Why Social Listening is Crucial to Your Brand

Social listening–have you heard about it? It’s an important tactic that helps organizations understand sentiment and conversations about their brand. Social listening is when brands monitor, listen, and respond to the digital chatter. No, this isn’t Big Brother; it’s a transparent way to learn about and engage with your audience. Let’s walk through three reasons why you need to integrate social listening into your daily or weekly marketing efforts.

Social listening and brand knowledge

When looking at company reviews or comments on your social media posts or third-party articles, what are people saying about your organization? You can learn what people take away from your brand’s online profiles or presence and what about your company matters to them. On the other hand, you might notice misinformation is causing confusion and then determine a plan to set the record straight.

Social listening and sentiment

Brands can use social listening to understand conversation sentiment. Do people have positive, neutral, or negative things to say? Acclamation should result in a thank you to the commenter and internal recognition of the employee or team responsible for the task. Complaints not only need to be appropriately resolved with the person online but also discussed internally. Negative feedback can be useful to help improve customer service processes and recognize unintentional errors.

Social listening and innovation

It’s right at your fingertips; just look at what your audience is saying. Innovation begins with listening. By monitoring conversations over time, you might see trends emerge. Not only could these trends spark future content ideas, but they can lead to improved or new products or services and help reach business goals. Actively listening to your audience and seeing how you can address gaps in products or services would take your organization to the next level. People talk online because they want to be heard. It’s what you do with them and how you react to those comments that truly matters, and this can help position you above your competitors.

Our social media specialist, Shelby, sums it up best:

“With interpersonal interactions being seen so much more frequently than company posts, it’s important to have a handle on the conversation about your business and find a way to participate that benefits your brand. You can begin social listening by monitoring topical and branded hashtags, your website, location tags, and organization mentions on all platforms.”