you can simply try our Agenic Control platform and start using this tactic right now.
Agenic Control provides you with all the things we’ve discussed in the article – from better understanding your audience to benchmarking your business to competitors and finding growth opportunities based on data and relevant insights, it’s all there.
P.S.: It’s also easy to use and does not require a Ph.D. in rocket science to understand the data.
SOCIAL LISTENING ISN’T ROCKET SCIENCE
