Social Media Listening – Creating Buzz in the Biz world

Social (media) listening is emerging as one of the most powerful tools in the social media block. Also, known as social media monitoring, this platform is now effectively used in business circles to monitor, analyze and then engage in customer interactions in social media networks. Studies have repeatedly shown that listening tools if used strategically can prove to be a useful resource for accessing social media information through organizations.

Fig: Social media listening is all about listening to your customer’s feedback and responding accordingly.

Social media listening process starts with ‘LISTENING’ to customer interaction, DECIPHERING customer feedback, BENEFIT from intelligence gathering, ANALYZE from context collection; and then use the platform to DEMONSTRATE appreciation to your customers for helping make your brand better.

Eventually, social listening is all about customer benchmarking.

The Role of Social Media Listening in Business & Brand Development

Social media listening is all set to play a vital role in business and brand development in days to come. Enterprises have been competently harnessing the power of social intelligence courtesy listening platforms to help capture social data (buzz) relating to its brand, manage and analyze its content (updates and conversations) through text analytics, and deliver insights (by engaging and demonstrating ) in dashboards and reporting services.

Don’t just Listen: Understand, Analyze, Engage and Demonstrate appreciation to build customer relationship.

In fact, brands have been quick to realize the potential of social media listening; because social media networks not only allows enterprises to connect and interact directly with their customers, but also opens up opportunities to ‘listen’ to what your customers are saying about you and your brand. Use this to your advantage. Don’t just listen, ENGAGE!

Listen to the social buzz, identify the opportunities to respond to engage with your customer’s queries, concerns and complaints more comprehensively. ‘Listen’ to the growing trend of conversations and identify the influencer(s). Remember to keep your friends close, but your enemies even closer.

How to Ensure Real-time Customer Engagement with Social Media Listening?

Real-time customer engagement in social media if used effectively can prove to be a goldmine for enterprises who are willing to harness it to their advantage and boost their ROI (return on investment).

Remember, the entire concept of social listening in business is irrelevant without involving the very essence of being ‘social’ or interactive. And interaction in the right perspective involves not just consuming information, but also to share and give back information. Because it is only by nurturing customer engagement both people and companies can build relationships – gradually leading a potential buyer into the selling process.

The Curious Case of ‘Maker’s Mark’: Social listening personified

Everyone here, serious about imbibing social listening into your business strategy are surely aware of Maker’s Mark’s unprecedented social media success story. This will ever remain the ultimate example of how the popular whiskey brand implemented ‘social listening’ effectively to turnaround their impending business debacle into a social media win. Here’s a round-up of the amazing ‘social listening’ coup from Maker’s Mark:

Fig. How Maker’s Mark effectively implemented ‘Social Listening’ to turn a business debacle into social media win.

How to Boost your Business ROI with Social Media Listening

You have just seen how Maker’s Mark used the negative publicity to its advantage just by being quick and effective in converging its social listening data to tap the pulse of the customers, and work in its favor – adding to its branding and improving ROI. However, many big brands are finding it difficult to implement it in the right perspective. Let’s check out a few golden rules:

Use Social Listening for Demographic Segmentation

Use social listening for demographic segmentation by using data from listening platforms and web analytics software like Google Analytics. This will help you to accurately address your target customers (even using traditional advertising), increase sales and improve ROI.

Identify Influencers and Collaborate

Use your social listening skills to identify influencers, and then engage and collaborate with them in product development, building business processes, etc. as well as making them customer representative in brand promotion. Brand value definitely takes a leap when customers (especially an influencer) endorse it.

Fig: Implement Social media listening techniques to boost ROI

Do More Than Listening – Participate, Amend and Implement

With statistics indicating that an average American spends 16 minutes/hour on social media sites, it is important for businesses to do more than just listening. Whether your customers are venting out amongst others in the social circle or directly at you, it is important for you to pay heed to the updates and conversation and engage to satisfy the queries and concerns of your customers. This will help improve brand loyalty, increase conversions and repeat sales; and boost ROI.

