If you’re in the digital space right now (as you should be), you may have come across the phrase ‘social listening’. So, what exactly does it mean? Social listening is following trends and conversation around the industry you are in with the intention of understanding more about your target audience and competition, discovering potential leads, engaging with your audience, and identifying the top influencers and potential brand ambassadors within your industry.
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How to Use Social Listening to Identify Industry Influencers and Advocates
Now that you know what it is, it’s important to know how you can leverage it to identify the advocates and influencers and therefore improve your brand’s digital presence. Social listening will help you keep track of keywords that you should use in your blogs, posts, and website so that you rank higher on Google and other search engines.
When you can track your company’s mentions, this enables you to also provide stellar customer service; the ability to find a tweet about your products or services or even a bad review enables you to acknowledge and respond in a timely manner thereby potentially giving your reputation a boost.
As many as 59% of Americans believe that accessing customer service on social media has made it a lot easier to get their issues resolved and questions answered. (Lyfe Marketing, 2018). This is enough to tell you that in the digital space, there’s a lot of potential in growth using social listening.
What You Should Look For in an Influencer
Ready to set down this path and essentially become an online sleuth for your company? That’s great, and this is where NetbaseQuid comes in. NetbaseQuid gives you the most accurate and fastest social media analytics, so you can focus on building your brand on other fronts.
Fluent in 42 languages and giving you real-time reporting means that you don’t have to spend precious minutes or even hours waiting for a report to know what step to take next for your brand.
Influencers, on the other hand, are the human link to your program. They are crucial in making your brand more personable, and they act as a face that visitors to your online store can relate to.
When trying to find an industry influencer for your company, you need to find one that:
- Is likable and has built a great reputation for themselves online. This shows that they will most probably do the same for your brand.
- Is passionate and stays up to date with the latest trends.
- Actively engages with their audience and knows how to keep the conversation going.
- Is authentic and has built trust with their audience, so their followers are genuinely interested in what they have to say.
- Is a good marketer who can seamlessly integrate your content in their timeline, so they don’t turn away their audience.
- Is authoritative and has a well organized website or other online presence.
- Has a personality that fits well with your brand which will help you connect with the right audience.
How to Reach Out to Influencers
It’s good to understand that influencers, even those without a large online presence, likely receive a lot of emails requesting for their services. Here’s how to make sure your pitch to influencer’s doesn’t end up lost in their emails:
- Do some research on their backgrounds so that you know exactly what you’re about to get into.
- Check out their numbers; including followers, engagement rates, cadence of posts, and relevance of comments.
- Engage with those you are interested in to get their attention and break the ice.
- Find out their motivation which could be building a community, money, fame, free products, or even a strong desire to make a change in the world.
- Decide on the compensation you are willing to give them for their time and be ready to negotiate.
What a Company Should Expect from an Influencer
You need to outline what you expect from an influencer in order to make sure you’re not setting yourself up for failure. You can do this by:
- An increased reach and brand awareness.
- Generating higher revenue for your goods or services.
- User-generated content both from the influencer and their audience which improves your brand presence even more.
If influencer marketing seems like something you would want to try out fro your brand, then check out NetbaseQuid for an array of solutions for your brand’s or company’s marketing needs!
