In this digital era, implementing a business strategy that puts the customer first is a wise choice. Because, you will focus on finding out what consumers like or don’t like, about your product, service, or brand. Social media listening is one effective way to achieve this.
By taking advantage of the fact that there are 4.2 billion active social media users around the world today, you can dive into social media channels and “listen to” discussions in today’s virtual world. The benefits? Of course, you will get direct feedback, insight, and even ideas from the community, so you can create future business strategies.
The Definition of Social Media Listening
Although its role is quite important in the current digital marketing cycle, there are still many people who are not familiar with this term. Basically, social media listening or social listening is the process of finding out what people are saying about the brand, product, or service that you provide, on social media.
But it’s not just listening, because the goal is to get feedback from people’s comments or complaints about your brand. If done correctly, you can even get a variety of other information from “listening” to conversations on social media. For example, about a competitor’s brand or a trend that is currently hype.
From the results of this social media listening research, you can get many benefits. Especially data or insights, which are useful as a material for consideration in making further business strategies. For example, is there a need to improve the quality of products, and services, or even just determine what type of content people want?
Implying Social Media Listening
It may seem easy at first glance, but this research turns out to be more than just looking at what people are saying about your brand on their social platforms. Actually, before entering social listening, there is a social media monitoring process first.
To make it more simple, if social media monitoring is looking and gathering for information, then social media listening is analyzing the results, so you can apply the right marketing strategies from these results. In general, here is a step-by-step social media listening that you can do.
1. Map out what you want to “hear”
First, you have to know what you want to know from the social talk on social media. Do relevant keyword tracking to monitor all mentions of your brand name, your product, your competitor’s brand name, or related hashtags. Tips include the name of the product, even with the possibility of misspellings once.
You can use any kind of social media listening platform, either Facebook, Twitter, or Instagram. But basically, the more the better. You may find questions, comments, reviews, or discussions about your brand. There may even be people complaining about a competitor’s product or service.
Here, you can “enter” into the discussion and ask them to explain what shortcomings they found. You can even show them that your brand is there for them, that their opinions are important to be heard, and explain the product benefits of your brand.
2. Collect data, process, and share
From the information you “listen to”, collect everything, make processing and analysis of the data, then share it with the relevant team. For example product manager (if related to the product) or customer service (if related to service).
Discuss with them what strategies to use from this processed information. Will there be product quality improvements, service improvements, or other things.
There are many ways you can do to develop a business, and social media listening is one that you should consider in this digital era. Don’t despair when you don’t get a lot of data or information at the start, because this process must be done continuously so that your marketing campaign can be effective.