Why does social listening matter for your brand in 2024?
Social listening is a popular marketing buzzword that you hear a lot these days – and for a good reason. Consumer insights are at the heart of every successful marketing strategy. Thus, it is essential to understand your target audience, your market, and the essence of your brand to optimise your marketing and customer engagement strategies.
The most effective way to obtain these insights is through social listening. Social Listening involves a conversation of a brand or a company online on a social media platform. The brand or company is aware of this exchange of ideas is social listening. Out of the contents of this conversation, a brand or company can make observations about their brand awareness and brand image.
While this was something that was only done through surveys and satisfaction leaflets, now the conversation and expression of brand perception have majorly moved online. This has helped brands a lot as tracking customer perception has never been this easier.
While it has been convenient for brands just to search up their name and hop into social media conversations and take a look at what’s happening, it gets much more nuanced than that. Nowadays, increasing the accountability of brands and companies means that they simply cannot get away with acting nice online.
Business malpractices and other under the table deals that the brand desperately wants to be pushed under the rug gets pushed to the forefront by activist personalities and organizations formed entirely online.
It has also become an essential part of the PR department as they have to know about the public’s opinion and maintain a good relationship with them. In the end, it all boils down to why does a company need to do social listening in this day and age?
7 reasons why social listening matters for brand in 2023
Basic business sustenance
For some, social listening has become necessary as some primary company functions like marketing. With the world moving online at a brisk pace, a company simply cannot get away with not knowing the netizens’ opinions about the company.
Ergo, it can be said that social listening is an additional thing to keep up with the times.
Increased importance of research and data
Recent times have shown a trend where data has gained more importance than ever. As more and more people are coming online, the need to research and analyse data. Using this data, one can easily determine customer brand perception and demand and base their business strategies on it.
Extensive data management has also been used to meet stakeholder expectations, and social listening helps in that aspect too. Social listening is a great tool to find raw data from social media platforms to form the basis of research and further analysis.
Increasing power of consumer
There has been increased accountability and overall more restrictions on the functioning of companies in recent times. But the same cannot be said for the consumer. On the flip side, the consumers have enjoyed more rights and freedoms nowadays as society’s focus has shifted to empowering the consumer.
This advancement has made the companies even more cautious in their communication and overall approach of running a customer. A small complaint on a social media website could lead to catastrophic repercussions. So, social listening aids in finding the overall mood of the brand online in the minds of the customer online at a given period of time.
Message adjustment to meet with the times
One of the reasons that social listening has gained so much is when brands don’t do it correctly. The tone-deaf marketing messages sent out by some brands make them the corporate world’s laughing stock and get clowned upon on social media.
To avoid being embarrassed in an environment more competitive than ever, brands must be aware of the social climate and deliver their messages in accordance with it.
Increased Customer expectations
With customers having more power, they demand more as well. Gone are the days when customers would gobble up the newest and shiniest products without question. Nowadays, they want brands to be based on their own needs and desires, and they come out and complain if it is not.
These needs and expectations can easily be identified if social listening is done in advance to product development and design phases. Some brands swiftly modify their products based on trends on social media, and some even go far as making entirely new products based on this.
Basic business sustenance
Nowadays, there is a constant need for performance evaluation and appraisal at every step of the business process. So, it’s natural for brands to be aware of social media talks about them and work on the responses.
While it is uncommon for basing their entire performance evaluation on social media, it also plays a crucial role in improving the business.
Increased brand loyalty
Emphasis on brand loyalty is not a new thing, but doing it through social media is. Rewarding and compensating repeated purchases from customers online has become the hallmark of companies to reward their consumers without any physical contact. This is a win-win for both parties as customers also like to get rewarded without human hurdles in receiving it.
Social listening helps identify the singling out opinions of loyal customers and work out in areas these customers have been vocal about.
Conclusion
Social listening may be looked at as eavesdropping on social media and intrusive to the feedback experience. But, it is much more than that. Social listening can also be part of the conversation rather than purely listening and gathering data.
Its importance has far-reaching and extends beyond business too. Businesses like Locobuzz have taken up the task of social listening for other companies and aid in collecting priceless data, which helps companies succeed in a competitive online hemisphere…
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