Over 2.5 billion people use social media platforms daily, posting various updates such as blogs, news, images, videos, memes, and more. According to HubSpot, around 4M posts go online every minute across major social channels.

Now that’s a lot of content! If you are a growing (or stable) business, some of these posts might concern you. But the question is – are you “listening” to them?

It’s a common practice to follow and resolve or interact with the direct mentions you get on your social handles. But that’s just a fraction of the traffic that concerns you.

Yes, it is essential to address this audience, but you need to understand that a considerable chunk of your audience may not be following you or might merely be mistyping your brand name or domain name.

Speaking of mistyping, it is a good practice to prevent the problem rather than wait to solve it. When you pick a domain name for your brand, you need to make sure that it is short, crisp, easy to remember, and easier to spell. It is possible that you will lose a lot of leads due to a complicated domain name.

You can explore new domain extensions such as .tech, .online, .store, .space, or even .site to make sure you get the perfect domain name for your business. With new domain extensions, you need not compromise on a good domain name due to unavailability issues.

Having said that, there may still be a large chunk of your audience that you may not be able to access without social listening.

So what is social listening? Let’s break it down!

What is Social Listening?

Social media listening or simply social listening involves using different tools to “listen to” or monitor your business’s commentary across social media.

Businesses need to understand what customers feel about them, their likes and dislikes, issues, and testimonials.

Social listening offers the most actionable insights and conclusions surrounding your brand, ultimately helping you achieve your business targets.

 What Does Social Listening Offer?

There are two parts of social listening – social media monitoring and social media listening.

Social monitoring allows you to collect all publicly available mentions containing your brand name or a keyword of your interest. This data is a great stepping stone to start analyzing your brand presence and reach.

Social listening then goes a step further and adds value, such as:

• It gives insights into the sentiments of the brand mentions.
• You will understand what your audience likes or dislikes about your business.
• It gives an estimate of your overall social media reach.
• It will help you determine which social channel works best and what content type is most interactive.
• It helps identify social media influencers or public figures you can collaborate with to expand your social media presence and brand awareness.

Next, social listening can assist you in:

• Improving your customer service
• Marketing your products through influencers
• Getting new clients
• Improving product quality
• Understanding more about your audience
• Creating highly targeted ads
• Keeping an eye on the competition

Despite the name, social listening isn’t restricted to social channels. Some tools help you monitor your presence across blogs, news publications, websites, and forums.

These tools focus on collecting and analyzing data that will generate the best possible insights and help you make the most of your online presence. The choice of tools comes down to your marketing strategy and approach.

How to Use Social Listening to Grow Your Business?

1. Get Consumer Feedback

You can treat insights from social listening as a personal focused group. Social monitoring tools help answer questions related to your business and pick up publically available mentions and conversations across the Internet that are relevant to you.

They gather data reflecting brand awareness, campaign information, and product information, all in one place to help you get an idea of what people think about your business.

2. Do Competitive Research

Social listening tools not only allow you to set up a campaign for your brand keywords but also help you monitor keywords relevant to your competitors.

Social listening can help you identify key competitors and understand how you are better or where you are lacking.

3. Manage Your Online Reputation

Social media reactions might not be faster than the speed of light, but they are fast enough. And it works both ways.

Your campaign, product, or service might just click and go viral in no time. Similarly, one small typo or mistake can be taken out of context and trolled mercilessly. It thus becomes a matter of your online reputation.

Social listening helps you gauge the general public sentiment about your business. These tools gather data on various metrics such as number of mentions, overall reach, number of shares and likes, etc.

Analyzing these metrics can help you understand what caused a sudden spike or drop in interaction. You can then take appropriate action to streamline the situation.

4. Create Interactive Content

You must have heard of the phrase – “Content is King.” And it’s true.

Having said that, only creating content is not enough. Correct distribution is equally important. It means you need to figure out where your target audience is talking about your product or service and ensure that they interact with your content on those platforms. Social listening will help you find such platforms and help reach the right audience.

While you may have some active channels, the project will also offer insights on media where you are lagging. You can then use the data to create content that will attract the channel-specific audience and target them.

5. Optimize Your Marketing Campaign

If your business has an online presence, then you must do some form of digital marketing. While organic growth is always better, paid promotions and campaigns have become a necessity.

With social listening, you can monitor and optimize your marketing campaigns as per the user sentiment. For instance, you can monitor hashtags related to your campaigns, see their performance, the number of times they are used, etc.

6. Get Leads

Getting leads is a matter of increasing your brand awareness. A lot of people ask online suggestions, and there are long threads of interactions.

With social listening, you canfind conversations with relevant keywords or phrases and be a part of them. It will help you generate qualified leads.

7. Customer Service and Engagement

One of the most significant advantages of social listening is to understand consumer sentiment. Brands are using their social media handles to interact with consumers and solve their grievances and concerns.

You can find several examples online of how brands are leveraging social media to offer better customer service and improve engagement and online presence.

For instance, Google’s or Amazon’s Twitter handle will quickly respond to a user’s tweet providing some update. A simple response can buy you time to fix the issue and build trust along the way.

Similarly, you can use social listening tools to identify which keywords or phrases your audience mostly interacts with. You can then participate in the conversation and connect with your audience to improve engagement.

Conclusion

Social listening is about creating brand awareness, which might just be the critical difference between success and failure.

You need to set a marketing objective and create a social listening project around it and you will be amazed by the results.

Author: Tasmiya Sayed 

Tasmiya is a Sr. Content Marketing & Communication Associate at Radix, the registry behind some of the most successful new domain extensions, including .ONLINE and .TECH. You can connect with her on LinkedIn