4.48 billion people use social media around the world, which means that about 57% of the world’s population is on social stuff and is probably looking for your brand.
So why not use this opportunity to generate quality leads and improve your customer service?
Social listening is a great way to find relevant social media leads. It lets you follow trending topics and industry news and identify and connect with potential customers.
Times like the coronavirus pandemic have shown that social listening is indeed an invaluable source of insight for PR and digital marketing professionals. And yet, a Gartner survey indicated that just over 51% of marketing leaders use it worldwide.
That is an underwhelming percentage, considering the numerous and potentially transformative benefits of social listening to businesses of any niche and size.
What Is Social Listening?
Social listening is all about tracking your social media platforms to get references and interactions related to your brand. You then analyze them for insight to find action opportunities.
It is a two-step process:
Step 1: It involves monitoring social media channels to learn about your brand, competitors, products, and keywords related to your business.
Step 2: It involves analyzing the information about ways to put what you learn into practice. It can be as small as responding to a happy customer or as big as changing the positioning of your entire brand.
At first glance, social listening may sound like social media monitoring – but the two concepts differ in meaningful ways.
Simply put, social media monitoring looks at metrics such as:
- Brand mention
- Relevant stage
- Competitor mentions
- Industry trends
… and collect data on those metrics. Social media monitoring is excellent for things like monitoring A/B testing campaigns or ROI.
When you take the right action in response to the data you collect, you begin the process of social listening. Social media monitoring looks at metrics like the number of referrals and engagement rate; Social Listening looks beyond the numbers to consider the specifics behind the data.
It helps you understand how people feel about you and your competitors. It is not just counting the number of times your brand is mentioned.
This “online vibe” is also known as a social media sensation. Therefore, keeping an eye on social media sentiment is an integral part of social media listening.
Understanding how people feel about your company and brand helps you keep your marketing and product development efforts on track. It also allows you to respond to positive or negative posts quickly.
The key thing to understand is that social listening looks back and forth. It’s about analyzing the information you’ve gathered and using it to guide your strategy and your day-to-day operations.
Tips to Generate Leads Via Social Listening
1. Get to Know Your Buyer Persona
The first step to approaching the right lead is knowing who they are. You can filter relevant online conversations and identify your ideal client’s demographics, interests, and behaviors with social listening.
With several tools, you can monitor references from 100 million online sources to understand your customers’ interests, behavior, and the types of content they use.
With Social Listening, you can also:
Get the behind-the-scenes experience of online conversations: You can understand the feel of online conversations, even if they are in a different language. This information will help you build a comprehensive picture of your buyer persona.
Explore what your direct competitor’s audience is talking about: It’s a great exercise to take an in-depth look at the profiles of the people they’re connecting with so that you can get a clear picture of your lead pool.
Better understand your content preferences and language style: This will help you create tailored content with the right tone.
2. Manage crises
Engagement is good – but only if it comes with a positive social sentiment. Social listening allows you to track that feeling in real time. This way, you can see which posts are doing well for your brand and which ones aren’t.
If you are experiencing a lot of positive results, look for the reasons behind them. Your customers share a lot of helpful information about what they like and don’t like. These lessons can help guide your strategy across all channels.
Social listening helps you deal with PR disasters before they get out of hand. If feelings are low, review the social response to lessons that may prevent similar misconceptions in the future.
If the sentiment is off, seek out the cause and make changes immediately by pulling a problem post or apologizing for the insensitive tweet.
A great example of this comes from Nike. In 2019, they found their brand amid controversy when Duke basketball player Zion Williamson’s Nike shoe exploded in the middle of a game.
The game was broadcasted on national TV. So when it happened, several influencers and celebrities took to Twitter to express their concern for the player and cast some shade at Nike.
Nike’s social media team wasted no time jumping on the grenade. He took the time to respond to tweets from concerned customers, and his PR team issued a statement the next day wishing Wilson the best and pledging to investigate the matter.
They also reached out to Wilson himself and offered him an advertising deal. Goodwill, commitment, and humility allowed Nike to rise above the situation.
3. Track Competitors
Social listening is more than just understanding what people say about you. You also need to know what they say about your competitors. It gives you important insight into where you fit into the market.
You will also need to know in real-time what your competitors are aiming for. For example, are they launching new products? Are they developing new marketing campaigns?
Social listening allows you to become aware of these new opportunities and threats, so you can plan and react accordingly.
Conversations like these are an excellent opportunity to share helpful content and highlight your unique selling proposition. The aim here is not to eliminate your competition but to help.
Even in cases where you do not sell, you may learn valuable information such as sales objections or services offered by a competitor that you do not. Such an act of answering shows that you are actively listening and represent a cheerful voice in your industry.
4. Warm Up Your List of Leads And Prospects
Finally, don’t neglect the importance of building brief contact points with your prospects and leads on social media.
Not everything needs to go for “hard sell.” Instead, “liking” and sharing your target audience’s content can do the trick. Moreover, doing so helps sow the seeds of customer loyalty as you stand out from competitors who aren’t giving their leads the time of day.
There is a reason why so many sales reps rely on social media for account-based marketing. Of course, any engagement with your audience is an advantage: Before hitting someone off with a sales call or email, consider how you might test the waters of your conversation with a brief “like” or comment.
And with that, we end our list!
Conclusion
There is a quote from Epictetus that summarizes this article perfectly: “We have two ears and one mouth so we can hear twice as much as we speak.”
Keep this in mind when creating your social listening lead-generation strategy. With all this information on social listening, all you have to do is choose the right tool and grow your business straight away with the help of media intelligence. For more tips, you can contact us. Our social listening experts are here to guide you for FREE. Call now!