Social Media Listening: Why You Need To Start Using It Share: Social Gamma Date Published 3 July 2020 Categories Blog Reading Time 4-Minute Read Brand awareness is probably one of the most sought-after objectives when it comes to social media content marketing, elevating your business to new heights. While developing and implementing a content strategy is essential to growing your social media profiles, it is also crucial to evaluate and analyse social media metrics that will make you understand what your target audience is responding well to or if there is a need to revise the initial plan. We can all recognise a few social media metrics and some of the most common ones can be likes, comments, views, shares. For someone managing a business page, they will be able to also see metrics such as post engagements, website clicks, impressions, reach and more. However, whether you are just starting out on social media or you are already an established brand on these platforms, it is challenging to keep up with the algorithm changes, billions of users and shifting age groups. So, what can you do to take advantage of social media features to generate a more in-depth and accurate evaluation of your brand’s positioning on online networks? Well, social media listening might be just the perfect solution for you to not only monitor mentions of your brand, tags and customer feedback but also get a deeper understanding of the online perception on your brand and industry, as well as find out what your competitors have going on social media and what makes your audience tick. 4 Reasons Why You Should Use Social Media Listening Increase Engagement Rates Interaction is a two-way street and there are many pieces of research that revealed the fact that more than half of online users like when brands engage with their audience. Social media listening will provide you with relevant data about your audience and how to engage with. Putting in the effort to craft responses that actually bring value to your followers will take you a long way on social media platforms. Users are most likely to make purchases from brands that are interactive in the digital space and it can really boost your engagement rates, regardless of the chosen platform. Monitor Your Brand and Your Competitors Deciding to monitor your brand’s position in the online environment through social media listening enables you to also track the activity of your competitors and analyse the conversations that take place on different channels about you or your competitors. This can also help you evaluate the online sentiment regarding your campaigns and tweak your strategy in real-time to maximise the reach and impact it has on your target audience. According to Hootsuite there are a few things to help you get started with social media listening: Your brand name and handles Your product name(s), including common misspellings Your competitors’ brand names, product names, and handles Industry buzzwords Your slogan and those of your competitors Names of key people in your company and your competitors’ companies (your CEO, spokesperson, etc.) Campaign names or keywords Your branded hashtags and those of your competitors Unbranded hashtags related to your industry Free Feedback What could be better than your consumer telling you exactly how they feel about your brand and the areas they think could be improved? Positive feedback is great and reflects well on your brand in the online environment but does not actively contribute to your improvement. Acknowledging feedback that highlights areas, where you can perform better, can be an amazing way for you to really listen to your consumers and understand how you can make their experience with your product or service more pleasant, closer to their expectations and your goals. New Opportunities Is your audience constantly bringing up what is not working about a product or what issues or challenges they’re facing when it comes to your brand or one of your competitors? That is pure gold! Here is your chance to not only potentially improve your own product/service to fit your consumer’s needs better but also a great opportunity to think about a new product to help solve an issue that your online community is dealing with and is actively telling you about it. Whether it makes you think about expanding, rebranding or focusing on one branch of your business, social media listening might reveal new business opportunities you are currently missing out. At Social Gamma, we provide full-service marketing packages that can help you achieve your digital goals and grow your business through both organic and paid techniques. If you would like to know more about who we are and what we do, please visit Social Gamma and get in touch with us today!