We’re all looking for easy ways to gain insights about our customers. Surveys, focus groups, and research projects all yield valuable feedback, but who has the time and resources?
One easy method you can use to learn a great deal with little effort is social listening.
Social listening means reading conversations online to learn about your target audience. For example, you might “listen in” on conversations on Facebook, online forums, or in the comments section of a video. Then, analyze the data to discover trends and patterns.
What You Can Learn from Social Listening
Social listening helps you understand how people feel about your brand and products. You can monitor your reputation and learn what your audience loves about you so you can play to these strengths. This allows them to discover what they truly enjoy about your products or areas they think need improvement.
Social listening can reveal how your audience feels about your competitors. If you find a point of dissatisfaction or gap where they’re not serving the market, this is an opportunity.
Monitoring online discussions can also teach you about your audience’s interests, passions, and pain points. This data helps create a customer profile and targeting.
Start with a Goal
While you can discover a great deal through keyword searching and following conversations, start with a clear goal. Identify what specific information or insights you’d like to uncover. This helps you choose the right keywords to search for and places to find information.
For example, discovering your audience’s biggest pain points would be a good goal. Or your focus might be competitor research. You may want to find where your competitors aren’t meeting your audience’s needs.
An excellent way to set a goal is to look for gaps in what you know about your target market. You may have a decent target customer profile that’s missing a few key pieces.
What to Listen for
Start by choosing relevant keywords and searching for them in online discussions. Helpful keywords to search include:
Your company name and brand
Your social media handle
Names of products you carry
Names of people in your company
Topics closely related to your brand or products
Your competitors’ names or products
Industry terms
URLs for your sites and those of competitors
Make a list of these keywords and search Google and social media platforms. If you find websites or individuals who often discuss these topics, save them so you can check them directly.
Automate with Social Media Monitoring Tools
You can scale up by using social listening tools like Hootsuite, Sprout Social, or HubSpot. These tools offer features that track mentions and keywords across platforms to make searching easier.
Social listening is a proactive approach to discovering what your target market thinks, and this feedback is essential to crafting an effective Know, Like, Trust strategy.
Want to learn more about leveraging Know, Like, Trust to build better customer relationships? Head over here:
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