Social media listening helps to enhance relationships with customers by responding and engaging to both positive and negative online mentions from customers, thus increasing customer advocacy by making them to feel they are valued and listened to.
Although it does not stop there, below are the ways it can improve customer advocacy as well as the purpose and the reasons for using social media listening tools.
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Ways in which social media listening can increase customer advocacy
The following are ways social media listening can help to increase customer advocacy:
Helps to resolve issues
This is the most obvious reason for using social media listening as it has the capability to allow you to respond to any negative mentions of your business online and address them quickly to resolve any potential problems.
Surprise your customers and make them feel valued
This can help form part of your strategy, where you can listen to customers comments on social media and randomly select some of these customers to receive a gift such as free service for a specific period of time or gift cards. This not only helps to make customers happy but they are more likely to endorse your brand to others online.
Support product innovation
This is a perfect opportunity to generate innovative ideas to help meet customer needs and get ahead of your competition. By gathering and analysing customer feedback online about your product or service is likely to provide you with ideas to enhance your product offering such as additional features or to create a new product to fulfil an unmet need for a certain group of customers.
Discover your most influential customers
You can group your customers by identifying how influential they are online and focus on those with a large following for favourable reviews and recommendations to help build support for your business.
What is the purpose of social listening tools?
Social listening tools are online software that allows businesses an opportunity to monitor, analyse and respond to mentions about the brand on social media as part of a two-part process. For example, discussions can be tracked about competitors, sectors or relevant keywords and then analysis can be carried out from the data collected for strategies to be formed and actions to be taken based on these insights.
Essentially social media sentiment of your brand can be tracked to gage the mood of people towards your brand and can also serve as an early warning system for you to act before a small issue becomes a much larger problem that is out of your control.
Download this free E-book on how to get started with social media listening.
Why use social media listening tools?
The following are 10 reasons for using social media listening tools:
Ability to tackle issues directly and promptly by responding to customer feedback or negative brand mentions on social media before they escalate.
To build brand awareness online of product and service offering.
Gain a better understanding of the target audience.
Monitor a brand’s health in the marketplace.
Gathering feedback on competitors from social media and use these insights to exploit competitor weaknesses.
To build a brand’s image online through customer engagement and empathy.
Lead generation and reaching out to new customers.
Explore new opportunities to help optimise product or service offering by filling a need in the market.
For promotional purposes by utilising social media listening tools to highlight frequent visitors to a website.
Highlight key influencers in the sector to reach out to.
As you are now more aware of the benefits of social media listening, check out this interesting post about the Benefits of Social Media Monitoring.
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