‘Cause Everybody Talks: Social Listening
Listening to and joining conversations online has never been easier. We no longer have to wait for our monthly magazine subscriptions to tell us the hottest trends or hope our customers take the time to fill out our surveys at the bottom of their receipt, we can simply hop on social media and read conversations that are happening in real-time.
While it might sound invasive, social listening is solely a process of collecting data from conversations that are happening. The main purpose of social listening for brands is to gather customer feedback. You do this by looking at your mentions, specific keywords, your competitors, and overall industry conversations — notice, we’re not hacking into phones and listening to private conversations!
Why You Should Be Listening
If you don’t already practice social listening for your company, here are a few reasons why you should. First off, we can all agree that we like when people respond to our questions and concerns…it’s no different when you look at your customers. Sprout Social found that 48% of customers make a purchase with a brand who is responsive to its customers and prospects via social media. Not only that, but social listening helps you join conversations that are already occurring rather than doing all the work alone — you can reinforce facts about your brand that some customers are already posting about. On the other hand, you can also clarify when customers are confused and adjust when it seems your customers have found a fault in your brand.
How to Prepare for Social Listening
What Are You Trying to Measure?
When social listening, you want to be as focused as possible. There is a lot of noise online so it is easy to get distracted. You’ll need to figure out what you want to evaluate and improve. A few areas you could be looking at are:
- Customer service
- Brand reputation
- Content creation
- Competition among other brands
- Campaign recognition
How Will You Measure It?
As Brandwatch explains, your next step is to talk to the team most closely related to what you are measuring. They will know what talking points customers have and what metrics are most important in their area. You’ll also want to gather a specific list of metrics that you will be looking at. This list could include:
- Direct brand mentions
- Conversations between your customers
- Common questions in your industry that come up online
- Mentions compared to competitor mentions
How Long Will You Measure It For?
Finding trends is key when social listening. For some tasks, you can quickly catch on in a month or so and for other tasks, you will need to keep an eye on the everchanging trends. Take a look back at your goal to determine how long you will need to measure for.
When You Work With Cosmitto
As we said earlier, figuring out what people are saying online has never been easier, however answering the questions above is another story. It isn’t always easy to set a clear and defined goal when it comes to social listening. That’s where we come in! We’re here to help you hone in on the relevant conversations among the online chatter by gathering and evaluating what people think of your brand, competitors, and products!