How to improve your marketing strategy with social listening

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It’s clear that social media brought the most significant change in marketing strategies brands develop to communicate with consumers. Before Facebook or Twitter, companies couldn’t imagine building such close relationships with their customers or responding in real-time to potential target audiences located on the other side of the globe.

Social media is an essential component of every online marketing strategy, but how can brands leverage their presence on social networks? Through social listening. What exactly can you gain by delving into social listening and how to listen to your audiences? Here are 8 good reasons and 7 tools to help you make the most form social media listening.

Why listen to social media?

1. Insights from powerful marketing analytics

Listening to what consumers say on social media will help you to uncover the prevailing opinions about your brand and their authors. You’ll also learn who are the main influencers in the sector. All this knowledge is the first step towards improving your chances at creating more engaging content and fully leveraging topic insights. It’s not just about content, of course – you’ll also note improvement in SEO and PPC.

2. Developing a better product

One of the key advantages of listening to your target audience is the opportunity of improving your product. You’ll know perfectly what consumers think about it, how they use and what about it could be improved. Monitoring the reviews, you’ll gain lots of additional user input and alternative ideas on improvement, as well as better matching of preferences and expectations of your target audience.

3. Agility improvement

This is an important point in social media communication where timing is literally everything. A report from Lithium Technologies suggests that 53% of consumers who tweet a brand expect a response within an hour. Now, if the tweet is a complaint, the figure rises to a smashing 72%! (http://www.lithium.com/company/news-room/press-releases/2013/consumers-will-punish-brands-that-fail-to-respond-on-twitter-quickly)

Your reaction time is key for building a positive brand image. You can choose to post your stories in those small windows of opportunity, when you know that your target audience is checking their social media feeds.

4. Sales boost

Social listening will also impact your sales department. Keeping up with consumers, you’ll be able to unearth conversations suggesting that a user wants to purchase your product – and then act accordingly by bringing your offer right to their doorstep. Another important thing is to monitor what your competitors are up to. By integrating CRM with those insights, you’ll be on your way to improving your ROI.

5. Building a community

Insights form social listening will enable you to track conversations, detect leads, identify potential buyers and determine who are key influencers in your sector. All this knowledge serves not only for boosting sales or developing your product, but will also help you to interact with customers in a meaningful way. Knowing what is it that your audience appreciates most, you’ll build a positive image of your brand and foster the creation of a community of loyal followers.

6. Social recruiting

Your human resources department can benefit from some social listening as well. Social networks can be easily treated as potential talent pools and a perfect place to build your employer brand. Detecting key figures in the community, your recruiters will be able to assess the networks of potential employees and identify problems in the sector that might impact employee happiness.

7. Understanding consumer behavior

Social listening is the best strategy for learning more about your target audience. By paying close attention to what they talk about, you’ll gain knowledge about their main problems, motivations and requirements regarding your product. This is also the first step towards developing an efficient customer service – you’ll identify common problems and provide specific solutions that consumers will find useful.

8. Better management of social media channels

It often happens that social listening tools include smart functionalities that can help you to manage your social channels. With Hootsuite, of instance, you’ll easily manage and monitor a number of profiles on a single dashboard, executing campaigns and instantly measuring their results. All this will help in your daily interactions with target audience and build a positive image of your brand online.

How to listen to social media?

Now that you know why it’s worth to do some social media listening, here are are few tools to help you combine and analyze data from various social media channels.

1. Social Mention (http://www.socialmention.com/)

Social Mention collects and analyzes information scattered across different platforms, ranging from Facebook and Twitter to YouTube or even Photobucket. You’ll find a selection of basic analytics tools that will help you to gain new insights about your keywords, such as the number of active sources or a smart sentiment measurement tool. Plus, you can use it for free.

2. TweetReach (http://tweetreach.com/)

This tool is great for all kinds of Twitter analytics, especially if you’re interested in long-term impact of your activity. You can analyze how far your tweets travel or measure the impact of your social media interactions on your brand status. Best of all, you can trace your most influential followers to point your in the right direction when choosing what kind of content to create and share on your social channels.

3. Topsy (http://www.topsy.com/)

Topsy will show you data from both multimedia and blogs. You can set up an email alert associated to your Twitter or Facebook account, which will go off every time something significant happens with a given keyword. All this data will be displayed alongside basic analytics information, including sentiment measurement. You can use Topsy for free and you won’t have to register.

4. Klout (http://klout.com/)

Often considered a controversial tool, Klout supposedly delivers valuable insights about user engagement on the basis of their Twitter activity. Needles to say, to many marketers it sounds too good to be true. Still, Klout can be very useful – you can see what is being said about your brand and who are the main influencers. Some marketers simply love Klout, while others hate it – have a look yourself to decide whether it’s worth your time.

5. Hootsuite (http://www.hootsuite.com/)

A classic social media management tool, Hootsuite is great for gathering analytics data and generating valuable insights. It’s free and covers all the social media giants like Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn, but also Google+, Foursquare and WordPress blogs. Hootsuite is a great choice if you’re thinking about collaborative environments – you’ll have a range of team management tools, such as private messages or task delegation. Moreover, Hootsuite will issue an analytics report every week.

6. Icerocket (http://www.icerocket.com/)

This is a perfect tool for those who are interested in blogs. Icerocket will show you what’s up in the blogosphere, but also social media – a feature called ‘big buzz’ gives a picture of all activity on Twitter, Facebook, as well as smaller networks like Flickr. Icerocket a hit – it’s free, easy to use and doesn’t require any account registration.

7. TweetDeck (http://tweetdeck.com/)

TweetDeck is great for beginners and covers practically all activity happening on Twitter. It can also be used as a management tool – you can schedule tweets, as well as monitor your messages and interactions. You can manage several accounts at once and keep tabs on all relevant hashtags. This tool is a great start to social media listening.

Now that you’re perfectly aware of what you can gain by delving into social listening, you’re ready to use the tools listed above and generate valuable insights to make your social marketing strategy even more relevant and effective.

Image source: http://www.bankopening.co.uk/

Monika Banczerowska
Monika Banczerowska is an Online Marketing Specialist at http://www.bizdb.co.uk/.

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