4 Right Ways for Listening to Your Customers on Social Media

On social media, listening to your customers is most vital for the success of your business.

Social listening is important for businesses because this is one way to understand what their customers and target audience are saying on social media– what are they talking about, how they feel about their brands/products/services, and what are their needs and wants, what do they expect from customer service et al. Using Social Media Monitoring tools, businesses can use this vital information to improve products and services, enhance customer service, find the correct takers for their products and above all, offer customers tailor-made services.

But the question still persists – how to use Social Media Monitoring tools for effective listening?

Here’s how:

Understand Your Goals and Objectives:

Business organisations must first be very clear about their business goals and objectives. Once you are clear on this one, you can structure your social listening methods around your goals and objectives. Else, you will be listening to everything on the social and not know which piece of information is beneficial to your business and which is not.

Pay Attention:

Not just listen to your customers’ conversations but pay close attention to what they are saying. How is their tone of voice – good, bad or ugly? Do they seem happy with your products or can you sense a palpable dissatisfaction? What your customers say and more importantly, how they say it are all critical indicators of your brands’ reputation and its customer perception.

Filter Signals from Noise:

Once you have understood what part of your customers’ conversations are useful to your business goals, the next step is to separate the usual talk from that relating to your specific objectives. Social Media Monitoring tools are a huge asset to businesses in this aspect.

Covert Customer Talk to Your Tactic:

As I mentioned earlier, your customers’ social conversations are enriched with actionable insights. Therefore, business cannot afford to take this phenomenon lightly. Therefore, along with social media monitoring, it is also essential to analyze, decipher and decode your customers’ conversations.

Henceforth, businesses must equip themselves with tools that offer both social media monitoring and social media analytics to make sense of what they are listening and glean critical, actionable business insights from their customers’ conversations.

To learn how Shout Analytics can help your business with both social media monitoring and analytics, write to us at info@shoutanalytics.com

Social Media Analytics Tools: The Most Reliable Source For Amassing Social Intelligence

In my previous post on Social Intelligence, I discussed the ‘what’ and ‘why’ of the importance of Social Intelligence. In this post, I will delve into the ‘how’ of it.

I will begin by reiterating that organizations and brands cannot afford to merely collect data and not explore it for actionable insights. Social Intelligence or Social Media Intelligence is clearly the vital key to business success. Therefore, apart from monitoring, collecting and storing their social data, organizations must, using Social Media Analytics tools, also analyze it well. However, no organization can benefit from Social Intelligence if the amassed Intelligence does not support its business objectives and goals. 

This brings us to the question – HOW can organizations use Social Intelligence to their benefit?

The trick here is simple – once an organization gets its goals and business objectives in place, it must invest resources and time in collecting social data that is relevant to their business. Effective Social Media Analytics tools are the most reliable sources to separate signals from noise.

Angela Hausman, quoting one McKinsey report points out that unlike in traditional media where data analysts spend more than 80% of their time just collecting data, in social media, data collection is “ubiquitous and real-time”. Not just that, by providing instant but detailed reports, Social Media Analytics tools makes data analysis and interpretation quick and hassle free.

What’s more, when an organization’s social media efforts are analyzed and interpreted with precision by Social Media Analytics tools, heads of units and senior leadership can improve communication and engage in constructive discussions based entirely on quantified facts and figures.

The bottom line here is that Social Media Analytics tools are a great source for gleaning and amassing Social Intelligence. I firmly believe that Social Intelligence will be extremely crucial for the future success of businesses both big and small. Therefore, it is imperative for organizations to leverage the power of Social Media Analytics tools to the fullest in order to empower themselves with Social Intelligence.

Do you also believe that Social Media Analytics tools are the most reliable sources of Social Intelligence? Share your thoughts in the comments below. To know how Shout Analytics can equip you with Social Intelligence, write to us at info@shoutanalytics.com

Social Listening – Are Your Consumers Liking It?

At a time when there is substantial noise being raised over an individual’s privacy, especially on social media, NetBase and J.D. Power and Associates conducted a survey on 1,062 consumers to find out if consumers know that companies are listening to them on the social media and how they feel about it.

The study reveals some interesting insights –

According to the Altimeter Group, 42% of companies have social listening as one of their top 3 priorities 

But consumers are apprehensive towards this popular business trend and increasingly expressing their angst over it. However, the nature of their response hasn’t been consistent either.

• 51% of the consumers want to talk about organizations and their products; but they do not want these organizations to listen to their conversations.  
• In fact, 43% of them believe that social listening is an intrusion into their privacy
• But, completely contrasting to the above two ideas, there are also 32% of consumers who are completely unaware of the fact that organizations are listening to their social conversations.  
• Another important aspect that this study revealed was that 48% of consumers wanted companies to listen to them on social media and use the conversations for product/service improvements.  
• But there was also another 58% of them who opined that companies must use social listening only to respond to and solve customer complaints. 

But the real surprise was here-

• 42% people want brands to respond without fail to their positive comments
• 64% of consumers insist that brands must respond to social comments only when spoken to

This is a challenge to social media chiefs because such expectations from your social audience means that you must somehow, know beforehand how each of them is going to react to your social engagement efforts.

Now, we acknowledge that listening to, engaging with and understanding their social audience (customers, influencers, fans, stakeholders and even the competitors) are the three basic and fundamental principles of social media engagement for any brand marketers and the organization’s leadership. 

But, given the recent reservation among the consumers towards being listened to by brands on the social channels, the onus is now on the social media marketers, brand managers, CXOs and even social media monitoring and analytics people like us to delve deep into this new development and find new, feasible ways to, as the study’s infographic says, “demonstrate how listening doesn’t intrude but instead builds relationships”.