Being a business on social media requires more than simply creating ways to engage with audiences. It's crucial to ensure you are engaging the right way, building a good brand image, and creating strong long-lasting relationships with the target audience!
This is actually what you can track using Social Media Listening. Welcome to the Vanilla blog! We are about to share with you another major aspect of social media marketing!
What is social media listening?
As mentioned in our previous article, Social Media Listening is simply tracking what customers think & say about your business, and what your competitors do in your market. It is the process of understanding the online conversation about a business or brand, along with its products and services.
Why is it so important to listen to your customers?
Imagine as all businesses are trying hard for a better understanding of their audiences and customer behavior, there is a huge fertile and perceptive source that they miss when they don't listen to their customers!
There are so many benefits to Social Media Listening. For example, when you listen to your customer, you can know:
- Feedback customers have about your product, service, content,..etc.
- What the brand image the audience has in their minds regarding your business is - this could be based on their thoughts, word of mouth, or real experience!
- The volume of audience engagement with your social media channels
- The best times to get in touch with your audience
- The content type they engage with the most
By analyzing this data you will be able to:
- Measure the performance of your social media, web, conversation and content strategy.
- Manage your brand image
- Bring to your mind ideas for new products & services or some enhancements for the existing ones.
- Discover the weaknesses and gaps of your business.
- Managing and controlling crises
- Identify future possibilities for collaboration
Why does it matter so much to listen to your competitors?
Simply, the purpose is to get to know how your business situation compares with theirs. How people think about the competitors is a gate for knowing their strengths, points to learn, and weaknesses to beat them! It actually helps to identify threats and opportunities related to your presence in the market alongside your competitors.
How does one effectively listen to social media?
Search, search, and search! Searching is the key of this stage. But how can one search about people effectively? There are very critical keywords to use in your search, like:
- Brand name
- Product(s) or service(s) names
- Industry common expression terms
- Names of the key employees in your organization & your competitors
- Your competitors’ brand names, product names, and handles
- Campaign names or keywords
- Your branded hashtags and your competitors’ ones
- Unbranded hashtags related to your industry
Where to search?
All social media channels that your target audience is active on, even if you don't use them in your marketing activities!
You can search in the comments, shares, and interactions of your business pages, your competitors' pages, Facebook communities, or Instagram influencers' accounts!
The way your audience will comment on your work on Instagram will not be the same as on Twitter, for example, because the audience does not match on both platforms. One is an audience of a certain age and interest group, while the other is an audience of different ages and interests!
Therefore, your first task will always be to know where your audience is.
Social Media Listening Tools
Besides our Vanilla Analytics Tool, Vanilla also offers the social media listening service in cooperation with other experts such as Sprout social, Semrush, and Media toolkit.
All you need to do is send us an email to info@vanillasm.com and get a new social media monitoring experience underway!