Using Social Listening to Improve Your Business Social Media Content
Are Your Social Media Efforts A One-Way Conversation?
How many times have we heard that listening is key to good communication? Probably more times than we can count. Hopefully, we’ve at least begun to learn this trick in our friendships and other relationships. Have you ever considered, however, how important listening is when it comes to your social media marketing as a company? Missing this key component of good communication could be causing us to miss out on better results.
What Is Social Listening?
Social Listening: ‘listening’ to what others are saying about your industry and brand online in order to gain helpful insights that will help you improve your business, your products and services, and your social strategy.
Now let’s make sure we’re not getting social listening confused with social monitoring. Social monitoring is focused on collecting information about your social media efforts, including social mentions and engagement with your audience through your posts. Social monitoring focuses on responding to notifications about interactions with your posts. Social listening takes you beyond just monitoring current engagement but helps you take what you learned from those interactions to improve your content strategy. It helps you not only hear what your current audience needs, but takes you further to a greater potential audience that you could reach.
What Are the Benefits of Social Listening?
What if you began to listen to your audience to allow them to get in their two cents about what they would like to see your business do on social media? Do you think changing your content strategy based on what you learn from listening to your audience could increase engagement with your social marketing? Imagine with me some of the possible benefits you could gain.
- You could find out what your audience is interested in and talking about.
- You would learn about the problems your audience is having and know how you could work to bring a solution.
- You’d be able to find out what people are complaining about related to your niche…and then you could address those complaints and do things better.
- You would actually be able to post the kind of content your audience is craving, the kinds of things that give them real value.
How Do I Begin Social Listening?
Start by knowing where your audience (or potential audience) hangs out. If the people you are trying to reach tend to gather on Facebook but you’re only active on Twitter, I’m afraid you’ve started your social media efforts on the wrong foot. Discover where your ideal audience is and then put your focus there.
Pay Attention to Feedback on Your Posts
There are all kinds of ways to begin being purposeful about listening to your audience. One of the most obvious ways is to pay attention to comments people leave on your posts. Whether they’re giving you praise or criticism, perk up those social ears…you may just learn something that will help you take your social media marketing to a new level. Go beyond just common courtesy in responding to comments, but learn to extract valuable insight from those conversations to be able to share content your audience needs.
Listen to Your Reviews
Start by checking out the reviews customers have left for you on Google or Facebook: the good, the bad, the ugly. Are there additional products or services people wish you would have offered? Is there something about your service that they loved that stands out above the crowd? Are you noticing a common problem people have that you could address in a Live video, blog article, or another type of social media post? Maybe there’s a common theme in the complaints people leave in your reviews. How can you fix or address them?
Check your competitors’ reviews for ideas as well. Notice any gaps in customer reviews that you could fill? Maybe there’s a service they don’t offer that you do. Perhaps there are concerns they haven’t addressed that would be relevant for you to address on your page.
Find out What Questions People Are Asking
A great way to find out what people want to know about your niche is to check out a site like Quora or Answer The Public. The questions they are asking could help you gain all kinds of ideas for shareable content to create, from videos to blog posts, to infographics. You would be creating content that people have been looking for, even if they haven’t been directly asking you.
Look for the “People also ask” toggle when searching for a target keyword question in Google search to get additional ideas on common questions you could address for your audience. 
Spy on Your Competition
Okay, don’t really spy on them. But do visit their social media pages to find out what they’re doing that is bringing good responses from their audience as well as what isn’t making much of an impression.
Have your competitors had requests to share about something, but they have never done it? You may be able to fill that gap. Have they shared information that just doesn’t fully satisfy a customer’s question? Create content that is thorough to share on your page.
Get a Bit More Trendy
Instead of trying to rack your brain for new and inventive things to share, why not find out what is already trending with your audience and tap into those trends?
You can find out what’s trending and what people are discussing with these hacks:
- Search hashtags with keywords relative to your niche to find what people are saying about your industry
- Explore the relevance of topics related to your industry using Google Trends
Use a Tool to Social Listen
Stay in touch with what’s going on with your brand or related keywords beyond just monitoring your own social media pages. Try using one of these tools:
- Use a tool like Social Mention. This tool allows you to search your brand name or industry-related keywords and find any mentions of them on the web. You can filter your results by the date of the mention or the source. This tool will also give you information, like the strength, sentiment, passion, and reach your entered keywords have across the web.
- For a more robust tool, check out Mention. This tool will give you updates whenever your brand is mentioned on the web or on social media. Mention allows you to monitor keywords, compare your metrics with competitors, and more. Mention is a paid service, but you can start by using their free trial.
- You can also use Google Alerts for social listening. When you set up an alert for a particular brand, keyword, or keyword phrase, Google will email you a notification when those keywords are mentioned on the web.
Try Taking a Poll
Taking a poll to find out what your audience wants to see you post may be the perfect approach for your business. Whether you leave it open-ended for people to comment out what they want to see or allow them to select one or more from a few options, this can be a great way to get answers straight from the people you want to reach.
Conclusion
So to wrap this all up, what is the whole goal of social listening and why should we be doing it?
- Social media isn’t just about you. It’s about your audience. You can’t serve them well with one-way communication.
- Social listening helps you understand your audience’s needs so that you can meet them.
- Listening helps you take better care of your customers and therefore strengthens the relationship.
- Social listening helps you attract new followers and potential customers
- Social listening not only helps you improve your social content but can also help you improve your services and products.
Was this article helpful? You may also want to check out our Facebook Live session about social listening.