Social Media is one of the fastest growing market in world. It has grown very fast more than any other vertical in world infact faster than internet itself., infact by one of study it is stated that by July 2018, 55% of world’s population i.e. approx. 4.2 billion people has internet accessibility. If we believe to studies that by 2017 more than 80% of US population is on Social media platforms and they having social media profiles and approx. 3.4 billion people globally.
Social Media marketing is one of best techniques in digital marketing to boost your products and services on Social Media channels like Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin, Instagram, Quora and other relevant and important platforms. It is one of the best and easy way to get traffic and awareness from a mass audience with less investment.
Social Media listening is knowing all about a company, a person or a brand or a product what their competitors talking over social media. Being an independent and open platform to share views, to express thought and to talk about any brand or person with all freedom makes internet a very complex and unstructured platform. Listening to these unstructured data and to organize in an efficient way and to define goals for a social media. There are several modes to gain insights for social media with the help of different softwares and tools to gather information from different social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and motivating customers to suggest new product or services of their choices.
Let’s suppose that you run a tea stall and you sourcing milk from two different vendors i.e. one supplies from a factory and other supplies from a dairy farm. A customer comes on Wednesday and orders a bunch of tea for their staff and then comes back and complaints about the taste and find it low in taste. You apologies and offered a refund. Friday, another customer comes in and ordered for his employees and find its amazing.
Next Wednesday, another customer came and orders for their employees. They complaint again about the taste and you again refunded them like you did last week. A similar trend continuous on for about a month long.
So, if you look at the both the issues case by case, you will be easily able to write them off as one time issues. You will quickly became aware of the problem and solve it on the spot. We call it Monitoring.
But after a month long, if you analyse that the problems are coming on Wednesday only, you will find a trend developing. You will find something fishy and suspicious and something wrong with the Milk vendor coming on Wednesday. You go to the vendor and and tell that there is something wrong with the milk . They will then check it and diagnose and rectify the issue and you will stop loosing money on refunds and also stop losing your customers and their complaints. That is we call it Social Listening.
Social media listening allows you to see things at a micro level. It will be a daily proactive to analyse and respond to the social media queries hundreds or thousands questions, queries and complaints. You need social media listening to see the bigger picture of your brand over social media platforms.
To gain feedback and queries regarding your brand , product and services.
Better advertising tricks and strategies for marketing campaigns.
To identify your brand engagement rate.
Better understanding of customer s and market and then improve customer service.
To prevent social media crises.
Social media Listening Tools:
Social media listening tools like Awario, Brand24, Mention, and such can help a lot with streamlining the process.