Emerald Frog Marketing is celebrating its 5 year anniversary! For five weeks, we are posting five blogs posts containing five top tips. Here’s our third instalment:
If your brand is serious about using social media to build awareness, raise its profile and ultimately increase revenue, then social listening should definitely be part of your overall strategy. Social listening means paying attention to what your customers are saying, outside of direct engagement with you as well as in. It is vital for effective use of social media, and here are 5 reasons why:
Reputation. Social listening ensures your business isn’t the online equivalent of ‘that’ person in the office who loves the sound of their own voice, but never takes time to listen to what anyone else has to say! Of course you should use your networks to promote, but that shouldn’t be all you ever do. A brand that listens and responds to its existing clients is always attractive to new ones.
Customer Service & PR. Nobody likes complaints, but nobody likes to be ignored either. If you spot a complaint on your feed, never ignore it. Engage with the client and work to turn it into a positive rather than filling your feed with new, unrelated content. Simple things such as wishing someone a happy birthday or congratulating them on good news they’ve shared all work to ‘humanise’ your brand making it more appealing to potential customers. Aim to be responsive rather than simply promotional.
Insight. By paying attention to what people are saying about your brand, you gain a real-time insight as to where your business sits amongst its competitors, you can assess what strategies are working well and areas where there is room for improvement.
Product Development. Listening to what people are saying about your product can help identify problems, highlight what works well for you and can even turn up new ideas that you might not have thought of otherwise.
Sales Opportunities. By keeping an eye on your network, you can be first to spot an opportunity, for example somebody tweeting ‘Can anyone recommend…’ – if yours is the first brand to step in and offer advice, backed up with a timeline full of great customer service, you’ll be hard to resist!
Is social listening part of your social media strategy? If not, talk to us about how to start making sure it is!
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