Reputed brands are “Listening”. Users have now clearly understood the very public nature of social, So now it has become accepted – and even expected – that brands are listening to their customers’ conversations.
Research reports from Markets and Markets, forecast that global spending on combined social media monitoring tools, including social listening will rise from $2.2bn to $17.92 billion by 2019.
So what is driving this interest in social media monitoring tools and why are brands finding it so appealing to “listen”?
Billions of mentions take place every day across the social networks, with many related to brands, their services and products. Social listening platforms use their smart algorithms to enable brands to organise the aggregated public domain data and collate this with keywords/brand names. As we mature in listening techniques, brands have started using this functionality in a variety of ways.
Social listening is not just about the Facebook page or managing the @mentions on Twitter and Instagram, it is about collating all the data out there whenever brands or products are mentioned. By listening to the entire social media chatter, brands can obtain data on the volume, key conversations or general sentiment of user-generated content.
Surely, “listening” can be beneficial in many ways, and here are the top 7 reasons.
- Manage brand reputation: Through listening tools, companies can track what customers are talking about the brand through their experience with the companies various divisions/products/branch offices etc.
- Manage crisis proactively: Social media monitoring usually gives a heads up to corporate communication teams about a mushrooming crisis, and get alerted to ‘bad communication’ going viral in time to respond and resolve the same with suitable intervention.
- Improved Customer Service: Social media becomes one more effective channel for resolving customer complaints, register feedback or implement surveys. Social is probably the fastest channel and offers customer demographics and data analytics as an advantage to companies who “listen” and “engage”
- Marketing Feedback: The marketing teams can use social listening to gain useful insights into what messages and offers will be successful with different customer segments. They can track ‘reactions’ to different campaigns and implement analytics in order to improve their marketing communications. Social ‘listening’ also helps in market research of new markets & segments by analysing competition chatter. Marketers can identify how much a competitive product or service is resonating in the marketplace.
- Attract & Retain Talent : Prospective candidates look up the company’s social media to interpret the “employee happiness” quotient, in order to take joining decisions. Simultaneously HR teams like to track social media behaviour of employees and prospective employees in order to engage & communicate the benefits of working in their company.
- Product/Service Lifecycle management: Social data can provide valuable information to support the development, testing and improvement of new products and services, potentially saving brands huge R&D investment.
- Identifying Influencers: Marketing through influencers is an increasingly popular way of reaching and engaging with potential customers. When we listen to a product/service category, it will become easy to identify these communication leaders who can influence the rest of the crowd to love or hate your brand.
To conclude, there are a great many opportunities to derive value from social media monitoring tools – from improving customer service and satisfaction to identifying threats to the brand reputation; from improving market research to identifying new sales opportunities; and from improving marketing ROI to identifying unmet customer needs.
Get tuned to social media monitoring, gather actionable insights & “Keep Listening”.