Social Media Listening

The most important step to take before speaking to your customers or clients is learning what they want, and what opinions they have about you, your competition and the industry you are in. Social media listening is more valuable than the technology you will use eventually to talk online.

You most likely haven’t got a budget that can pay for extensive research through data collection and focus groups, market research surveys can cost £1000’s to reach a sample of just 1,000 people.  The increase in use of social media over the past decade has resulted in more and more people voluntarily sharing the valuable information market researchers pay for on sites like Facebook and Twitter. Everyday millions of users of these platforms create millions of posts and tweets which are liked and retweeted by their networks.

Tapping into the sea of information online can seem intimidating if you don’t know where to begin. By following a few simple guidelines you can learn how to listen to what your customers are saying about your industry, products, and services, and use that information when developing your online presence through social media.

Make sure you have a defined objective to why you are listening, not just because everyone else is doing it.  But because you want to know customers views about your industry and what they need and how they prefer to be served.  There is nothing worse than a marketing campaign that never considered the target market, instead of providing the client with positive campaigns more than not they would just be building their ego.

There are many ways to find your target audience; simple searches using Google, Facebook, Twitter can start you off.  From there you may use Google Alerts to search for keyword activity or do similar through third party software like TweetDeck or Hootesuite. 

Listening will help you learn about your customer whether you learn from Starbucks with over 10 million facebook fans or the local coffee shop with a few hundred fans.  Monitor the competition or similar businesses not for underhand gain but to see what does and doesn’t work, skills and experiences can be shared too.

Numbers are not important, activity is fundamental to developing knowledge of your customer to help develop your brand.  Ultimately this will involve engagement with your customer to provide the service they deserve and will then share with their network.

Take things simply one step at a time and build a strategy and plan your time effectively. If you require any assistance in developing this further contact mark@design58.com .