When you talk, you are only repeating what you already know. But, when you listen, you learn something new – Dalai Lama.

The customer is the king of any business, whether in the B2B or B2C domain. Knowing what customers say about our business, products, services, and offers is crucial to ensure our success. It can help us uncover valuable insights and act on them to improve our offerings, refine our strategies and better engage with our customers.

This is where social listening comes in. Wondering what social listening is? Here’s a simple answer.

What is social listening?

Social listening is the practice of monitoring, analyzing, and responding to online conversations on social media platforms in real-time. It helps us understand what our customers are saying about our brand and helps us identify opportunities to better engage with them.

Moreover, social listening also involves competitor analysis. We can use different social listening tools to monitor our competitors and gain valuable insights into their strategies. This, in turn, can help us create effective strategies to stay ahead of the competition and better serve our customers.

Social listening is carried out by closely monitoring user posts, comments, hashtags, keywords, and other indicators of customer sentiment on social media platforms like Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, and Reddit. 

The data obtained from these platforms can be used to identify customer pain points and needs, evaluate the success of our initiatives, find market trends, build customer relationships, and more.

Simply put, social listening helps us stay ahead of the curve. It helps us anticipate customer needs, refine our strategies, and better engage with them and ultimately improve overall customer experience. In this blog, we will look at some of the pain points it solves.

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8 Problems that Social Listening Solves

Social listening solves numerous pain points for businesses across industries, but here are eight of the most common ones:

Tracking Potential Customer Journey

The customer journey is the most important aspect of any business. It refers to the entire customer journey, from initial contact with a business to becoming a loyal customer. 

The customer journey, helps businesses uncover opportunities to refine their strategies and better engage with customers. That being said, tracking the customer journey can be a daunting task.

Social listening helps businesses track the customer journey by tracking user conversations and posts. This data can be used to better understand what customers want, develop relevant strategies, and ensure a seamless customer experience.

For example, suppose a customer posts on Twitter about a product they like. Through social listening, the business can track this conversation and use the data to further refine its strategies for engaging with customers.

Track and Measure Ad Campaigns

Ad campaigns are an essential part of any business’s digital and offline strategy. But, it can be difficult to track and measure the success of a particular ad campaign. 

Is the campaign good, great, or just doing okay? Many businesses struggle to answer these questions.

But, with social listening metrics, businesses can easily track and measure ad campaigns with a high degree of precision. It provides us with valuable insights into customer sentiment towards a particular ad campaign, allowing us to make informed decisions about its success.

Many businesses, in fact, create a dedicated hashtag for their ad campaigns and use social listening to track customer conversations using the hashtag. This helps them measure the success of their campaigns in a much easier way.

For instance, Coca-Cola launched the Share A Coke campaign, which focused on personalized bottles of Coke. They created a dedicated hashtag, #ShareACoke, for the campaign. 

Using this hashtag, we can easily track customer conversations about the campaign. This gives us valuable insights into the success of the campaign. This, in turn, allows us to make data-driven decisions.

Analyze Customer Feedback & Reviews

The success or failure of a product, service, or marketing campaign of a business is often determined by the customer feedback and reviews it receives. Therefore, businesses need to keep track of customer feedback and reviews.

Social listening helps us do just that. It allows us to track customer conversations about a particular product or service, allowing us to understand customer opinions about the product better. This data can then be used to improve products, services, and marketing strategies.

For example, take the earlier versions of the OnePlus phones. The company had a strong, dedicated, and loyal community of users, which provided a lot of feedback about the phones. 

The company was able to use this data to refine its strategies for future versions of the phone. This led to the massive growth and success of the OnePlus brand.

Effective Communication With Target Audience

Nowadays, communicating with the target audience is as important as providing great products and services. 

Businesses have to be able to engage with their customers in the right way and at the right time in order to ensure success. They must also rectify wrongdoings or address customer complaints quickly and effectively.

Social listening can help businesses do just that. It provides us with valuable insights into customer needs and expectations, allowing us to craft relevant strategies for engaging with the target audience. 

