Social Listening Will Help Your Business Succeed: Here’s Why You Need to Start Doing It Now

Our digital marketing experts recognize that social listening is essential for every business.

In order to succeed in today’s marketplace, you need to make sure you let the customer know they are being heard.  And based on that, you need to be able to take their constructive criticism and use it to improve the overall experience.  This is where social listening comes into play. 

What Is Social Listening?

Social listening often gets confused with social monitoring.  Social listening is a two-part process by which businesses collect information regarding what customers are saying about them on social media, and then apply that knowledge to their overall strategy.

Why Is Social Listening Important?

Social monitoring isn’t enough to keep your business strategy strong.  We’re here to tell you that social listening is important, for the following reasons:

• Customer engagement. Customer engagement has always been important, but its importance is at an all-time high in this largely online era.  Social listening allows you to take the customers’ feedback and put it into action to improve your business strategy.  When a customer makes a direct impact on your business through social media, it adds value to their experience and strengthens your relationship with them.
• Manage PR crises before they happen. No matter how smoothly you run your business, you will come across a dissatisfied customer once in a while.  While you can’t necessarily control a customer’s opinion of your brand, you can monitor potential bad PR situations before they get out of hand.  By engaging in social listening, you’ll be able to monitor the sentiment behind your posts and overall strategy.  If that sentiment is negative across the board, you’ll have the opportunity to get ahead of the game and make changes right away, all because you did the proper research beforehand.
• Discover new sales leads. Our experts have seen time and again that customers don’t like when you attempt to sell to them right away without properly identifying their problems and solving them.  Social listening allows you to see what’s working across your business and the rest of the industry so you can go into your next prospect meeting with knowledge of what the customer needs.  Reach out, make a connection and establish a relationship, and then eventually nurture that relationship into a sales deal.

At GEM Corp, we help businesses develop their social listening strategy and make long-term decisions based on relevant information.  Contact us today at (866) GEM-CORP, and our social media team will get right to work!