Listen up! 4 reasons why you should be investing in social listening

Social media is primarily about two-way conversations, however the listening part of this is often the important aspect that is often overlooked.

In a world that is constantly tweeting, posting and sharing their thoughts on brands, social listening is key to nurturing your current audience, gaining a new one and increasing your brands overall presence online. Here’s four reasons why you should be investing in social listening if you want to stay one step ahead:

1. Care for your customers

When it comes to your audience’s opinions, enquiries or feedback; the first port of call will be social. According to Brandwatch, only 46.6% of businesses respond to a tagged mention which can lead to a decrease in brand trust and create disgruntled customers. This can be easily avoided with constant monitoring on social tools such as Hootsuite, Sproutsocial or Tweetdeck. Quick responses or even holding messages can easily diffuse a situation.

(*Did you know that Facebook states the typical response time on business pages which will give the user an idea of how fast you will get back to them.)

A prime example of great social listening came from Pizza Hut UK when they delivered a pizza to the house of One Direction member, Louis Tomlinson after he complained they didn’t deliver to his house. Just over an hour later Louis had a pizza straight to his door and the twitter conversation racked up over 15k engagements.

2. Increased listening, Increased engagement

Using a good listening tool to identify hashtags, topics, keywords or brand mentions that aren’t specifically directed at you will allow you to tap in to activity that may have usually gone unfound. Listening to what your customers are likely to talk about when discussing your brand will allow you to monitor and seize opportunities as well as ramping up engagement.

Take a look at how Yorkshire Tea didn’t miss out on the action here…

3. User generated content is King 

Through effective social listening user generated content can be easily found and used to your brands advantage. As well as aiding SEO, user generated content gives your messages authenticity which is crucial to building your audiences trust. Creating content can sometimes be a slog, so let your users do some of the hard work for you. Utilising user generated content in to your marketing strategy couldn’t be simpler than a Quote Retweet or Regram!

Although ASOS occasionally use their brand name as a hashtag in their posts to maximise discovery, it’s actually their followers who use it more frequently. There are in fact nearly 3 million images on Instagram using the hashtag #ASOS – effectively doing their marketing for them!

* Did You Know that you can now follow hashtags on Instagram, this proves useful staying connected with the communities you care about and wish to convert.

4. Monitor your competitors

Set up competitor lists, industry keywords searches and specific hashtags to get a feel of what your competitors are saying on Twitter and Instagram. Not only will this generate ideas involving content, but it will allow you to observe conversations between users which you can capitalise on.

Facebook has kindly helped us out with this one by creating the ‘Facebook Pages to Watch’ feature which can be found in your business page insights (after your page has over 100 likes). Letting you keep tabs on up to five of your competitors pages it’s a simple way to track effectively what they’re doing on their pages, what’s getting the most engagement and how often they’re posting.

If you don’t know where to start when it comes to social listening, get in touch with us! We offer forward-thinking digital marketing to put your brand in front of the people that matter, helping to grow your company from the ground up.