Engage in Social Listening for Your Customers

There are many good marketing tools available to elicit feedback from your customers. You can offer customer surveys or offer feedback opportunities on your social media. In most cases, the inquiry signifies that you care about your customer’s experience. It instigates trust. But what about when you can’t figure out what is going wrong or right with your marketing campaign? That is when you must engage in social listening for your customers. 

What is social listening? 

You could say that social listening is checking your social media sites for feedback, but that would be a limiting statement. Social listening is checking everything that you can for feedback. It is checking the news for mention of your company or products such as yours, checking social media sites for praise or criticism, and using this information to evaluate mistakes and cater an efficient response to criticism. It lets you know what is trending in your industry, and what your competition is doing correctly, or not.

When should you engage in social listening?

You should engage in social listening every day. In order to cater to the needs of your customer, you should be able to put out fires before they become infernos. It isn’t recommended that you glue yourself to whatever monitoring tools you choose. Instead, it should be part of your daily grind. You can make better marketing decisions when you understand the climate surrounding your business and your product. 

How do you engage in social listening? 

You can make social listening very complex, but it’s easier to get help from a social media or web monitoring service. Then you can do a little sleuthing on your own schedule.

Doing your own social listening without the help of a monitoring service can take up time. If you’re a busy entrepreneur, you may only have time to monitor your own social media website. That is always better than not monitoring. One nasty comment from a customer can reach many potential customers who visit your site to decide whether or not to do business with you. A polite response, removal of the comment, or an explanation can go a long way toward solving the issue. It may even get a subsequent complement about service from the person who complained. 

Some Fires Burn Themselves Out

One argument for using a social media or web monitoring tool is that you can gauge the size of the problem. Did a customer’s complaint reach anyone? Did your marketing campaign stir a public crisis, or did it offend three or four people who don’t have much influence? Sometimes, you have to ignore the problems that aren’t going to cause damage. True monitoring tools allow you to evaluate the reach of complaints. 

Why is social listening so important now?

The world is experiencing some pretty heavy crises right now, and emotions are definitely heightened. It is very easy to offend somebody innocently in this atmosphere, and you have to remedy those situations ASAP. The best way to do this is by early detection, so you can prevent significant long-term damage to your brand. Your best bet is social listening.