What is social listening, and how can brands leverage to their advantage?

The marketing expert Jeff Bullas reports that the number of active social media users has surpassed three billion, while the average daily time spent on social media has almost reached two hours. Hence, social media is a great place for you to learn what people are saying.

 

This can include thoughts they are expressing about your brand. As a business owner, you could therefore benefit from social listening, which CustomerThink describes as “analyzing mentions and trends about your brand on social networking sites.” 

 

Detailed below are several effective things your brand can do by making use of social listening…

 

Track multiple social channels from one place 

 

Since social listening involves perusing data from multiple social networking sites, you could do with a solution that would enable you to do this in an especially time-efficient manner.

 

Pulsar offers a social listening tool with which you would be able to tap into dozens of data sources — including Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and TikTok. Especially beneficially, data from all of these sources can be fed into the same interface for quick and easy viewing there.

 

Watch out for conversations relevant to your industry 

 

Even if your brand is little-established and consequently isn’t spurring a lot of social media conversations, social listening can still be useful for giving you an insight into what is topical about the broader industry in which your company operates.

 

You could uncover some especially relevant subjects of recent discussion if you restrict your social listening by geography. For example, if you run a tech repair shop in Texas, developments specific to the tech sector in California might not sufficiently warrant your attention.

 

Proactively stamp out potential threats 

 

Let’s assume that a customer has had a bad experience with your business and decided to take to social media to openly complain about it.

 

If a public complaint about your company is indeed posted on social media, you could reach out to the customer in question and offer to make amends. That way, you can prevent negative publicity about your business from ‘going viral’.

 

Learn how to improve your products 

 

There was once a time when brands sought opinions about their products by asking customers to fill out surveys — and, indeed, your own firm might still do this.

 

However, you could supplement your findings from surveys by also using social listening to get raw customer feedback. After all, customers don’t tend to hold back about their thoughts on social media — and what you hear from them could truly assist you in enhancing your offering.

 

Keep track of what the competition are up to 

 

The above-mentioned honesty of customers on social media makes it a reliable place for you to find out what these people genuinely think about your brand’s competitors, too.

 

If those companies appear to be falling short in certain areas, you could endeavor to plug these gaps in the market. You can also see early on how people react to new products as they are launched by your rivals. Could you offer something better?