Social listening is a social data analysis technique that is tried and tested by most brands to gather useful insights. With time, traditional marketing turned into digital marketing redefining how social media strategies work. Gone are the days when social media was only considered a communication channel. It’s a multi-purpose marketing tool that allows brands to build a more engaging and interactive community.

Social media is the first place customers turn to learn about products and brands, share their reviews, and seek help for issues. Therefore, it’s easier for us to trust other’s experiences shared on social media more than the brand’s campaign. How everyone reacts to your products and what they say about your brand on discussion boards, social media, and blogs matters a lot. To improve their customer service and analyze online conversations, brands significantly rely on social listening tools.

Why Social Listening Is Important For Brands

Performance Evaluation

If you’re unsure about a certain tactic for your marketing campaign, you can rely on multiple social listening tools to analyze your campaign performance.

They use these tools to mainly monitor metrics that provide valuable insights for their marketing campaigns. These metrics are divided into qualitative metrics (e.g. sentiment analysis) and quantitative metrics (e.g. conversation volume analysis). Social listening gives you the power of re-defining your entire social media strategy the right way through these insights.

Measure any metric for your brand before, during, and after the campaign to understand when and where your campaign performed better. Make effective adjustments such as re-planning content and re-scheduling posts to improve engagement rate and customer satisfaction.

Social Media Strategy

If you run an online business and use social media actively, you definitely need to trust social listening to enhance your social media strategy. How can you improve your brand image and customer experience when you don’t know what people say about your brand? Building an effective social media strategy takes more than just integrating good communication tools.

Social listening tells you which social media platforms your audience is most active on, what conversations engage the audience the most and what are the most popular topics of conversations about your brand that the audience finds relatable.  Furthermore, it also explains how you can analyze sentiment in-depth to develop a better connection with your audience. Not only will you save a lot of money, but you will save a ton of time that you can use for other tasks.

Brand Image

Building a brand’s identity is one thing, but maintaining it is a completely different thing. Your customers are in control of the narrative when it comes to maintaining a brand reputation in the market. How your customers react to your brand, product, industry, and customer service speaks volumes about your brand’s reputation.

Incorporating social listening in your social media strategy can help you identify the problem before it becomes one. Instead of letting a potentially harmful review take control of the situation and impact your brand’s reputation, you must identify and mediate the situation before it gets to that point. Social listening is an actively useful tool that doubles engagement and improves brand reputation strategy for your brand.

If you’re looking for a valuable tool to build an effective social media management plan, a reliable social listening tool is all you need.

Valuable Insights

The reason why most brands have begun using social listening tools or began running social listening campaigns is to gather insights, particularly competitive insights. Along with tracking conversations and narratives about your competitors and your brand, social listening allows you to monitor conversations about your particular industry as well. Keep track of all online conversations with a stable internet connection powered by the AT&T service and never miss out on a good business opportunity.

There are many questions about your industry you will find answers to through constructive feedback, and often at times, they might surprise you. These insights are not only valuable, but they’re interesting for creating unique and creative business strategies.

Some industry-centric questions you may find answers to are:

• What complaints do customers usually have in your field of work?
• Is there any service or product the customers have been looking for in your industry but can’t find?
• Is there a particular topic of conversation that is popular enough to be used as a communication tool for your brand?
• Are there any new opportunities in the industry for your brand?

Join different conversations to gather direct feedback, and look for issues and customer satisfaction reviews to emulate issues and create solutions.

Product Improvement And Development

Social listening goes beyond focusing on brands. It’s focused on products as well. Because receiving customer feedback on your products, service and industry is a huge benefit of social listening, it’s your responsibility as a brand to actively listen to the feedback attentively, analyze what it’s about and create effective business strategies that cater to customer’s needs. It’s important to understand constructive criticism isn’t a bad thing at all. It gives you a chance to do better and build stronger relationships.

With valuable feedback, you can improve your service, customer care, products, and social media and business strategies. In the end, it all comes down to how well you listen to your customers. If you find that certain focus groups are constructively criticizing any part of your brand, it’s important to analyze sentiment, where they’re coming from, and understand their expectations to foster a stronger relationship with them. Not every brand in a saturated market is lucky enough to receive honest yet constructive feedback.

To Wrap It Up

We hope this brief yet comprehensive response to ‘why social listening is important is enough to guide you down the right path. By implementing this social tool into your marketing strategy, you’re redefining your customer care and brand image by miles, which will do a huge favor in return in the longer run. Master the art of social listening and stay on top of your game!