Social listening skills are a key to marketers who aim to promote their products among customers. These skills can elevate your products’ value by many folds if you know how to use social listening tools. Most of the tools are included in social media. By definition, Social Listening Skill is the process of monitoring the feedback from customers, about your products, services, or related topics and discussions and rival brands through social media. This skill is different from that of customer service, as you would collect customers’ opinions and feedback about your brand and services, and reflect on them accordingly to improve the process so that customers will be served better than before. This is different from social monitoring because, in social monitoring, any discussions about your brand will give you alerts, which is useful for monitoring any negative feedback from customers. Social listening is different in the manner that it collects every feedback, both positive and negative and miscellaneous discussions about your brand, which can give you a greater insight into your product and its future. This data can help you upgrade your brand for better purposes.
Strategies for Social Listening
● Understand your customers:
Listen to what the customers have to say about your products and services. They can give you compliments for your services, or they can present a problem to you and hope you can resolve the matter for them. Through social media platforms such as Twitter, Facebook and Instagram, social listening becomes easier. For example, you went to Car Service Center to repair your car, because it doesn’t start. They took their time repairing your car and, in a few moments, or more, your car was ready. After payment, if your car still doesn’t start properly in the middle of the road, you will surely send them negative feedback and they will receive it on their social media and will want to solve your problem by sending towing van and look into your car again. If your car works fine, and you’re happy, you want to give good feedback and thank them, which will also be received by them and be acknowledged. Next time, they will want to treat you and your car better than before. This is the case with Maruti Car Service Center.
● Learn the problems in your industry around the product/service:
Even inside the industry or workplace, you may find many officials conversing about some limitations of the brand that have not been resolved yet after many reportings. The existing and potential customers will speak about it in the social media. That opens a lot of room for improvement and innovation. Be advised, this negative feedback may not be a fault from your product, but maybe something that is missing in it, which customers noticed and posted. Be sure to monitor these conversations very closely. It can not only tell you about your brands’ potential but compare it with other brands in the market, through customers. So, in the future as an enhancement, you can include new features in your products that can satisfy your customers more than they asked for.
● Try looking for keywords surrounding your brand:
While it is true you have to look for signs of any mentioning about your brand name, product and complaints or feedback from customers through social media. It becomes hard to track down those feedbacks because many customers do not mention the brand directly and in a straightforward manner. You are monitoring not just one, but thousands of customers’ reviews on your service/product through social media. The best way to approach this laborious task, is by using keywords related to your business such as products, brand, services, management, cost and other words that show customers’ opinion. Keywords are a best way to filter through the conversations of customers and identify the keywords and gain knowledge about the feedback as mentioned by the customers. To aid in this process, many Social listening tools can be deployed to mark the keywords you are searching for. These social listening tools will monitor all the conversations around your products and services which you can see through a dashboard and filter through them to find keywords.
● Improve the customer feedback processes:
The social media platform of your company is a hub for customers to converse and give feedback. It is the responsibility of your company to respond to them on time and maintain the customer care service. Then only the true social listening will be realized in your company. The act of being punctual with your response is also a sign of true social listening. Whether the customers have good and positive feedback or bad and negative feedback, you should listen, and collect those data to improve your services. If the customer gives good feedback about your product, you should gain the data on why the customers like it. If it is a negative feedback, then listen to the customers’ complaints about the services.
● Adapt Strategical developments to improve your products/services:
The next step comes with the strategy to adapt the changes needed to improve your products and services. Based on the negative feedback, this may become necessary to reconsider the process of manufacturing products. You can implement these changes by introducing a new ingredient for your product that can improve its quality, or maybe implement marketing strategies to reduce costs. Be careful about what you put in the description of your product. Many customers may complain about unfavorable experiences or fear of using the products due to the written description mentioning certain ingredients, for example, perfumes. Furthermore, the features of your product should match and be justifiable with the description, or else it may impact on your products’ intellectual property rights. Heed the customers’ good feedback, and try to understand what they like about your products and services. It is also important to know, what they think your product and compare it with the same product of other brands. Your aim will be to gather data on how to improve your products more based on those feedbacks.
● Maintain a good customer relationship and be steady about it:
The Social media platform is your best friend when it comes to providing you feedbacks about your company. You may have a good influence on customers through your services online and products. But you are optimistic about upgrading your services more. You may want to offer help to customers for any resolutions need to be made. Through social media as you can monitor their conversations you can also reach out to them. But, it is not a professional way to just interfere in between the customers’ conversations to promote your products. Roughly speaking, this act becomes annoying to the customers and may have a negative impact on them. Be steady about it and do not jump into the conversations. Reach out to them gently, by viewing their conversation and sharing helpful information to them with an affirmation of their potential requests. This will help you gain customers with happy sentiments towards the services of your company, showing that your company care for your customers and build a strong relationship with them.
● Connect with essential creators and leaders:
Identifying the potential people with leadership skills and creative abilities is essential for the company if it wants to grow further. In the industry, every person has its own profession in maintaining the foundation of the company. Thus, it is important to give credit and support important people, because in return they will understand you and support you. So, a mutual connection is probable in the industry. When you approach someone with creative skills and an important place in the community, try connecting them with an offer of collaboration. Social listening online can help you reach out to such potential people, and that may attract others’ attention in the community about your presence and acknowledge your brand. Many Brand advocates may even become interested in your offer and thus support you.
● Keep track of the competitors and marketing trends:
Nowadays, social media can give you the idea of not only the trends currently adopted but also the rate at which it is changing. Your company really would want to catch up to the current trends that customers are interested in. Social listening can help you gain a review of the trends you can adapt in your services and products. But, you also should be extra-careful about your competitors, if they have already adapted the trend and reached out to many people successfully.
Again, social listening allows you to monitor the conversations of your customers regarding topics related to businesses and products from your company and your rival. Through these data, you can adapt more innovative features while adapting a new trend into your products and services that can make your brand unique from others.
So, from what is discussed above, social listening skills are helpful and important for your marketing strategy. Your business works on your customers’ satisfaction, if your company wants to achieve high recognition in the market, it should first reach out to customers and satisfy them. A company unaware of the customers’ opinion and sentiment are operating with blind on, which is risky for a company to run. Engaging with customers and important people who can influence on the services your company can provide can have a great impact in the community. Hence, it is always better to approach and most importantly, listen through social media, in the current technological world, because they can listen to you and you can listen to them.
