Sales lead generation would be nigh impossible without some form of social media listening. The entire world is on social media, so you have to seize the medium to drive your messaging and get those sales numbers up.
Social media listening is what each brand does whenever they turn towards social spaces on the Internet to learn what’s said about them or learn what’s new within their specific sector. It’s not just opening your mentions or direct messages, though.
You gather engagement statistics and qualitative data through the close monitoring of keywords via a social media listening tool. For any specific social media listening task, there’s a tool to meet your needs.
6 Ways RSS Feeds Can Help You Master Social Listening
Why bring RSS into this discussion? Isn’t it just a tool to read multiple sites at once?
RSS readers available right now have far more flexibility and features, which successfully mimic social media monitoring tools. Through further integration with third-party clients, you’re able to reap the benefits of social media listening at a far lower price point.
Inoreader gives users powerful automation features and support for multiple RSS feed types from Twitter accounts and hashtags to newsletters, YouTube channels and podcasts.
With a little bit of imagination you can…
Discover Where The Community Hangs out
You can’t discover prospective customers without knowing what online spaces they inhabit on a daily basis. Social media listening invites you to venture outside your own accounts to gather data on customers. Their likes, their preferences, their age and their values. All these play into knowing if you should lean into the classics like Twitter and Instagram or investigate TikTok, YouTube or even Quora.
Often we place this at the first thing you should be doing. Go to where your audience is, otherwise you’re missing out on opportunities to directly come in contact with customers and waste money on ads on platforms they don’t visit.
During the community research, you should also pay attention to who the natural influencers are as they serve as a representative, easy source of information on your target audience.
Improve Customer Care
Companies, sometimes, falsely understand social media to be only a place for positive connection to their audience. Nothing can be further from the truth. Even as far back as 2013, social media is used for customer care 67% of the time.
You don’t need a sophisticated tool to listen to complaints when you can open your DM folder or turn to your mentions, replies, tagged posts, tagged stories and comments underneath posts. If a customer is displeased, you will hear it about immediately. It’s your job to respond immediately.
A strong reputation for customer care attracts prospective customers through word of mouth. Why not improve a competitor’s customer care by stepping in to offer a solution before they can react?
Receive Feedback
Prolong a product’s life cycle through consistent improvement over time. To that end, social media listening collects reliable (free!) user-generated feedback at any given moment.
A product primed to storm the market five years ago might not live up to customer demands today. Market conditions change dramatically in short bursts of time. To think all you need doing is slight recalibration in how you market a product that’s been untouched since its introduction…
Well, you’re not building a brand on strong foundations. Even without a social media tool, you can ask your following directly, ‘what do you think about X feature or Y model?’ Better yet just take notes every time you receive a complaint directed at you or a negative review.
Find New Clients
The most straightforward way to reach prospective customers is use ‘search’ on social media. You must already know what your dominant keywords are. Through non-branded keywords on types of products, inquiries and phrases, you can scan through Twitter (using the search), Instagram (via hashtags in the search bar) and Facebook (via Graph Search) in search of a prospective customer.
You will find them. There’s no doubt about it. Strike up a conversation and explain what you can do for them. The sales pitch is important, yet, maintain a human touch. People want to be helped with their problems, not seen as potential money bags. You want to leverage this first contact into a follow / like and then foster a deeper connection through private messages.
Create More Targeted Ads
In a crowded marketplace, targeted ads do the heavy lifting to shine light on your brand. If you’re not properly tuned into your audience, you’re not going to reach the audience… or at least not as much you would have liked. Effective marketing still requires sizable monetary investment to get desired results. Yet, the goal is to increase the revenue generated per ad.
Social media listening identifies your targeted audience with precision and that’s the key to truly effective marketing. Knowing exactly who your audience is on a given platform and then knowing the fastest route to cut through all the white noise and reach them. A case study posted on Awario breaks down how targeted ads powered by social media listening generated 991% more traffic via Twitter Ads.
Monitor The Competition
Existing in a public space with your competitors presents opportunities to harvest fresh insight into shared audiences’ response to messaging and marketing stimuli. All actors on the economic stage shape conversations surrounding content’s efficacy.
As such, competitor content and reception towards it further determine what marketing approaches you can apply to positive results in your own marketing strategy, but filtered through your unique point of view. Pay attention to engagement data on a single piece of their content through the social media tool you use. Twitter is all about user engagement as leverage for sales leads.
Competitors are the gift that keeps on giving regardless of the purpose to your monitoring. Are you trying to learn better ways to interact with customers? Are they neglecting customer complaints? Is there another customer segment they attract and you don’t?