Marketers are getting pretty good at joining conversations on social media, interacting with customers, and communicating information about their products and services. But just like all effective communication, listening is as important as talking, even on places like Facebook and Twitter. In this article, I’ll show you why listening is so important for social media campaign success, along with ways you can become a better listener.
3 reasons why listening is critical to social media success
1. Listening makes customers feel important
Don’t you feel better when someone listens to you? Your customers do, too. Listening helps customers feel valued and strengthens your relationships with them. Feeling heard usually leads to feeling happier, so make your customers and clients happy by taking the time to listen.
2. Listening provides valuable insight about your products and services
Listening in on social networks can reveal how customers are using, or not using, your products. You can use this information to improve products based on what customers would like to see. Also, you can glean insight into how to market your products and services by presenting how they fulfill a need your previous campaigns may not have addressed.
3. Listening helps you plan future marketing communications
Instead of launching right into an expensive campaign, you can listen first to determine which offers and promotions might drive more sales. And, you can learn which types of communications strategies build buzz online. Use social media as an inexpensive “focus group” to inform your communications planning.
How to be a better listener
While there are numerous paid options for social media listening, you may want to start with the free tools that are available to you. Popular choices include Google Alerts, Twitter Search, Technorati Blog Search, YouTube Search, Facebook Search, Monitter and TweetBeep. You can search keywords on any social network to see what people are discussing around that topic. You can also do a simple web search, filtering by geographical location if you are a local or regional business. Think of terms your target audience might use, such as “need to hire a financial planner” or “want to build a sundeck.”
If you’ve got the cash to spend, consider a paid listening solution such as Vocus or Radian 6. These platforms can handle large volumes of conversations and present you with reports on mentions, sentiment and more.
What to do with what you’ve “heard”
Once you’ve been listening for a while, you’ll notice that the information generally falls into three categories. Sometimes you may hear complaints or negative comments about your products – and you’ll want to respond and fix the situation as quickly as possible, of course!
Often, people talk about features they’d like to see in the next version of your product. This is your cue to see if the features are realistic and act accordingly.
The best conversations to hear are those singing your praises. Customers may talk about their favorite features or new ways they are using your products that you haven’t thought of before. As I mentioned above, take notes and include these valuable assets in your future marketing promotions.
Since listening is so easy, and can even be totally free, there’s no reason not to include it in your social media strategy. If you don’t listen to your customers online, you could be missing opportunities for connecting with your customers and smoothing over bad customer experiences. After all, if you don’t listen to your customers, your competitors might!
Image courtesy of jamesnathan.com
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