Are You Social Listening?
As a small business owner, you know how important it is to listen to your audience. However, the old adage, “the customer is always right,” will only take you so far. It’s imperative that you keep your ears, or eyes, open to what is going on in the business world that you move in. One of the best ways to do this is to practice social listening.
What is Social Listening?
Social listening is researching, watching, and tracking trends, conversations, mentions, and even hashtags relating to your business, products, and services. This is a two-part practice.
On ALL, yes I said ALL, of the social media platforms you choose to use, you need to keep an eye on mentions of your product or service, what your competitors are talking about, any keywords or phrases relating to your business, and watch for new movements with hashtags.
Once you get a solid volume of information, you can start analyzing it. Grouping the information into categories can help you shuffle what you found useful and what won’t serve you. These will help you to create a functional action plan to create a better environment for your audience.
We like to use just 3 categories: Change, Toss, and Future.
The Change category reveals an area where we need to make immediate changes to better understand your audience and their needs.
The Toss category is self-explanatory. Either we are already implementing a strategy that relates or it is irrelevant.
The Future category is one of our favorites. We know that running a business is like trying to herd cats. Things are happening all over the place at all times. We are focusing on what is in front of us while keeping our eyes on the future. This category tends to be the longest and it also offers wild inspiration on how we can grow and be better.
A simple google search will reveal that there are a lot of social listening tools out there. If you have the resources, finding and using one will significantly boost your understanding of not just your audience, but also your business. If you are wanting to take a stab at doing this organically, just keep in mind these key practices:
Use a buyer persona to best understand your audience and what they need from your service or product. If you need more info on understanding your audience, check out an earlier blog: knowyouraudience
Decide what you are listening for and analyze accordingly. There are endless amounts of data you can collect, and it will feel like drinking from a fire hose if you don’t pare it down to specifics. Use keywords to help you determine exactly what you are looking for. You can do this as many times as you like, just do it piece by piece.
You are going beyond social monitoring. You are not just collecting data, you are collecting with the intent to use this data to “hear” what's being talked about and make necessary changes to better understand how your services or products will meet the needs of your clients and audience.
Flywheel Marketing only shares best practices that we use ourselves. If you are a small business looking for an agency to take care of your social media marketing needs, click the link below for a free evaluation.
