Knowing your customer avatar is critical for boosting sales and creating a more compelling user experience. While it’s good to learn more about customers as they buy your products and provide feedback, you can also learn about them with an effective social listening strategy.
What Is Social Listening?
Social listening involves browsing through social networks and seeing what people are saying about your brand, products, and services. Some customers use social media to lay out how your company can improve and what products they would like to see.
Social media posts with high engagement numbers indicate that plenty of your customers agree with what the social media post says. Businesses will also monitor how people respond to social media content about their products and services.
How to Optimize Your Social Listening Strategy
A better social listening strategy allows you to serve your customers more effectively, thus increasing conversion rates in the process. These five tactics can give you a competitive edge and make your company a top resource for customers.
1. Determine Which Keywords You Will Monitor
The first step for any social listening strategy is to consider which keywords you will monitor. Even if you already have some keywords, it’s good to assess additional options for your social listening strategy.
You may include your company’s name, product names, and other keywords that are related to your company. Influencers should include their names as the list of keywords they will monitor.
As you craft your list of keywords and phrases, it’s important to establish the goals of your social listening strategy. These are some of the objectives you can consider for your social listening efforts:
- Strengthening your brand’s reputation
- Being able to capitalize on profitable trends quickly
- Enhancing your customer support team
As you continue to refine your social listening strategy, you may discover that some keywords are no longer relevant. Social media managers may also have to adjust their social listening keywords to include new products.
2. Engage with Customers
People regularly use social media to talk about products and services that they have used. Some people talk about how a product helped them, while others complain about how the product or service did not meet their expectations.
A good social listening strategy allows businesses to find posts from these customers and respond to them quickly. Interacting with customers can provide a better experience and increase retention, regardless of their experience with the product.
A customer who enjoyed your product and talks about it on social media will like it a lot if you engage with their social media post. They will feel as if your company has acknowledged them as a customer. Furthermore, you’ll show up on their social media feed for an additional time. The more frequently your business shows up on a customer’s social media feed, the more inclined they may feel to become a returning customer.
Quick engagement also has its benefits when customers aren’t saying good things about your product or service. Someone on the social media team can respond to the customer and try to make the situation right. Offering immediate customer service, giving a refund, doing some troubleshooting, or presenting a discount code on their next purchase can lighten the mood.
Some customers will appreciate the gesture even if they didn’t have a good experience. Interacting with customers on social media turns good experiences into great ones. It can also turn bad experiences into not-as-bad customer experiences.
3. Analyze the Competition
Business owners and marketers can get plenty of good insights by paying attention to their customers and reading their social media posts. However, that’s not the only source of information that can lead to better business decisions.
Analyzing your competition will also bolster your social listening strategy. While listening to your customers allows you to focus on what your company can do better, analyzing the competition reveals their weaknesses. If a competitor regularly receives complaints about bad customer service, your company can invest more in customer support. Then, word may get out and you will win over some customers from your competitor.
Digital marketers can also see what competitors are doing right. While you don’t always want to copy the competition, you can incorporate some of their best ideas.
The Miracle on 34th Street highlights this concept. In the movie, Macy’s sales reps are trained to recommend Gimbels products if the product the customer wants isn’t in a Macy’s store. This business decision works well for Macy’s, and Gimbels decides to copy them after seeing the results. The company then trains Gimbels sales reps to recommend an appropriate Macy’s product if the product the customer wants isn’t in a Gimbels store.
You don’t have to reinvent the wheel, and with social media, it’s easier to see which wheels work the best. Agile businesses can quickly incorporate what’s working well for other companies into their strategy.
4. Know Which Social Networks to Prioritize
Businesses can establish themselves on numerous social networks, but some of those platforms are more valuable than others. The most important platforms for your company are the ones that have many of your regular customers.
For instance, LinkedIn is a top choice for many business professionals, and creating a good LinkedIn profile can result in plenty of new customers. However, you won’t see as many t-shirt companies shifting their focus toward LinkedIn. You don’t have to post on every social network, and you don’t need a social listening strategy for each platform.
Prioritize the platforms where you already invest the most time and resources. It’s better to focus most of your time on a platform where you post daily than a platform where you only post once per month. It’s okay to add and remove social networks from your social listening strategy based on changes in customer behavior and where your ideal customers spend their time online.
5. Review Your Metrics
It’s only possible to improve in something if you track it. Social listening offers many data points that can strengthen your business. You can see how often people mention your brand, plus the overall sentiment. Doing competitor analyses will also give you valuable insights.
However, metrics are only valuable if you act upon them. Making meaningful changes in your business based on what the majority of your customers say should lead to more sales. You can’t please everyone, but if many customers offer the same suggestion or have the same complaint, it’s probably something that you should address.
Social media management tools like Keyhole make it easy to review metrics and stay on top of your social listening strategy. You can book a free demo to see how Keyhole can enhance your social media strategy.
Author bio
Marc Guberti is a digital marketing freelance writer and Certified Personal Finance Counselor. He offers content marketing services for small businesses.
Frequently Asked Questions
1. Is social listening worth it?
Social listening is worth the investment. Understanding how customers feel about your brand and the industry can help you make better business decisions and boost revenue.
2. Is social listening a KPI?
Social listening is a KPI that lets you gauge how people engage with your content. You can also analyze how people interact with your competitors’ social media posts to learn new insights about what your customers want.
3. How do you practice social listening?
Marketers and businesses can practice social listening by following relevant keywords, phrases, and hashtags that relate to their companies and industries. Monitoring the pulse of the online community can fortify your social listening strategy and lead to sales growth.
