Twenty years ago, the dot-com bubble was still expanding and social listening did not yet exist. That’s how quickly digital marketing strategies have been evolving—and likely will continue to evolve. These are exciting times in which we live, though they may also seem a bit scary now and then. How do small business owners keep up, especially those with no formal education in digital marketing? With a great deal of help. But for now, let’s tackle the current topic at hand.
Social Monitoring vs Social Listening
Most businesses today, regardless of size, do social media marketing in some way. From creating content that drives audience engagement and brand awareness, social monitoring and social listening are two things that will benefit your business. What’s the difference between social listening and social monitoring?
Social Monitoring
Many businesses monitor their social media channels watching for questions from customers, responding to online reviews, direct messages, and so forth. Simply watching for mentions and taking a direct action like responding to a message, or reacting to a comment.
Social Listening
Social listening goes much deeper, looking for patterns in social media activity relating not only to a particular brand but also in the industry as a whole. Social listening delves into sentiment (the why), both positive and negative, measuring when and where it occurs and striving to separate cause-and-effect relationships within the data. This will help a business get insight and draw analysis that could shape long-term strategy and improved marketing decisions.
Social listening has the potential to impact the brand substantially and for an extended period of time. The difference between having an effective social listening strategy and not could be one of capitalizing on an opportunity that can help shape content strategy, improve marketing campaigns, and get an edge on your competitors.
How Can Social Listening Benefit your Business?
In essence, social listening has the potential to answer the question, “What’s going on,” in a timely fashion. Like most forms of marketing, producing and publishing a steady stream of relevant content across multiple channels does not happen without cost. An ongoing social listening strategy will not only reveal what seems to be working well, as well as when and where, but also if and when that changes — and sooner or later, it always changes. Good things to know, right?
Social listening tools will flag substantial changes or disruptions. Imagine this extreme example: A competitor to brand XYZ issues a product recall and becomes the target of several wrongful injury lawsuits due to some issue which your product does not experience and in fact could not experience due to key differences in your brand’s production process.
Yet social chatter is spreading like wildfire, not only about the XYZ recall but about a perceived inherent danger associated with that type of product, regardless of brand, including yours! Would you prefer to know about this now or next month?
Both of the above scenarios deal with information that could be utilized to a company’s advantage if obtained soon enough. Social listening tools are designed to accomplish this.
Digital Marketing at Spring-Green
Comprehensive social media monitoring and social listening are not activities that the average person can carry out without the right tools and understanding. At Spring-Green our Digital Marketing team takes care of social reputation management such as responding to comments and seeing how customers feedback shapes business for each of our franchises, as well as creating, managing and publishing relevant content for consumer engagement.
We make life a little easier for our Franchise Owners by not only including these tools as part of our comprehensive marketing strategy, but also by providing ongoing support to the professionals who use our strategies and systems on a daily basis. Call 1-800-777-8608 or visit us at www.growmygreenindustrybusiness.com if you would like to learn more.
