Social listening isn’t just monitoring or analyzing social media chatter. Monitoring just look for keywords or count the number of brand related hashtags. It makes sure you pick up on posts and comments that may hurt the brands reputation.
Listening goes far deeper than that. It looks to really understand and gain valuable insights into what customers and thinking, what they are feeling and ultimately what they are wanting from a brand like yours.
The conversations that marketing teams pick up from social listening can lead to product improvements and innovations, changes to how the brand relates to the market, how advertising is created, how content is created and shared, identifying and recruiting influencers with a lot of clout in your target market space and a host of other things.
Information is power. Here are some ways that the enterprise can uniquely leverage social listening with powerful platforms like NetBase to innovate, change and achieve their strategic market objectives.
- Combine Social Listening with Business Intelligence
It’s likely your enterprise already has mounds of data that’s relevant for marketing. They probably have stores of data from focus groups, surveys and reviews.
Using a platform like NetBase, your team can combine the data they get from social media and combine it with other data-sets you house to provide robust analysis. A platform like this can also do language analysis on both the social media chatter and transcripts from other data collection projects.
- Market Research
Listening to the customer has always been an axiom for successful businesses. In the old days, that meant having a conversation with your customer who walked into your general store on Main street and finding out the types of products he wanted to buy.
Social listening is basically the same idea, but at an exponentially bigger scale.
Social media platforms offer more free market research data than has existed ever before in the history of mankind. That sounds lofty, but it’s not at all an understatement.
Enterprises that aren’t collecting, analyzing and listening to the market using social media are missing out on a massive opportunity to understand what their market wants.
- Digital Advertising Targeting
Another great thing about social listening is that you can talk back. In times past, the vast majority of the communications from brands were one way.
They’d listen to a handful of people in a focus group or survey. Then the brands would turn around and put an ad spot on TV and talk back to millions.
Now its the other way around. Brands can listen to millions of people, and only talk back to the people they want to and decide what message that individual is going to get.
The targeting ability on social media is incredible. If someone is talking to their friends on Facebook about shopping around for a new car, they will instantly get car brands pepper them with ads.
Never in the history of mankind have we seen this kind of revolution in the marketing world. Many enterprises are still under-utilizing social media, which means there are opportunities galore for those who want to take advantage of it and get an edge on their competitors.
