If you want to know how your B2B efforts are doing, you need to be on social media and actively listening. Companies should be monitoring digital conversations to ascertain what consumers discuss in relation to a brand, company and industry. Social listening helps a company learn the needs, problems and preferences of an audience that a company aims to reach. By listening, the business can facilitate change.
What makes social listening so special is that you’re not only pushing your brand to the consumer, you are also listening to their feedback and the discussions they are having online. Through doing this, you can also anonymously engage your consumer on forums and use that as a tool to direct them back to your site. An example of this would be if you were looking for a tent or camping equipment. If your a company provides products such as these, you could go onto a discussion board where someone is looking for a recommendation and direct them to your product.
To widen your audience further, you should be actively listening in multiple languages. This will help you later when you want to gain new influencer opportunities and shows that your company is interested in giving the audience a personalized and immediate response. By accessing people from various backgrounds, you are staying culturally relevant and tapping into culture points.
There are various tools that can assist you as your company participates in social listening:
• Google Alerts is a top choice for many companies. You can set up an alert system to send emails of key term mentions related to your company from various social media sites.
• Hootsuite creates custom reports that you can share with clients and colleagues. It also allows you to engage with your audience and hear what they are saying about your brand.
• Social Mention puts all of the social media analytics and searches into on single stream of information. You can track and measure what people are saying about you and can monitor over one hundred social media sites.
• Buffer will post for you automatically at designated times and also gives you deeper analytics than if you just posted to social networks directly.
For more social listening tools, click here.
As a company or brand, it’s also important to know what search results are generating for you. Here’s a list of what you should be searching for:
• Brand name
• Slogans, key messages, mottos
• Alternate spellings or misspellings
• Keywords relevant to your industry
By utilizing various searches and sites, you will be able to broaden your social listening scope, create a personalized feel for your clients and tap into markets that you may have been ignoring.
