Supercharging Customer Engagement: How Social Listening Can Enhance Your Social Media Strategy

As an owner, in today’s well-connected world, people are aware about the importance of social media presence, not only to influence but also to establish the brand name in the existing market. In addition to your own perspective, other opinions are also instrumental in shaping the current and future strategy to ensure the success of your brand.
There are plethora of ways to connect with the customer base, but when it comes to social listening supersedes others. How does social listening work and how does it supercharge the customer engagement? I have listed down value driven approaches for enhanced customer engagement through social media platforms.

What is social listening?

As the name suggests, we attentively listen to people on social media, and consider their opinions about the brand. It not only includes direct mentioning but also indirect reference, we track customer sentiment, industry trend and competitor activity. If you want to make informed decisions and strategize your social media campaigns for your brand, use tools to get the insight and find out what your target audience is thinking and what you need to contemplate, regarding the strategies to be used to work on aspects like long term marketing strategies, product development and customer support.

How to improve your social listening?

Understanding the customer
Understanding the consumer/customer before setting up your campaigns, identifying demographic base is just a good start of the strategy, we need to know more. Find out, what kind of customer is talking and feel more inclined towards your product category. Major factors are gender, place, common interests, profession, and existing purchase trends of the potential buyer. Such data connects us directly to the preference of the buyer and who needs what is clearer to understand. This helps a business to focus on the needs of their customers and penetrate the consumer base more effectively; customer centric campaigns, where the businesses refine their offerings certainly help to meet with the customer requirement. This helps you develop a strong bond with the customer and you can also create better customer engagement.
Immerse you campaign in social perspective
You can never set an effective campaign without knowing about the general social acceptance, an idea may be accepted in one community or even by a gender, but can be rejected by others due to the set of people’s beloved ideologies. If you will not be sensitive about it, your campaign will face downright rejection by the particular customer base you are targeting and it might also stir up controversy resulting in social ostracism. On the flip side, understanding the communal sentiments can connect you with the society in the strongest possible way. You can create your presence socially by following these steps:-

Connect your campaign with social causes like cancer in the form of support your brand will extend from your earnings.
Establish a traditional connection between your campaign and society.
Be sensitive towards social issues like pollution, where you can advertise the ecofriendly approach followed by the company.

Track Brand sentiment

What people say about your brand is instrumental and you can track it through comments, likes, reviews and engagement of your campaigns. Positive outcome shows what is appealing for the customers and the negative comments will notify you to rethink your strategies and reconnect with your client base. Success of a campaign can always enlighten us and we can discover steps for a successful campaign, at the same time a negative campaign can educate us about the don’ts of a campaign.

Partner with the influential voices
You can also capitalize on the inherent strength of influential voices on customer engagement platforms. They can magnify your reach and amplify your voice to the new audience, you just need to evaluate and assess the engagement and you can harness their power of persuading people by their presence on social platforms.
This partnership can cover important dimensions like brand awareness, and loyalty.
Advocates can promote your brand as your brand ambassadors by stating tangible results, feedbacks and sometimes their own insight.
You can foster a genuine connection with customers and increase their confidence towards your services.
Monitor the competition
Staying vigilant and monitoring your competitor’s strategy is of utmost importance for ever changing landscape of social media. There are certain effective steps to follow while monitoring competition.

Identify your competition and focus on their actions to analyze the changing strategies regarding their brand.
You need to prepare a blueprint to monitor the fields of interest starting from marketing strategies, product launches, and customer interaction.
You need to analyze their market presence and the strategies they use to maintain it- the content on their website, their posts and social media accounts.
Newsletter subscription is an easy way to stay updated about news, product updates and offers. Automated updating can also be activated by email subscription.
Attend industry events hosted by competitors to know more about the products, and get the insight to compare with your services and make amends if required to gain a competitive edge.
Review the feedback of the customers acquired by your contemporaries, and get accustomed to their weaknesses and strengths which can assist you to work on your own online reputation management.

Apply social listening tools which gather the raw data including direct and indirect mention of the brand, positive and negative comments, engagement of different campaigns and in the end, use Ai to compile this data into a meaningful road map showing all the shortcomings and the area requiring more focus.

There are different popular tools available online to enhance social listening.

Hootsuite can monitor mentions, hash tags, keywords and mentions.
Talkwalker analyze forums, videos, blogs, news sites and social networks at the same time from one dashboard.
Sprout Social helps to create segments carefully using demographics, gender, sentiment and influence.

Conclusion
Social listening equips you to analyze your social marketing strategy and modify it to mitigate potential crises, and manage your online reputation. This can enable you to retain your existing customers along with gaining more and stay ahead of your competition. Utilize it, and create stronger connections with your audience and use it as a catalyst in the success of your brand.