The Power of Social Media Listening: Why Brands Need to Pay Attention

Listen more, talk less. This golden nugget is a staple in sales and business books. However, while salesmen and business people have mastered the art of listening, brands are slow to do so especially in the modern age—that’s set to change with social media listening.

Social listening refers to the act of monitoring the conversations of your customers and target audience on social media. This includes monitoring:

Direct and indirect brand mentions (e.g. tags, mentions)
Keywords
Content topics
Primary, secondary, and tertiary competitors
Industries

Social listening does more than just collecting raw data. It analyzes the data to give brands valuable insights that allow them to make informed decisions to improve business performance.

Why Does It Matter for Brands?

If you don’t listen to your customers, you won’t know what they want. Just like in the real world, a lack of knowledge leads to guesswork and approximations. Sure, you might get lucky. But, it’s not worth hypothesizing the feelings of your customers—and upsetting them—when you can just listen.

Social listening tells you what your customers are saying, why they’re feeling that way, and how you can benefit from the situation. This awareness is invaluable in planning future campaigns, improving your marketing message, launching new products and services, and so on. In short, the better you understand your customers, the more likely it is for your brand to succeed.

1. Happier Customers

Customers who feel appreciated are happy customers. 86% of customers are willing to pay higher prices for brands with better customer experiences. The same research also shows 49% of customers are more likely to make a purchase whenever they receive personalized journeys in the buying cycle. These stats prove listening to your customers is a massive boon to sales and revenue.

The key to successful social listening is to craft thoughtful, personalized responses to your customers. Don’t just hit them with automated Twitter replies. Be genuine. Put effort into your replies and try to solve their problems. That is what people want from brands and if you can do it well, don’t be surprised when your team is overwhelmed with leads sooner or later.

2. Better Brand Reputation Management

There’ll be a point in time where your brand receives negative PR. It may not be entirely your fault, but what’s more crucial is how to recover from bad press. This is where social listening plays a starring role.

By assessing the events causing the bad PR, you can use social listening to determine how it has impacted your brand reputation. Have you lost followers? Is the context of your brand mentions negative? Have you been linked in dismissive articles on news sites?

An example of setting up alerts in Lucidya

With this information, you can craft a strategy to tackle the problem and restore your brand’s reputation. If you employed social listening earlier, you won’t even need to handle bad press since you’ll notice unhappy customers before a crisis boils.

3. Improved Content Marketing Results

Social media is a resource with tons of golden opportunities to generate leads and sales. That said, it’s a mistake to treat it as a sales channel. People go on social media to destress, have fun, engage with attractive content—how do you know what your target audience is using social media for?

Social listening solves that problem. With it, you can identify the content your customers love, all the way from popular topics to the type of content (e.g. videos, pictures, GIFs) that generates the most interest. This knowledge allows you to create laser-targeted, engaging content that will improve your content marketing results in the long-run.

4. Successful Influencer Marketing

Monitoring online conversations in your industry gives you an idea of who the top influencers are. It’s important to connect with these influencers since they’re essentially the voice of the market, the people who your customers identify the most with.

A social listening tool like Lucidya shows you the influencers with the biggest impact in your market. From there, you can analyze the influencers further to know if they’re the right fit for your brand. Some influencers may be divisive while others may not have enough star power—a social media listening tool helps you find the perfect fit for influencer marketing campaigns.

Obviously, it will take time and effort to find the right influencers. With Lucidya, you can create alerts to get notified of potential influencers that match your brand profile so you spend less time searching and focus more on important work.

How Lucidya Helps Brands Listen to Important Customer Conversations

Lucidya is an AI-powered social media listening tool that empowers companies operating in Arabic-speaking countries with in-depth, never-before-seen customer insights. With Lucidya, businesses can build profitable products, boost customer satisfaction, execute successful campaigns, and close more sales thanks to our extensive list of social media listening features.

Ready to listen to your most valued customers?