In a recent poll of over 200 people, we learned that less than 9% feel that social listening is an important aspect of social media marketing when compared to engagement, consistency, and content.
Over the past 10 years of working in social media marketing, we’ve found that social listening is in fact, the most significant aspect – and we’d like to introduce a new approach possibly helping you succeed in your marketing efforts.
Why is Social Listening so important?
Social listening, in combination with consistency, posting with a purpose, & efficient storytelling is a recipe that has helped us grow online reputations, increase followers, visibility and engagement.
We’ve all heard about the ‘algorithm’ and how we have to have a higher engagement rate with great content to have successful posts online. However, we want to stress that it doesn’t do you any good to invest in creating great content if no one see it.
Always remember first and foremost that social media is just that, it’s social.
Let’s say you were at a social gathering with your friends. If you walked in, approached a group of people and started speaking about yourself and everything you were doing and all that you accomplished and so on and so on, eventually those friends would tune out. Right?
It’s the same with social media.
Social media marketing is a two way form of online communication between you (the company) and your online community (your followers).
Look, every healthy relationship, friendship or social dynamic comes down to the ability to listen. It’s a balance between listening and talking, while understanding the needs of the other person – because you are in tune with how they are feeling.
Whereby listening in relationships is one of the most important aspects to a healthy dynamic, social listening is the equivalent in social media marketing.
Similar to how you would respond to someone’s body language in a social setting, social listening involves reading your numbers and responding. It also includes viewing comments and possibly using those comments/questions as upcoming posts. Additionally, social listening is researching comparable pages (and reading their comments for feedback).
Social listening also involves real world listening. What is your team telling you that they need more of? When they talk, listen. If there is a challenge, use social media to find a solution for them. Use your creative storytelling to produce content based on what they need. Answer their main questions or concerns through the creation posts which demonstrate your responses, in a positive light.
When I was working as the social media consultant for an animal care & control organization, a fire decimated our area.
Our staff was inundated with calls about lost/found animals posted to our website with photographs. The photographs could not show the entire animal, and staff could not physical see the animal from the office.
Community members who had just lost everything they had were asked to come into the shelter, walking through hundreds of animals who had been injured, who wanted to return home – it was traumatizing for everyone.
I knew there was a problem, a challenge. And knowing social media can help provide solutions, I stopped and listened. Instantly, I switched to using video and created a 30 second video clip for each animal and uploaded it to our website and to social media.
Staff could now “see” the animal if and when a community member called. And community could “see” the animal without ever coming in.
Videos had a much further reach online so our page had millions of people coming to it to help us, help reunite more animals.
250 animals were reunited with their families.
That is the power of working together, the power of social media marketing combined with social listening.
Social Listening is not just about online media.
Social listening is one of the most useful tools which involves finding ways to use social media to be of service, assisting your community, and staff. In this way, you become a valuable resource by listening to what your community, your staff, your volunteers need and giving it to them.
How will you find ways to listen first, and then provide content based on what your community, your staff, volunteers, are telling you they want to hear?
Interested in learning more? Register today for the upcoming live webinar on 2/8/22 by clicking here.
Stay tuned for upcoming blogs and YouTube videos about the social listening process and how we perform it on a daily basis.
Or send us an email for a consultation – we’ll share more about social listening and aspects related to social media marketing.
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