Social listening is powerful new concept that can be leveraged in every function of the organization. It’s not just a marketing concept where a company is promoting their brand. It’s about really connecting with your target market in a personal way, and that can be leveraged in powerful ways in any enterprise.
Social listening is really about paying attention to your customers. The data on what people are saying about any given brand on social media is all out there for you to grab and analyze.
Social Influencers
As you dig into your target market, you’ll find that there will be certain people who have emerged as influencers in that market. They tend to have a lot of followers and their opinions are valued and tend to spread virally.
Those are the people you want to listen more carefully to. In fact, many brands reach out to these influencers deliberately, and it’s not just to get them to promote their products. In fact, just trying to get influencers to sell for you can backfire.
How To Approach Influencers
If you want to build a relationship with influencers, it’s no different than how you would build a relationship with anyone else. Start by getting to know them. That means you have to watch and read their content. You have to value what they say.
Then you have to add value to them. That doesn’t mean you send them stuff or money. That comes later.
You want to start engaging them in a conversation with them and their audience. It needs to be personable and authentic. Once a dialog has started and you’ve built a level of trust and rapport, then you can start looking for opportunities to take it to the next level.
There is no formula to this and no one can prescribe one to do this. That being said, you can consider things like sending them free products to review.
The caveat is, if you do this with most social media influencers, they will be honest. That is how they became a trusted influencer with their audience. In other word, they’re not going to give you a good review just because you gave it to them for free.
That means you should pick a product that you know they will love. Be strategic about the products you send them to review and know exactly how they’re going to review it before sending it.
You can also send them a new product, knowing there will be glitches that need to be fixed. Why would you do this on purpose?
If you send them a product that’s not fulling developed yet, the influencers will likely have recommendations on how to tweak it. They are essentially helping you with product design.
You in turn take those recommendations seriously and build it into your product. Then you send them the product with the suggested improvements for the influencers to review again. That is true social listening and your brand will gain huge level of credibility, trust and authenticity with their audience.
How to Measure Impact
Although this strategy is about authenticity and human connection, you’re still running a business. That means you need to measure the outcomes of your efforts, even in social listening.
That’s where a platform like NetBase comes in. Not only can it help you identify who the influencers are, it will also help you measure the impact of your efforts to reach out and develop relationships with them and their audience. True social listening is a powerful way to connect to your target market, develop products and look for new opportunities. And just like in the physical world, you want to listen to some people more than others.
