Franchise PowerUp 
If you are doing business, you understand that customer satisfaction is one of your top priorities. But, how to know whether your client is satisfied or not? Social media listening comes into play here. If you do not listen to your target customers, you will never know their impression of your product.
The social media listening definition refers to tracking and analyzing the online conversations of your audience. Its primary functions are to investigate what your clients care about, what features of your product are preferable to them, where they discuss your product and what is their attitude to it. It also helps to distinguish your brand advocates and potential influencers for further cooperation.
The other part of social listening is your reaction to the social mentions of your brand. It helps not only to keep track on all the conversations related to your own products, but also to jump into conversations of the competitors to provide a better service level to their audiences.
As you can see, successful social listening is superior to just tracking of the company’s mentions on social. It is difficult for the brand to search for this comprehensive information manually. Therefore, in most cases, special software is required to pick up all the references for your company and its products. The perfect software will also allow monitoring the competitors’ references, the attitude of customers to competitive products and highlighting trends and themes for future strategic development.
Benefits of Social Listening for Your Business
- Prevention of negative customer feedback – it allows to track all the mentions of your brand in the social media and react on them in time. For example, if you see a negative reaction by a customer you can present him with the solution to overcome his problem and prevent the future discussion of this issue across the web. Besides, people love when somebody can assist them with their troubles meaning they will be loyal to the firm doing its best to solve them.
- Engagement in important conversations related to your field – tracking the discussions in your niche allows you to join them and involve in conversations related to the topics being important for your potential customers. Avoid sales pitches in your comments; your role is to help not to sell at this moment.
- Improvement of your product’s features – you can discover what features of your product customers love most and what they would like to improve. Then you can upgrade your product according to their recommendations.
- The work with influencers – monitoring different mentions of your brand in social you can outline people who praise your product. If these people have many followers including your potential customers, it is a good idea to ask them to involve in influencer marketing on your behalf.
- Investigation of your competitors – social listening allows tracking not only mentions of your product but also discussions concerning competitive products. You can learn about new products your competitors are planning to launch and the first feedbacks from their customers concerning the new products. This information will help you to improve your own products and outperform the competition. In addition, you can identify the content they post that outperforms your own and update the brand’s content strategy accordingly.
What Is Social Media Monitoring and How Does It Differ from Social Listening?
One common misconception that companies have, is the belief that social media listening and monitoring are interchangeable terms. In reality, it is not quite true. Social media monitoring definition refers to tracking and responding to any mentions, questions and messages about your business and its products appearing in social media. On the contrary, the social listening meaning is much broader.
It refers to the development of the broader picture of your social landscape, uncovering all the information related to your brand, including your customers’ treatment of your products and competitive analysis. In addition, the aspect differentiating social listening from monitoring is sensitivity analysis, which helps to investigate customer opinions about the topics related to your niche. It facilitates determining the future strategic steps for outperforming the competitors and determine the sentiment drivers for your customers.
Social monitoring provides you with insides about your brand and alert potential problems concerning the existing products, whereas social listening helps to explore the trends in your niche as well as in related industries. Consequently, listening sheds light on the needs, wants of your target customers, and find product-market fit for them. Finally, it determines the direction to scale your business and define your ideal customer profiles for future products.
