Imagine you could read the minds of your clients, your potential clients, industry pundits, influencers — basically, anyone who could help you grow your business. Sounds like the best superpower to have, doesn’t it?

Well, this scenario is not as unlikely as you think. In the twenty-first century, we got used to pouring out our minds on our screens: in the form of tweets, Instagram Stories, Facebook posts, and so on. And there are tools that are able to access, categorize and analyze these posts to tell you what your customers and competitors think.

That’s where social listening proves itself useful. The best social media monitoring tools can analyze your audience, notice potential PR crises, show you new channels to promote your brand, and more. Social listening tools use the keywords you provide, for example, your brand name, competitors’ names, niche-specific terms, and more to find online posts that mention these keywords and analyze them.

Let’s go through some ways social listening can improve different aspects of your business.

1. Social customer service

Social media is all about engagement — and your customers’ feedback is an important part of it. Social media users are using this channel every minute to contact companies for their customer care queries — ignoring them would be a huge drawback for your brand.

Social media monitoring tools like Awario help you find the untagged and tagged posts with your customers’ requests, organize and prioritize them, and answer them in real-time.

To find these mentions, all you need to do is set up monitoring alerts containing the name of your brand and products. You’ll immediately start getting online mentions in your feed and inbox. Such analytics features as sentiment analysis and sorting/tagging abilities can help you address the most urgent negative requests first.

2 Product research

Feedback from your customers is also a valuable source of product insights for your company. To be honest, customer feedback should be the guiding beacon when you’re developing new products or features, figure out how to improve your service, and develop your brand.

Once again, all you need is a social listening tool and a monitoring alert with your brand’s name. You can add the names of your competitors in there too to find what people like and dislike about their products, and how you can improve your products to please your target audience.

3. Lead generation

The part every business owner is most interested in is making deals i.e. conversion or lead generation. Well, social media monitoring tools can help you find potential clients online and reach out to the right where they feel comfortable — on social media platforms.

The process itself is a bit more complicated than monitoring the online world for customer feedback for your brand, but still extremely useful. You need to think about the phrases that people can use when looking for recommendations or complaining about your competitors and add them to your monitoring alert along with a description of your product or service. It could look something like that:

Awario’s Leads feature actually does half the job and only requires you to add product descriptions and the competitors’ names — its algorithm then adds different phrases indicating buying interest to your search and finds your social posts from people willing to learn more about your product.

All in all, you end up with a feed of social media mentions that ask for recommendations or complain about your competitors — it’s your choice whether to answer them from your brand’s page or your own and if you want to just give them a link to your website or try to establish relationships before going for the sell (as you can guess I recommend the latter).

4 Backlinks and SEO

Another way to utilize social listening is to look for unlinked mentions of your product or brand! Ironically, social listening is not just for social media channels — you can also monitor and analyze mentions on blogs, news platforms, and websites.

Most social media monitoring tools allow you to tweak your search in such a way that you can look for the articles and blog posts that mention your brand but do not contain a link to your website. You can then contact the journalists and bloggers to ask them to add it, effectively turning them into organic backlinks!

Additionally, you can look for potential backlink opportunities by, for example, monitoring your competitors and industry-specific keywords and noticing what platforms came up when you find their content.

Social listening is a truly universal tool that can come in handy on many occasions depending on what your business needs. You can look for tools with a free trial and check it out for yourself!

And, finally here’s a bonus for you: Check out our exclusive guide on increasing Social Media ROI

Read Also:

• A Business Owner’s Guide to Creating Successful Social Media Marketing Campaigns
• 4 Ways Blogging Can Make Your Digital Marketing Strategy Pandemic-Proof
• 10 Tips for Protecting and Growing Your Business With SEO