Social Listening as a Marketing Technique: Why It Matters?

Listening is a crucial part of all good communications. And listening becomes all the more relevant for online communication. However, the dynamics of listening is different in the online world from the offline one. In social media marketing, listening is a surveillance mechanism that helps you to monitor online conversations related to your business. These conversations can be anything from your brand or product or industry-related topics. The truth is that conversations are most likely already happening; all you need to do is find them. People go online seeking an opinion from complete strangers to their friends and family. Conversations can range from asking for advice, product or company review, or just telling people about the product or services they love or hate.

Most of these conversations take place on social media platforms like Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, and several forums and blogs. Let's try to understand this in a real-world situation.

You are an owner of a salon. One day while you are preparing a hair color mix, you heard two of your customers talking about your service.

“I love the hair service here,” one says. “Especially the new hair spa treatment.”

“Ok, but I have not tried it yet,” the other one replies. “I didn’t enjoy the protein repair treatment. The product had an unpleasant smell.”

You are wondering which protein repair they are talking about and do all customers felt the same. Is that why only a few turned up for the second session?

So, you start asking around. You realized this is actually true. You changed the products and saw the difference in your customer's response to the protein repair hair service.

Wondering why it happened?

It became possible because of the tried and tested methods of engaging with your customer and making relevant changes to suit the wants and demands. This is called listening, and when it happens on social media, it is called "SOCIAL LISTENING."

What is Social Listening?

Social listening is the mechanism used to monitor and analyze social media channels for conversations about your brand, products, services, competitors, and related industry topics.

While social media monitoring restricts itself to the analysis of facts and figures, social media listening goes beyond the numbers and tells us about your current and potential consumers' moods and sentiments.

Why Social Listening Matter?

Understanding social media sentiment around your business can track your product development and marketing efforts on track. If you are still staying away from using social media listening, your marketing strategy is missing out on the most valuable insights.

Social Listening can be the turning point for the success of your social media strategy. Learn how:

Find potential customers: People who fit your ideal consumer are already talking about their wants and needs on social media. By listening and taking part in these conversations, you can step into a problem-solver role. You can find potential customers by gaining the knowledge of what they want.

Engage with customers: Social listening provides you the opportunity to interact with your customers. You can know your customer's feedback and response.

Improve customer relationships: To build long-term customer loyalty, you need to provide excellent customer relationships.  You can handle your customer's grievances and try to resolve them faster, which helps create a positive sentiment around your brand.

Measure campaign impact: It’s to evaluate the impact of your social media campaign. Social listening can tell you the awareness generated by the campaign. Social Media marketers can now analyze the changing sentiments around the brand. BoomSight can provide you key social metrics to analyze brand awareness, increase mentions, and much such information.

Competitive benchmarking: You can understand valuable competitive intelligence with social listening tools. The social metrics by BoomSight can give data related to competitors' successful strategies. We can tell you what your competitors are doing on social media and what their customers think about them.

Identify influencers: Identifying appropriate influencers remain one of the biggest marketing challenges. BoomSight can help you identify influencers with healthy engagement and filter out the influencers with fake followers and fake engagement.

Bottom Line

Data sources are the lifeblood of any social listening tool and system. If you are a worldwide brand, you need tools that cover many languages and more countries. Social media can give you an insight that goes beyond marketing and PR campaigns. Our monitoring algorithms dig deeper and analyze social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Pinterest, Instagram, along with blogs and news forums. By bringing you the social sentiments of your target and current customers, we can help you develop robust social media campaigns.