Ideas are at the heart of a successful marketing strategy; Understanding your market, your audience, the sentiment behind your brand, is essential to optimize your marketing and growth strategies. The only way to gain these insights is through "listening" to social media, monitoring your niche and brand, as well as your customers.
It's similar to monitoring, but it's actually a lot more than that.
While many use social monitoring to stay on top of brand mentions and relevant conversations, in many cases so they can engage with their audiences when needed, social listening is more complex; it's a way to track specific topics, keywords, brands, niches, audiences across social platforms so you can collect data.
Basically, social listening is all about looking at the big picture so you can spot trends. It allows you to better understand your niche and target audience, see what types of content work best for that audience, create better-performing marketing campaigns, and more.
Why listening to social networks is so important for companies?
As I mentioned earlier, one of the most important aspects of a successful strategy is knowledge. And that's what social listening offers: a tool that will help you gather information about your niche market and your audience.
You can use social listening to:
Do you really know what your audience likes? What information do they need? The best way you can really understand what content resonates with your audience is through a combination of social listening and experimentation, creating different types of content to see what works best.
Social listening helps you find out exactly what topics and hashtags your audience is using the most; Which means you'll know exactly what to talk about and which hashtags to use to reach as many people as possible, while delivering the kind of content they want to see or read.
One of the biggest benefits of "social listening" is that it allows you to monitor your brand across social channels and make sure you capture every mention it gets. This is essential because you need to respond to mentions as soon as possible; for example, you must acknowledge positive mentions and comments, as well as respond quickly to any negative mentions and especially customer service questions or comments.
Finding the right social influencers in your niche isn't always easy; In most industries, there is an abundance of social influencers with audiences of all sizes. The best way to identify the most influential people in each niche is by monitoring the conversations that are happening around the relevant topics, as well as the most shared content.
This helps you understand who the most influential people are, not only by their number of followers, but also by the engagement they have online.
Another important use is to identify your brand ambassadors: the people who are talking about your brand, who are using your products and talking about them online in positive ways, and who are constantly sharing your content. It's important to identify these brand "ambassadors" so you can reward them for their loyalty and, in some cases, collaborate with them.
How much do you really know about your audience? Social listening can help you get important information about your target audience, such as:
Learning all this information about your audience, the topics they cover, the hashtags they use, the content they read, etc., helps you create better digital marketing campaigns.
This is because the best-performing marketing campaigns often focus on topics that are highly relevant to their target audience. Social listening helps you uncover these topics by analyzing all the social conversations that are happening around a particular keyword or set of keywords.
Social listening has many benefits for businesses; but, it is better to consider it as a necessity, rather than an additional growth tool. Because at the end of the day, social listening is essential to truly understanding your audience and create better digital marketing campaigns based on that insight, whether you're choosing the right topics to talk about or the right social influencers to work with.
