The Benefits of Real-Time Social Listening

What you post on social media is only half the story – if that. True, every post has the potential to attract customers to your brand. But you shouldn’t restrict your efforts of attracting a following online to posting – rather, treating social media like the dynamic market research tool it is, makes for a far better strategy. 

By tuning into your what target audience is saying online, you can gain actionable and potentially game-changing insights into the very people you’re most interested in. This tactic is called social listening.

In this article, we’ll list the key benefits of real-time social listening – and why a social media listening platform is fundamental to realizing those benefits. 

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• Elevate your customer care
• Gain a competitive edge 
• Boost your lead generation efforts
• Inspire your content creation process
• Discover influencers that fit your brand 
• Making Social Listening Fit

Elevate your customer care 

There’s a significant cross-over between customer care and social media, with 80% of consumers using online platforms to engage with brands. 

Omni-channel customer support is the new normal. While most brands offer customer service using agents or through bots on their websites, it’s inevitable that social channels will be the more obvious choice for many. 

And why not? Social media feels far more direct. It’s a lot more convenient, too, since most of us spend a significant amount of time each day on social media. Gartner found that 96% of customers who experienced high-effort customer service were later disloyal to that brand. Simplicity, convenience, quick responses, and a clear understanding of the problem are vital, but how do you offer that if you’re only checking in on your mentions some of the time? You’ve got to be listening in real-time.

Social listening takes you beyond the most obvious queries from followers. From comments on your posts to indirect, untagged mentions of your brand, products, and services, social listening makes it possible for you to go above and beyond in terms of customer service and community management. It enables interactions with customers and prospects that may never have happened otherwise. 

Gain a competitive edge 

So many conversations take place on social media that aren’t directly about your brand but are nonetheless heavily relevant to you. An example could be a Tweet or LinkedIn post that creates an opportunity for meaningful interactions with customers or prospects.

Maybe someone is venting their frustrations with one of your direct competitors, or simply complaining about the very pain point your product or service is designed to resolve. Finding those opportunities to join conversations makes for overwhelmingly positive and memorable first impressions with leads and gives you a far more proactive presence on social media. If you’ve got the right social listening tools to witness those posts as they are posted, you’ll gain a real edge over your competitors.

Social listening is a fundamental part of competitive research – it’ll reveal where your competitors are performing well, what their customers’ frustrations are, and what angles their own social media strategies are taking. The more information you can gather, and the sooner you can get it, the more competitive your business will become.

With keyword tracking, sentiment analysis, and round-the-clock insight into share of voice, you can broaden your awareness beyond your corporate account’s audience, and realize a much higher ROI from your campaigns.

Boost your lead generation efforts 

It’s clear that social listening will give you a lot of insights into your existing customer base – your core following who interact with your brand, and its social channels, more than anyone else. 

But social listening also targets people who are currently beyond that scope – people who are not following you, but are in need of what your brand has to offer. Social media provides you with a platform that enables you to find leads on your own rather than waiting for them to discover your brand. By using social listening tools and joining relevant conversations online, you can attract more quality leads to your brand that are likely to convert. Simply by responding to a Tweet, or commenting on someone’s LinkedIn post, you’ll put your brand on their radar. This will enable a far more personal, meaningful first point of contact than the alternatives. 

Inspire your content creation process

We all have moments of writer’s block and feeling uninspired from time to time. However, social listening can provide you with valuable insights to spark creativity and rejuvenate your content. Social listening gives you constant insight into the conversations that get your audience interested, engaged, and inspired. In that way, content creation doesn’t need to feel like second-guessing what your audience wants; it can be a concrete process informed by social analytics and insights.  

Social listening will also help you stay on top of trends, so you can join in the hype before it’s over. 

Discover influencers that fit your brand

Chances are, you know the big names in your industry – a handful of prominent names that have risen through the ranks on social media to represent major B2B influencers. They hold a lot of sway, and it’s no surprise that B2B influencer marketing is now starting to mirror its billion-dollar B2C counterpart. 

But those major B2B influencers are only the tip of the iceberg. For the B2B world, there’s an incredible amount of untapped potential tied up with micro-influencers – individuals with smaller followings. Why? Because those ‘small’ followings are highly concentrated on whatever niche the micro-influencer has made their name in. So, what they lack in quantity they more than make up for in the quality leads they send your way. 

Without tapping into B2B influencer marketing, your insights are largely limited to your own channels and your own followers. Social listening can help you identify influencers that are the best fit for your brand, allowing you to capture the interest of a wider, but relevant, audience.

Making Social Listening Fit

Social listening offers an array of benefits from market research, competitive analysis, content creation, lead generation and, in a much broader sense, honing your brand’s voice and impact on social media. These channels are one-stop shops for so many core insights into the very people you want to get to know, and social listening is the way to gather that information at scale. 

With a robust and scalable, social media management platform, you’ll be able to track social media brand mentions, keywords, sentiment, share of voice, and keep a tight grip on community management – without all that lengthy back-and-forth, manual searching, and hours of scrolling. 

If you’re interested in learning more about social listening, contact us today.