But First, Listen: Why And How Social Listening Makes Businesses Stand Out

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Dealing with a lot of people all at once is not easy especially if your business is booming or has already established its name on the industry. At some point, it seems impossible to answer everyone. What makes it more difficult is the fact that every customer who contacts your brand expect for an answer.

When customers interact with your business, be it directly or indirectly, you have to listen. It is through their opinions and comments on your brand can you gain insight on how you could improve your business. Social listening, the practice of monitoring your social media accounts and the way your customers interact and connect therein, is one way of making your business stand out. You should not stick with your channels alone, though. Effective social listening happens even outside the confines of your owned channel.

According to Brandwatch 96 percent of people who mention your brand doesn’t follow your accounts. Merely monitoring your mentions and notifications will not suffice. Hence, having tools that would help you gain insights into what people think about your online presence is needed.

But why do you need to know what people think of your brand?

Remember BlackBerry? Those are the good times.

BlackBerry’s story is the perfect example of a company that did not incorporate social listening. According to Glean, “social media listening can quickly identify market issues, concerns, and preferred product features.” Nintendo might follow their footsteps if they still ignore what their consumers say about their products and services online.

Benefits of Social Listening

The internet is a gold mine if you know what you need to search for. It is especially true for brands and companies. One way to achieve that is social listening.

Like what many brands do today, one benefit of social listening is that you can answer to their complaints. Through that, you can respond carefully and respectfully without seeming like defensive.

Another advantage is you can measure if your advertisement, promotions, and overall marketing worked. If people are talking about it, then you have probably succeeded. If not, well, better luck next time.

The third one is you can defend your brand from malicious content. Most of the times these things will not reach your notifications and inbox because people are usually like that. With the use of social listening, you can reach out to them and explain your side of the things and not get judged by other consumers without getting to know the full story.

Probably one of the most advantageous benefits is newsjacking. A famous example of it was in 2014, Arby, the restaurant chain, has tweeted about Pharell’s hat as people have been tweeting about it having a resemblance to the logo of the brand. They jokingly asked back for it.

That one tweet blew up. Their PR team summarized that tweet as a $22 million advertisement. “The impact of that one Tweet is mind-blowing,” stated Josh Martin, Arby’s social media manager, on Twitter’s blog.

Free advertisement through advocates is like newsjacking but you are using your consumer’s content. This benefit is probably the easiest to do as you just need to share your customer’s content. Not only you make them happy but it will be a good look on your account as it is a proven fact that people do like your product and services and it will encourage other people to try it too.

As social media is here to stay, it is better for brands and companies to just learn how to use it and maximize it to its full potential.

Fred Chua
I am a Philippine-certified Electronics and Communications Engineer who serves as the CEO of Magellan Solutions Outsourcing Inc. Magellan Solutions is one of the top call centers/BPO companies in the world that can deliver high-performing operations to businesses of any type and any size.

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