Successful brands usually use every interaction tool they can to learn about their customers. A basic social listening work flow will help you maximize your online communications efforts. Understanding the path that online listening takes will improve your brand health.
Start here when setting up your social listening campaigns
The steps are much like compiling a written report or multimedia presentation. However, this process in some ways works in reverse where your audience becomes your performers. With that in mind, the most important social listening step is probably number one.
Step 1 – Observation
This step becomes priority when first establishing your space online. However, you can never take your customers for granted. Their needs may change at any given time, so pay attention to what they say and how or where they say it. Context such as comparison of your brand against others also matters.
Step 2 – Note taking
Keep a record of what your customers and target audience says, especially when it comes to their likes and dislikes. It’s almost like formulating a survey without your followers every knowing that they are taking a survey. It can be done just by simply storing the information you observe of people who voluntarily view, like, share or comment on your pages.
Step 3 – Planning
After you have engaged in several conversations with people on both your pages and groups and other brand’s pages and groups, you can start the planning.
Create series of posts that include the kind of content your audience would want. This might vary according to the social network you are on, but it could involve providing them the following: videos, blog posts, tutorials, quotes and memes, infographic data, and more.
Step 4 – Execution
If you already have quite a few viewers, take any chance you can to have an online conversation with them. What is more, continue to provide them the of facts, jokes, data or presentations they would expect you to deliver on a regular basis. If your audience becomes too large, you may then divide them into smaller groups and continue to meet the personalized needs of these subgroups.
Step 5 – Revision
Social media followers sometimes can be fickle. What matters to them one day may not matter the next. Just take a day or two to view trending hashtags on Twitter, and you will understand the need to frequently revise your ads, posts and other content.
Repeat steps one through five often and seek help when necessary.
When you keep learning about your audience, they will develop a trust in you. However, you also may need to take additional steps to build your relationship with them before they commit to buying. One thing you might need besides offering them a ton of free products is confidence.
If you speak to your audience in authority on subjects that matter to them, it will turn your leads into prospects. This will then cause your profits to soar.
However, you may not have all the tools or the time to execute social listening as in-depth as you would like. Therefore, you may want to consider deploying a solution such as what Netbase provides. This company offers a mixture of both social listening and online monitoring tools.
1 Comment
Great post I must say thanks for the information. Social Listening is definitely a sticky subject. However, is still among the leading topics of our time. I appreciate your post and look forward to more.