Monitoring is what most brands do: tracking individual mentions and observing notifications on certain keywords. By its very nature, monitoring is reactive — actionable if a certain mention occurs.
Listening takes monitoring a step further. Looking at the bigger picture, listening aggregates social data and identifies themes and patterns in consumer behavior, effectively allowing brands to make predictions and chart the appropriate course.
On this account, listening is proactive rather than reactive, and it takes a considerable amount of time, money and effort to pull off successfully. Then why should you do it?
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Listening helps develop a strategy.
Unlike monitoring, listening helps you capture overall sentiment. The knowledge that you extract directly from your customer is in-depth, and can be used to steer your strategy in the right direction. “How did your latest campaign do?” “Do your customers love your latest product?” These are just some of the questions listening can answer.
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Listening brings the competition to light.
Listening is not just something you do for yourself. You might just find that your audience can’t stop talking about that new product your competitor just launched. What do you do? Listen, home in on what your audience loves about that product, and react appropriately.
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Listening helps you be part of the conversation.
Not everyone who talks about your brand online mentions it directly, intentionally or not. Listening allows you to see this hidden segment, and understand it better. You can directly engage with these people and answer any queries they may have, or you can learn from them, and drive insights from conversations that refer to your brand.
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Listening helps you find influencers.
It’s safe to assume that most consumers trust peer recommendations when making purchase decisions. Listening can help you identify those peers you need to tap, the “real” influencers that get your prospective customers following. By leveraging the sway that these peers have over their contemporaries, you can curate your brand endorsers to get your message across to your target market even more effectively.
Because listening requires proper tools and execution, it’s admittedly a costly endeavor, but a powerful investment. Don’t just monitor your consumers from backstage; step out into the light and listen to what they have to say.
To learn more about how social listening can further boost your brand, check out Product Spotlight: Tracx.
Sources:
Newberry, C. (2017, June 13). Social Listening: What it is, Why You Should Care, and How to Do it Well.
Hootsuite. Retrieved from https://blog.hootsuite.com/social-listening-business/
Beese, J. (2015, November 18). What is Social Listening and Why is it important?. Sprout Social. Retrieved from https://sproutsocial.com/insights/social-listening/
Tracx (2017, July 06). 5 Ways Social Media Listening Can Put Your Brand on Top. https://www.tracx.com/resources/blog/5-ways-social-media-listening-can-put-your-brand-on-top/
