How to Leverage Social Listening For Better Marketing

How to Leverage Social Listening For Better Marketing?

While it's still debated, many marketers know there is a connection between social media and SEO. Understanding how social media impacts your site and the importance of E-A-T is part of the equation. Now, it's about tracking your SEO by listening to social media.

What is social listening?

?Social listening is a learning activity that provides insight into growth opportunities. Unfortunately, many interchange social monitoring and social listening, but they aren't the same.?

Social monitoring looks at social media mentions of your brand, topic, or industry. It takes events that have already happened and analyzes them for data.?

Social monitoring focuses on marketing campaign success.

Social listening involves looking at online conversations to identify helpful or avoidable patterns. It's an automated process driven by insight. Marketers look into their data for proactive understanding about strengthening their brand.??

Why social listening is important

Social listening is like looking at a forest of information to get valuable seeds of insight. The objective isn't to jump in and be a part of the conversation. Instead, it's about getting a handle on sentiment and using that to tweak your strategy.?

Social listening is essential to brands for four simple reasons:??

1. Better audience engagement. People frown upon eavesdropping in social settings, but eavesdropping marketers get valuable data. With good data, it's easier to speak customers' language in your copy and content. This provides a strong base for more engagement that builds rapport.?
2. Understanding what is (or isn't) working. Consider this,?96% of unhappy customers?won't complain, but they will tell many of their friends why. Social listening helps you determine why you have fewer repeat customers or a poor churn rate.??
3. Crisis management. A company getting buzz means it's either getting: praised or condemned. You want to avoid a potential PR crisis if it's the latter. You want to ride the wave if it's the former, starting with thank-yous and mentions. Social listening is an intelligent PR move.?
4. Collaboration opportunities. Collaboration multiplies your reach. Amplifying influencer and brand partnerships get you in front of more people. YouTube and Instagram have the feature, while?Twitter is exploring the option.

Success depends on your ability to answer the right questions for your customers. Sprout Social and Hootsuite are two popular social listening tools marketers use.