The benefits of social media monitoring & listening: part 1

In our recent guest blog post by Trust Radius, A guide to social listening: your social media secret weapon, we looked at how to put together a social listening plan. Over the next couple of weeks, we will dive deeper into the purpose and benefits of social listening.

Social media is becoming one of the primary ways your audience talks to you. Are you listening?

Communicating with your tribe through social is hands down one of the best opportunities to improve your relationship with current and potential audiences and strengthen your brand.

In today’s social media driven world, keeping up with the new ways people reach out can be difficult for an individual or an organization to manage. And the data shows we as marketers aren’t doing enough in this area. In a 2016 report by Sprout Social, the average brand response rate on Twitter was 12 per cent and only nine per cent on Facebook.

These numbers represent a lot of missed opportunities to make a meaningful and lasting impact on your audience.

Listening is essential in understanding how your brand stories are being received. The number one reason you should invest time and resources into actively listening to the online conversation surrounding your organization is to gain insights into the values you share with your audience.

According to a 2014 study by Google and TNS, consumers or interested audiences “choose the brands that engage them on their passions and interests 42 per cent more often” than they do with organizations that merely urge them to buy the product advertised.

This same logic is inherently true for non-retail organizations as well. For example, to persuade people to your point of view, gain donations for a charitable cause or attract new employees, you need to connect with your audiences on your shared values.

Beyond listening to the online conversations directly related to your organization, it is important to pay attention to the conversations surrounding your industry. This means you need to listen for opportunities to connect with people who don’t yet realize that your brand and their passion are the same, or at least similar.

Once you have mapped your audience values with those of your brand, you can adapt your messages and marketing activities to reflect this more audience-centric approach to communications.

Next week, we’ll discuss how social media monitoring and listening helps you become more useful to your customers and what you can do to provide more value than competitors.