This helps us build trust and loyalty among customers, thus promoting business growth.

For example, Netflix is well known for its effective communication strategy with its target audience. The company uses social listening to track customer conversations and posts, allowing it to create relevant messages that resonate with its target audience. This helps them build a strong connection with their customers and promote healthy brand loyalty.

Similarly, Pepsi quickly apologized for a controversial advertisement featuring Kendall Jenner released in 2017. They used social listening to identify customer sentiment about the ad and respond accordingly. This helped them maintain a good reputation and prevent long-term damage to their brand.

Help Come up With Creative Content Marketing Ideas

Nowadays, viral content and campaigns are considered the holy grail of content marketing. Creative ideas and strategies can often help businesses stand out from the competition, helping them to attract more customers and promote their brand.

Social listening can help businesses come up with creative content marketing ideas. It provides us with valuable insights into customer requirements, allowing us to deliver content that resonates with them. We can also use it to monitor competitor activities, allowing us to come up with original ideas.

For example, after the viral success of the recently popular Zomato and Blinkit hoarding ads, many companies jumped on the bandwagon to create even more creative taglines. 

The best one, however, in our opinion, was Netflix’s, “Friday Mangoge, Wednesday Denge” tagline, which was used to promote its upcoming series based on the Addams family – Wednesday.

Improve Customer Service

Customers expect the highest level of service from their favorite brands and businesses. They want brands to be able to address their queries, complaints, and suggestions quickly. If any business fails to do so, it can lead to customer dissatisfaction and, eventually, the loss of customers.

Social listening is an effective tool for improving customer service. It allows us to monitor customer conversations in order to identify queries and complaints quickly. This helps us address them before they escalate into bigger problems.

Taco Bell, the popular fast-food chain, leverages social listening to identify customer queries and complaints. They quickly responded to each customer individually on Twitter and other social media platforms. This helps in improving their customer service and building trust among their customers.

Similarly, almost every major business today has implemented a social listening strategy in order to ensure better customer service. This helps them to maintain a good reputation and promote healthy customer loyalty.

Increase Reach & Awareness in Less Investment

As businesses, we want to reach out to the maximum number of customers. However, it comes with a hefty price tag of investing in marketing. This can be a big issue for small and medium businesses.

Social listening can help increase reach and awareness with minimal upfront investment. All businesses need is a powerful social listening tool and a team dedicated to monitoring customer conversations.

Social listening tools come with a variety of features that can be used to track customer sentiment and conversations. This helps businesses identify topics people are discussing and trends they are interested in. This, in turn, helps them enhance their reach and create awareness about their brand.

For example, Chipotle, the American chain of fast-casual restaurants, uses social listening to find social media influencers who are part of their target audience. They then collaborate with them to create new content or reshare their content on their social media channels. This enables them to reach a wider audience with minimal effort.

Also Read : 20 Benefits of Using Social Listening Tools For Your Business 

Improve Content Personalization

Personalized content is slowly becoming the go-to for any business looking to boost its engagement and conversions. However, creating personalized content can be quite a hectic task. 

Moreover, even after creating the content, there is no guarantee that it will reach the right people. This can be a real struggle for small and medium businesses that do not have much budget to invest in marketing.

Social listening can be a great way to overcome these challenges. It helps us get a deep understanding of customer needs, preferences, and interests. This, in turn, helps us create content that resonates with them and offers a personalized experience.

For example, Amazon provides personalized recommendations to its customers based on their past purchases and browsing history. This helps them increase engagement and conversions, as customers are more likely to buy something they have seen or heard about.

Conclusion

Social listening is a powerful tool that helps solve a variety of pain points for businesses, such as the ones mentioned above. 

By using social listening, businesses can reap the benefits of improved customer service, increased reach and awareness, and content personalization. These advantages can help businesses grow their business and acquire loyal customers.

Therefore, it is important to have an effective social listening strategy in place for any business that wants to stay ahead of the competition and be successful. 

Konnect Insights offers a robust social listening tool that can help businesses track and analyze customer conversations and develop an effective strategy. Contact us today to learn more!