Just like in an ideal communication model, a conversation is a two-way street—you send out a message, your receiver sends back a feedback then the cycle goes on. Now, in this steadily changing social media landscape, a conversation about your brand–and listening to it–are very important, if you wish for your business to grow.
Listening well to conversations will show how genuinely ready you are to engage directly with your customers and how active and open you are in diving into insights that you can use to make decisions for the next campaign to reinforce your brand.
More than this, by social listening, you can see for yourself how your marketing campaign is doing, get ideas from users on your products and services and understand any issues around what you offer.
At Third Team Media (TTM), being a digital agency that cares for the social media reputation of brands that care about good marketing and good customer service, we do a lot of social listening, day in, day out.
We are composed of social people who invent, lead, connect others, make things happen, and create order out of chaos. We enjoy what we’re doing primarily because we understand what we’re doing. On social media, we are beset with information. By listening, we are able to filter through, analyze what this means and use it as reference for future decision-making.
Gathering insights for a channel is easy, sure. But using it to understand a market for a new product or service is another matter; it takes time and energy. By understanding the market on social media, we can define and analyze competition. We can determine what the market wants, how much they are willing to pay for a product or service and what other things they are looking for that our clients’ competitors are not (yet) offering. Social listening gives us the right intelligence that will enable our clients to serve their customers better.
Gone are the days when we suggestion boxes are in place for customer feedback. These days, customers go straight to their social media profiles to praise or criticize a product or service. And if there’s one thing that companies need to set up to replace physical suggestion boxes, it’s building a social media channel and maintaining it. By maintenance, we mean that brands should open up their channels to become venues for sharing and conversation. By continuously doing this, and with the right mindset and open ears, businesses will be able to improve the quality of their social media posts over time.
At the end of the day, the magic of social listening is the ability for the brands to acquire new customers and please and retain existing ones.
Setting up online channels, maintaining them and conversing with customers can be a lot of effort for you. If you do not have the right people in the team, your efforts at promoting your products or services on social media might backfire. In a past post, we recommended that businesses outsource a social media management team. For effective social listening for your brand, we echo the same advice.
Collaborate with Third Team Media today for your social listening needs!