Instill Trust: Social Listening Is Not an Intrusion into Privacy

While over 40 percent consumers feel that social listening is an intrusion into their privacy, it is essential for brands to instill trust amongst its customers (social media followers), by engaging in constructive discussions and implementing consumer suggestions into your business policy – thus reiterating that ‘Your Brand listens to you to improve products/services and respond to your grievances as well. Again, an important factor in building enduring business relationship and improved ROI.

How to Choose the Right Social Media Listening Platform for Your Business

Now, that you have understood the many benefits of social media listening; your next prerogative will be to choose the right social media listening platform. Here are a few parameters that will help you to adjudge the one that will suit your business the best:

Understanding What Your Business Needs to Measure

Contemplating to choose a social listening platform for your business? First, identify what you are actually going to measure, because every successful social media campaign are based on clearly defined objectives and measurable outcomes. Some of the most prominent measures are Reach and influence over your community, social media Engagement, Competitive data, customer Sentiment about your brand, and sales conversions.

Know Your Budget

It is important to know the budget your business is ready to allot for social media listening or monitoring. Simply speaking, the cost estimate for implementing social media listening for your business depends upon the amount of data you need to collect and archive for analysis. Apart from tracking and storing data related to social listening, there may be other features and functions that can boost expenses. Google Alerts is one of the best free tool to monitor your brand terms across the web.

Ask More Questions…Do Not Hesitate

• Who are your customers mainly – the social audience and target market?
• Is your social media platform meant just to monitor (listen) social media mentions or also manage social media profiles?
• Identify the profile you are most active on. Does your chosen social media listening platform support that network?
• Do you to archive data for analysis – for how long?
• Are you also looking for sentiment analysis in your listening platform?
• Are you looking for listening platform to integrate with other tools like Google Analytics, etc.?

Top 5 Social Media Listening Platforms

Google Alerts

Unquestionably, the best and the most inexpensive social listening platforms you can have for your business. Manage your brand in real-time through Google Alerts notifications – each time your brand name is mentioned. All you need to get the best of this great tool is a simple adjustment to settings.

Social Mention

Another robust, fast and free social listening tool that monitors blogs, videos, comments, etc. is Social Mention. Its ‘sort by feature’ allows you to monitor the most recent updates and conversations related to your brand that people are talking about. It also gives you an insight into the conversations you might have missed.

HootSuite

HootSuite is a simple, intuitive, user-friendly and highly popular social media listening and discovery platform - especially small to SME brands. Besides being easily accessible, users can comfortably manage and monitor multiple social media accounts through one interface, to identify and customize real time analytics. Its USP is its global messaging functions, which offers options such as scheduling social media posts. It also notifies you just when someone mentions your brand and in what light.

Sysomos

Sysomos (a Marketwire Company) comes with a complete social listening platform that besides demographic tracking, real-time tracking and analytics; offers automated sentiment analysis, competitor comparisons and much more. Moreover, this monitoring tool can provide great insights into social interactions based on segmentation by age, location, interests, and engagement levels.

Radian6

Radian6 (now acquired by Salesforce) is a powerful social listening platform with clean dashboards and real-time charts making it easy and a popular choice amongst marketing professionals. The tool proves to be a great asset when it comes to converting data into appealing visuals. In short, it helps you to seamlessly cut through the clutter, and focus on deriving meaningful data for marketing decisions.

Synopsis

One of the thumb rules to generate genuine social media following for effective real-time customer engagement is to identify customer market and understand business opportunities. Share content to implement your marketing message across all points of the buying cycle from social media circles like Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Myspace, etc. to shareable sites like YouTube, Slideshare, Pinterest and Flickr.

Many enterprises in spite of creating a successful social media branding fail to endure the media frenzy and buzz it has created, as they back off into a dormant mode after creating a stir believing they have accomplished their mission. Not really!

Social media listening is about customer engagement (without invading privacy). Your actual mission starts here…..