Using Social Media to really understand your market and get to know what pain your favorite customers are suffering calls for actively interacting with them. Interactions are by necessity two sided – talking and listening and the latter is what allows us to gain information. The difference between hearing and listening should not be confused. Listening is a skill while hearing is a physical ability. Listening and monitoring skills allow us to make sense of and understand what the customer is saying. In other words, listening allows us to understand what the customer is “talking about”.
Here are 8 effective listening and monitoring techniques to help you across the social media spectrum.
1. Use a Twitter client like HootSuite to follow streams of tweets related to certain key words or phrases that describe your solution and how the customer interacts with it. Using hash tags allows you to, monitor streams of everyone and can let you notice what the customer is saying. Perhaps your version of a key phrase is not what the customer has on his/her mind.
2. Ask open-ended questions on LinkedIn to find out what pain your customer is suffering. Other professionals are also aware of the specifics about your market and can share them with you if you ask.
3. Use Social Mention the social media search engine that searches for keywords across social media platforms including blogs, comments, bookmarks, events, news, videos and microblogging services — and provides metrics around these keywords.
4. Use an RSS reader like Google Reader to subscribe to feeds of top blogs in your sector, competitors’ sites, news sites, Twitter searches and more.
5. Subscribe to searches on sites like Flickr, YouTube and Pinterest, so you’ll get an update on any new image or video that matches the key phrases for your brand.
6. Use Facebook Search to monitor the rich conversations taking place about your solution on Facebook right now. Discover the people on Facebook who are talking about your product or solution by using the Facebook search field and then choose “All Results” in the left navigation. You may find new Pages to Like and new people to interact with.
7. Don’t forget Google Alerts which will send you an alert when Google discovers a new blog entry or news story that contains a keyword or phrase you specify. It will send you the alert in a time frame you designate: immediately, daily or weekly. What’s more, you can receive alerts via feeds sent to your RSS reader.
8. Monitor Yelp reviews on your brand and your competitor’s offerings. Not only do you get first- hand information on what is being said about your product/company but if you read between the lines you can get a good idea about what is really bugging your favorite customer.
In summary, listening and monitoring is only the beginning and this leads to discovery. You need a strategy for implementing a Social Media game plan. The next steps involve learning, engaging, acting and measuring in other words taking action on what you find out.
