The scope of social media for business research purposes is vast, but most brands usually fail to look beyond its basic utility or leverage its potential. Social listening tools can offer services beyond customer care insights and reputation management. Leading brands have moved beyond just listening in – they are using the data derived in their favor to lead the market. Let’s see how they are doing this.
Social Listening to Drive Innovation
Public sentiments expressed on social media help brands learn about customer needs and pain points. Customers actively express their needs and opinions on social media, mentioning a particular brand or an industry as a whole. These comments help to shape industry/market trends. Social listening to these comments or mentions can help brands come up with and offer innovative solutions to their customers. Any brand which can offer a unique/innovative solution is naturally a winner in any industry, gaining a larger market share and maximizing their profits.
It is always good to know what is affecting your customers’ satisfaction negatively. Knowing about their needs and acting on them helps to increase their trust in your brand. Giving your brand a competitive edge over the competition using innovative means to gain a loyal customer base and build a positive brand image. An inspiring example of a brand that used social listening to cater innovatively to the needs of their customers is Netflix. We are talking about the Netflix socks which were an instant hit, for all the right reasons.
Listening to Interests across Channels
Social media does not work in isolation. People actively posting and sharing content on Facebook are also present on other sites, engaging with TV commercials, billboards and commenting on them. Hence social listening goes beyond tracking the activity around a specific hashtag or keyword. Monitoring overall social sentiment across channels may give you the little pieces needed to put the jigsaw puzzle together to form the big picture, which helps you derive actionable insights into improving your CX.
Become more Customer-Centric
Customers expect brands to be more customer-centric. Forbes reported that companies that offer superior customer experience bring in 5.7 times more revenue than others. Savvy customers of the day know what they want. They would switch over easily to another brand if they don’t feel your brand is integrating their needs into your offerings.
Brands that want to succeed need to adapt to the individual preferences of their customers. Social listening makes it easier for brands to be receptive to the needs of their customers and to react in time. Tracking trends and sentiments online can help a brand gauge the general interest before investing in full-blown research about the psychographics of its customer base.
Social listening is about tracking all the key conversations happening on social media. When a comment or conversation concerns you, your brand, a keyword/trend you are interested in or even an industry; your social listening tool can zero in on it – in the vast sea of what happens every day on the Internet. The tool then organizes and presents the relevant data and insights to you. Act on them to derive an array of benefits from this real-time feedback and gain an enormous advantage by going beyond customer care to ensure true customer satisfaction. Keep following this space for more such insights.