“Seek first to understand, then to be understood”, Stephen Covey said. A crisp message, yet often ignored by organizations. It conveys that consumer experiences and their satisfaction to run successful businesses is essential, if not a necessity.

Social media, however, updates us on the live stream of conversations that happen on various consumer forums and groups. And, not just that, it offers a plethora of tools that let you do this for free.

So, what is social media listening?

Social media listening is keeping track of conversations, in the form of words or phrases about your brands. The information so obtained can be used to connect with your audience. The connect can come from creating suitable content, providing assistance with their problems or curating new products for them, basis their needs. It is not about tracking #hashtags, @mentions, likes and comments on your social media platforms, websites or mobile apps. As a matter of fact, if that is all that you are paying attention to, you are at fault. This is because you are missing out on a lot of people who are talking about your Brand or your product.

But, how is social listening different from social monitoring? In essence, monitoring includes collection and dumping of data. Listening, on the other hand, is about data interpretation to derive useful patterns to better cater to your audience.

This analogy from Dan can help in understanding the difference better:

Having understood it, how can brands benefit from social media listening?

Listening is an essential part of the social media world and it can yield ample benefits for a brand. The key parameters to track are volume, conversation subjects, media usage, sentiments, and influence. These can lead to actionable insights, which if played smartly with, can create new opportunities for your customers.

Apurva Chamaria, HCL technologies, talks about how HCL is listening to not just its present customers, but also, prospective customers on social media.

Hence, how to plan your social listening strategy?

The first step is to figure out your goals. Like most social media activities, having a goal in place will help in the development of a razor sharp strategy. So what is it that you expect social listening to do for your brand?

Do you want to:

#1: Solve problems by generating leads
Customers’ needs keep evolving over time. To find new business opportunities that solve customer’s problems using keywords is what the brand needs to focus on.

What can your brand do? Identify customers and their pain points by monitoring “(Competitor’s brand name)”, “what (competitor’s brand name) can’t”. Once you the set of customers demanding some kind of facility, reach out to them. Ask them their expectations from a product and in turn, communicate how your product can add value.

#2: Attract Potential Customers
There is always a set of potential customers in all product categories. Social listening provides an easy way to reach them.

What can your brand do? First of all, research on what kind of keywords people might use while talking about your product across various forums and groups. Having recognized them, join these forums and be a part of the conversations that your product or brand is a part of. Follow-up to see how many prospects have shown interest in trying your products. Send them personal mailers to get them started.

#3: Identify Influencers
In the present age, word of mouth and peer recommendations are more valuable to customers. So, if my friend recommends a brand, there is a high probability that I’ll consider buying it.

What can your brand do? As soon as a new product is being launched, track who all are sharing the title of your press release. This is your pool of influencers. The next step is to start engaging with them to build long-term relationships and brand loyalty. You could also reward your top influencers or advocates with special offers. Remember, a brand’s biggest tool is its satisfied customers.

Another way to do this is to find out who mentions your brand or your competitor’s brand by their followers’ density.

#4: Discover Where Your Community Hangs Out
Social listening assists you in knowing what all platforms are your audience present- Facebook, Quora, twitter etc. Further, you also get a hint of the percentage of your audience engaged with a particular platform.

What can your brand do? All you need to do is keep tracking the conversations, and whilst the iron is hot; join in.

#5: Improve Customer Care
A recent survey by Oracle found that about 43% of the customers engage with a brand on social media to get answers to their queries. In addition, 31% of them want to engage directly with product experts. Thus, a brand can ensure that no customer complaint goes unanswered and spot positive and negative feedback.

What can your brand do?  Monitor your brand name with and without the @ symbol (because a lot of people forget to add the @ symbol when communicating on Twitter). Also, track common auto-correct misspellings for your brand name and monitor your website mentions (for example, www.yourbrand.com).
The following is an example of how the brand Zappos pitched in a conversation about it, and within no time pitched in to join the conversation.

#6: Get instant Feedback on Product design and quality, hence manage your presence
Social listening is the key to identify issues in your product and continually improve.Use mentions like this one to address issues with your product.

What can your brand do? Trace your brand name’s mention to trace a consumer complaint reflecting a fault in the product or a bug in the software.Pass it on to your development team. Ask them to resolve it as quickly as possible. Meanwhile, respond directly to your customer to communicate that the issue is being looked upon from your end.

So, who is already in the game?

While most of the brands are still new to the world of social media listening, a few others have already garnered it to up their ante. A few praiseworthy examples of brands trying to use social listening to their advantage are as follows:

1. HP: The company decided to ask their customers what content they wanted to be “fed”. Regular calls from the company are one thing that the consumers didn’t want. One time content was their choice. Hence, HP created their own online magazine, Hpmatters.com, where customers could turn to once a month to get their dose of content.
2. H&M: The company ran 4 campaigns to target different geographical markets. It analyzed the impact of different regions in terms of the responses from people of different cultures and languages.
3. DELL: In their online community ‘Idea Storm ‘customers were invited to share ideas about product improvements. Today, there are 550 different ideas from this community that Dell has implemented.
4. CISCO:  Tracked ongoing topics, trends, and sentiment to support short-term listening goals such as a launching a new business initiative. Some examples are its sponsorship of the summer Olympics, or its annual trade show, Cisco Live.

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