Social listening is a relatively new concept in the world of marketing in general, but in the enterprise context especially.It’s essentially a way of leveraging technology to gain valuable insights and feedback from current and potential customers.
There are a ton of applications for this powerful tool that is currently under-utilized by large companies. Here are just a few of the many ways an enterprise can leverage this emerging innovation.
Sales Leads
This is an obvious low-hanging fruit application for social listening. If someone tweets out that they need a “power washer” and are looking for recommendations, that is prime time to come in with a product pitch.
It’s clearly a potential customer with a demand for a specific type of product. And they are ready, willing and wanting to buy.
Customer Complaints
This is a double-edge sword and cannot be ignored. If you ignore a sales lead, you lost one sale. If you ignore a customer complaint, you have potentially lost tons of sale depending on how influential the customer is on social media.
User-Generated Content
The most viral content may also be free. It’s expensive and time-consuming for a marketing department to create all of the content for their brand. By using social media listening platforms, you can sort through and curate content that your loyal customers create.
Not only is it a low cost method of generating really good content, it can also be more powerful. There’s a concept called social proof. When a peer validates a product or service, it has way more persuasive power than a brand promoting themselves.
Social Media PR
According a recent Pew Research Study, they found that two-thirds (67%) of Americans consume at least some of their news from social media. That means your public relations strategy must include social.
There are compelling reasons to use social media as a PR platform, in addition to the eye-balls you can get. Using a social listening platform like NetBase can also help you determine the effectiveness of your PR campaigns.
You can setup the campaign in NetBase to not only distribute your content, but also measure the reach of each post. You can also measure the engagement you get from the content you put out.
Not only is that enormously important to measure current PR campaigns, it’ll give you invaluable insights into how to improve and tweak your future campaigns. NetBase will give you the insights to be able to know what works and what doesn’t. That instant feedback can even allow you to tweak campaigns on the fly.
Identify and Recruit Influencers
As the world population is growing, people’s worlds are actually shrinking. Social media has provided a platform for niche tribes to be created. Within those tribes are influencers who have enormous power to move potential customers toward your brand.
Influencers are not difficult to find. If you spend any amount of time within your niche on social media, you will find them instantly.
Not all feedback is equal. Not all voices on social media are equal. Social listening can provide valuable feedback from these influencers and a platform like NetBase can help you determine how much weight you should put on what this elite group has to say.
Intelligence on Competitors
Social listening can also be a powerful tool to know what the competitors are up to. Not only can you monitor what they’re doing online, you can also listen to what your potential customers are saying about your competitor’s brand. It’s a great way to identify opportunities and create messaging to differentiate your brand from the rest.
Social listening platform is in it’s infancy, and the enterprises that know how to leverage it will have an edge in this new world we live in.
