How to Leverage the Power of Listening
Like many marketing professionals, we consider ourselves business strategists but also—and often, more importantly—storytellers. We promote, we advertise, we engage, we connect.
But with all of these proactive words ascribed to our work, there’s one that’s too often left out: listening. Yet, it’s one of the most essential skills that marketers need to master.
Before we can connect people and brands, we need to understand them. One of the most underutilized resources for doing this in the 21st century is “social listening.”
This is a type of market research that you perform strictly on social media platforms. It consists of monitoring what real people are saying about your brand, across those platforms, in real time.
You can start by assessing public comments and posts that refer to your company (and its key players) across Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn, TikTok, YouTube, Snapchat, and Pinterest. Going further, you might want to see what people are saying about your competitors.
As social media platforms have expanded in the past two decades, they’ve also grown in popularity. Incoming generations increasingly grow up on these platforms, shifting everything from entertainment and socialization to business and education onto these channels. Suffice it to say, social listening has only gained importance.
So if you haven’t started looking for ways to track what people are saying in these public arenas, the big question is: Why?
You most likely already have a social media presence on at least a few of the top platforms. But tallying followers and getting them to “like” your posts isn’t the surest way to gauge what people really think of you, and it shouldn’t be the sum of your efforts. It’s also important to learn why people aren’t following you. Are they your fans, customers, allies—but unwilling to associate with you on social media? If they’re not saying great things about your brand, is there a specific reason that would be important to hear—and turn into another proactive opportunity?
There’s a lot of information that’s just out there for you to find—if you have the tools in place to pick it up, the resources to analyze, and the strategy to implement responses based on what you learn. If you’re not sure which approach would be the best for your company or budget, we’d be happy to make suggestions.
But no matter what, take our advice: If they’re talking about you, you should be listening.
