People holding icons of digital brands
It is an understatement to say that social media has changed the way we live. The manner in which it has taken over our every thought and move is not only remarkable but also makes it an extremely powerful tool. At first, it was just a means of communication for people placed in different locations, but now social media dictates almost everything about us – from the ideologies we hold to even what to have for breakfast.
Organizations use the information derived from these social media channels to assist the growth of their brand. One such way to do this is through Social Media Listening.
To put it in simple words, Social Media Listening is collecting and using data from any media outlets where people express their ideas, views, or even complaints relating to your brand to make business-related decisions. Recall when the Internet called out the now known as “Glow and Lovely” brand for its unfair portrayal of the word “Fair” to promote its products? The higher-ups of the organization were forced to rethink their messaging. That is the power of social media and its tools.
Social media listening helps in boosting your understanding of how your target audience thinks, figuring out relevant trends to incorporate into your marketing strategies, product/service reviews, focusing your content to a particular platform based on the traffic generated, and more. Here are some ways to use Social Media Listening to your brand’s advantage to stay ahead of this dynamic game.
Interact with your target audience
Simply monitoring how your current and potential customers present themselves online will help you create a foundation for what your audience seeks. Talking to them about it will help you devise strategies on how to do it and tap into their pockets.
Zomato does this phenomenally through Twitter by asking questions like “Which food is overrated?” to not only drive traffic to their app but also to keep track of popular food preferences among its audience.
Understand how your competition operates
Sometimes, knowing more than what people say about just your brand goes a long way towards building your brand. Checking in on how your competitors use opportunities to widen their customer base and handle their reputation online allows your brand to identify key areas to work on.
Following your competition’s rankings, ways they use trends or even their past online activity can help analyze and devise an actionable plan for any given situation your brand might run into.
Use the power of Influence
In most cases, social media runs in a herd mentality which influencers can help create. A lot of brands depend and invest heavy money on social media influencers to manufacture opinions and trends to drive leads for their ideas, products, or services. Influencers do wonder by lending their unique perspective and ideas for brand marketing purposes. Kylie Jenner, for example, does it for her own cosmetic brand, Kylie Cosmetics, by assuring people that she looks the way she does solely because of her beauty products.
Create Relevant Content
With the help of social media, content creators of any form whether audio, video, image or written content come up with subject matter that people would want to engage with or talk about. They can recognize key interest areas of their audiences through keywords and SEO to build voices for themselves and for the community. For instance, Tanmay Bhat, a well-known YouTube personality, leveraged his following’s age cohort of young adults to talk about the importance and techniques of investing and finance, which helps relevant brands to collaborate with him to potentially generate leads and awareness.
Demand Feedback
On occasion, people use social media blindly to not only express their frustration but also to bad-mouth a brand for the grievances and experiences faced by them. To make sure you’re not one of those brands, it is essential to stay on top of your customer support services and meet your customers’ issues with solutions.
When this situation occurs, it is the brand’s responsibility to present a calm and helpful front as it determines how the rest of the world views them in times of distress of a valued customer.
Even though technically, there are no hard and fast rules to define how a brand can stay in the good books of its customers, there are certainly approaches to ensure the brand does not end up on the bad side of it.
Maintaining a sound image of your brand is more challenging than it might seem, credited to the ever-changing ways we as people think, act and communicate, especially on social media. Taking hints and suggestions from exchanges with your desired audience can aid in strategizing dependable and effective plans for your brand’s reputation for days to come.
