We all know it is more important to listen than to speak. The same need applies to brands today. Listening to your audience so you can deliver better products, services, and customer experience holds the key to your success. Social listening to your audience allows you to analyze popular trends and thus engage better with your audience. You increase the chances of creating a positive brand experience with increased customer interaction. Social listening and trend research become essential when you’re trying to start a conversation. Trend research is even important if you’re trying to produce engaging content.
Why should you use Social Listening for Trend Research?
To market a product or a service you need to know the influencers, the trends, and the industry news. To get a better understanding and specifics of your industry challenges or opportunities trend research is imperative.
Social listening to these industry trends lets you know what people are talking about. Most importantly it also tells you the answer to the ‘why’! Why are customers talking about a particular topic? Why are they buying or not buying it? Social listening for this “why” is the key to stay on top of the competition. It is also the way to increase engagement, improve your product or services and grow your business faster and more efficiently.
In this era of hashtags, you can connect faster with your audience by listening to customers’ pain points or tracking key challenges within your industry.
How to Research Trends?
Trend research is mostly like market research. Only it becomes easier due to the fact that trends these days are all over the Internet. Carefully listening to online conversations makes it easier to track trends. And in today’s day and age when trends keep forming and changing every other week, automating the trend research process is critical. Here are some easy techniques to help you out:
Set up Alerts
Trends these days are mostly set on the internet. And like the attention span of most internet users, these trends too are short-lived. So to make sure you catch up with these trends in time you can set up alerts. You could use tools like Google Alerts or a social listening tool like Auris. When you’ve set the keywords, Auris sends you alerts in real-time. This feature also helps you to prevent any PR crisis moments in case of a negative review.
You could also consider tuning in to the various RSS feeds to gather articles of interest around your industry. However, these may not always report the ongoing or upcoming trends.
2 Follow the Key Influencers from your Industry
By following top influencers of your industry based on social listening, you can stay updated with the latest trends. Working with an influencer on trending topics also helps you build a more authentic relationship with your audience members. In fact, social listening tools help you identify the right influencers for your brand. This helps you to increase your brand visibility and engage with a larger community.
3 Use Social Listening
Keep up to date with trending hashtags, keywords and connect with your audience based on their sentiments. Tracking all such information from social media might sound impossible but it’s not. You can understand the tone of conversations by using ‘conversation clusters’. Auris works on an algorithm that reads into the comments by forming word pairs and gauging the sentiment. This is how it finds out the areas of interest, the keywords being used, and the overall sentiment.
Staying updated with these trending keywords and hashtags can be useful when engaging with your customers. Auris word clouds also display the top hashtags which can help you in connecting with your audience faster.
Utilizing social listening tools to monitor conversations and what people are talking about online can be a powerful aid. Once you have the data, you can plan campaigns around it to connect with your target audience. This way your content feels more personal to them and personalized advertising bears great results. With the right approach towards social listening and trend research, you can create a much better experience for your customers and gain a loyal follower base.