The amount of data available to online businesses is staggering. In past eras, uncovering the thoughts, feelings, and grievances of leads and customers was a difficult process. Social media and software developments mean it is now possible to track mentions of brands, keywords, phrases, and competitors across the web, analyzing the information for patterns and opportunities. Social listening can reveal many surprises and confirm expectations, making it easier to respond quickly with customer responses, product development, and content creation. So what are the main reasons for integrating social listening into your business?

Find Influencers

Influencers are the personalities within your niche that drive the conversation and draw interested parties towards them. When influencers post content on social media or their blog, audiences will pay attention. Social listening can help uncover these people, allowing you to both follow their methods and build up a relationship. You may also find an influencer talking about your brand organically, so you want to be quick to acknowledge them and work on strengthening the relationship.

Monitoring Content

It is easy to make assumptions about content, anticipating certain topics or styles will get the best results. In reality, though, you can often find unexpected pieces of content being shared widely across social media. Certain social platforms can also react differently to both the content and the way it is presented. Paying attention to the number of likes and shares across a number of different sites can uncover opportunities, helping you to create and promote articles, videos, and images in the right places.

Gaining Feedback

Plenty of customers will contact you directly with their feedback. However, there will be many others who discuss your business without making contact. Social listening can find these conversations and reveal what is being said. This feedback could lead to product ideas, business upgrades, and marketing improvements, while also solving issues before they grow into more serious problems.

Studying the Competition

The analysis you perform on your own brand can also be used for your competitors. Using different brands and search terms will reveal what people think of other businesses, suggesting aspects of their businesses that are getting positive and negative results. With this insight available to you, making decisions in your own business can be achieved based on research instead of intuition or experimentation.

Hiring New Employees

A startup business can often require new employees quickly to deal with growth. Social listening can find suitable candidates for a number of different roles, allowing you to recruit organically. A brand champion, for example, could be found searching for enthusiastic fans of your business. Additionally, an excellent social media manager might be an individual building a following in your market. Jobs don’t even have to be permanent, with opportunities for outsourcing or joint ventures presenting themselves when you are paying attention to the right locations and search terms.

Exceeding Customer Expectations

Dealing with customer service requests is an important part of business, but it is possible to reduce issues before they start to grow. If an aspect of your business is frustrating customers, learning about it through social listening can help you simplify or change the problem quickly. Customers will typically have certain expectations of a business, so learning this information can help you go above and beyond.

Social listening can become a valuable tool in discovering thoughts about your brand and products, preventing customer service issues, and finding content opportunities. Rather than thinking reactively, though, the information you gather can be used to proactively provide content and prevent any issues growing. Businesses have become used to dealing with problems as they arise and making changes when they become impossible to ignore. With social listening, though, you can quickly predict audience feelings and adapt before most of your competitors have worked out what is going on.