16 SOCIAL LISTENING STRATEGIES TO INCORPORATE INTO YOUR BUSINESS STARATEGY

The number of users on social media platforms has exploded in the last few decades. According to a study, the number of people on social media platforms stands at over 4.48 billion globally. The study further said that an average internet user accesses 6.6 social media platforms monthly.

 While these social media platforms emerged as a place where people can connect, network, and stay in touch with each other, brands have been active participants in creating a loyal set of user base for their products or service using social media marketing tactics.

When each brand competes for the attention of all major social media platforms, improving social listening will ensure you are not another voice in the crowd. As they say, think twice before you speak. The same logic applies to creating a brand voice on social media platforms. Before you make your social media strategy to create an impact, it is worthwhile to implement a social listening strategy that can help your brand figure out what, how, why, and when of your social media communication strategy.

Here are the top 18 social listening strategies to incorporate into your business strategy:

Developing leads by identifying prospects

Social listening strategies are an effective way to develop leads by identifying prospects in your industry. This can be done by focusing on some sub-segments like industry news, issues faced by customers, best practices, and leading publications. This can help you identify a large existing audience that can be tapped for your products or services. After identifying this audience, you can either engage with them or pitch them your products or services. The time taken for this activity would depend on the social scale of your industry and business.

Developing leads via poor experience with competitor customers

Social listening helps a lot in identifying dissatisfied customers of your competition. These are a set of consumers that are eager to try new products and services because of a poor experience they have recently had. You can identify these unhappy customers by tracking the correct terms, such as competitor names and products they sell, along with negative words like "not," "can't," "won't," "doesn't," etc. You can contact them with an appealing offer like a free demo or trial to get them into your fold.  

Building meaningful engagement

One of the biggest benefits of social listening is that it enables you to create meaningful engagement with your target audience. Social listening equips you with the right knowledge before the brand initiates the conversation. As you already have some information about the customer's experience with the brand, you can build on it to build meaningful engagement with your target audience. 

Building industry and competitor intelligence

Social listening can be integral in building effective intelligence about competition and industry. As you can track the various terms and hashtags related to your industry in general and specifically for the competition, you can build a repository of insights that can be further used to build actionable steps for the business. 

Improving product intelligence

Social listening also helps you improve your arsenal of products and services and align them to the customer's needs. As a result, you can use social listening tactics to launch products that are expected by the customers, rather than trusting your gut or taking a chance. The products desired by some customers would likely be able to find an audience when launched at scale. 

Better crisis management

Social listening is an effective business strategy that can help you avoid a crisis and even help you when you are in the middle of one. In today's competitive, interconnected world, you are never sure when your brand will be found on the wrong side. As a result, you can use social listening to track the sentiment of your audience to avoid letting an issue balloon up quickly.

Converse in a language your audience understands

With a social listening strategy, you can figure out the kind of language that is liked by your target audience. When you use the phrases or converse in a familiar lingo, you have a better chance to strike a chord with the target group quickly. This can help you build effective landing pages, ad copies, and social media posts to talk to your audience. 

Identification of influencers in your niche

Many leading brands use famous online personalities to expand their target group, appeal to new customers, and build strong relationships with existing ones. Social listening can identify relevant influencers in your industry that can help you create an army of brand advocates on social media platforms. You can use engagement rate to identify the influencers you should partner with in your industry.

Collate meaningful feedback from customers

Tracking the right terms like brand keywords and including positive and negative words like 'does' and 'doesn't' will help you uncover a lot of meaningful feedback from your customers on social media platforms. This feedback can be both positive and negative. You can use the positive feedback as testimonials or retweets, while the negative feedback can help you derive future action from resolving the issues being faced by the customers.

Identify industry trends and news.

Social listening is like having an ear to the ground. By analyzing what is happening around your business and industry, you can identify the trends and news to use for your business strategy. This helps in maintaining the tempo in your content marketing strategy by providing enough fodder to churn out pieces that are trending and being talked about. 

Better measurement and target setting

Social listening can help you track, measure, and compare the impact of your campaigns with your competition and the industry in general. In addition to effective measurement, this can help you set goals for your future campaigns and analyze which demographic consumers are the most active audience. This can help you build engagement and increase reach on social media platforms. 

Discovering new audiences

A multi-channel social listening strategy can help you understand deeply about new audiences. You can use forums, communities, and other similar segments within social media platforms to understand the pain points of the consumer and available business opportunities. 

Handling indirect questions

Providing solutions to the queries and issues faced by the users is an excellent way to introduce your brand and build a relationship with a new audience. The queries may or may not be related to your brand but could be an issue faced by the customers in your industry or any other similar challenge. You can use keywords related to your industry to find these indirect questions as part of your social listening strategy. By providing the solution to this indirect question, you can share a link to a relevant blog post or social media post with the user. 

Monitoring competitor content

By consistently monitoring how your competition's content is performing on social media platforms, you would be able to adapt your social media strategy well. By figuring out the content performing well, you can have enough ideas for a robust social media strategy for your business.

Create customer and user personas

Social listening helps you build customer and user personas effectively. As you track profiles of users interacting and engaging with your content, you will quickly have a list of users. The list of users can be populated with other fields like age, gender, position, industry, etc. This can help you build a social audience and tailor your content as per the social audience you have.

Identify collaboration opportunities

You can identify meaningful collaboration opportunities using the social listening strategy. Social listening helps you identify the right audience and can guide you to identify the available collaboration opportunities. The scale of the collaboration would depend on your objective, the collaborating audience, and the brief provided.

To sum up

A robust social listening strategy can help you build an interactive social media strategy. People tend to share their opinions and views about the industry, brand, or competition. It is a good idea to use a social listening tool and use it in the various ways explained above and gain a competitive edge in your industry.

You would need to give some time for your social listening strategy to mature and throw relevant insights that can help you grow your business quickly. You must identify the right keywords and terms to have the proper contours for your social listening strategy.

You can follow Cogent Infotech for more insightful content to help you build a proactive marketing strategy for your business. 

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