Why Social Listening Will Drive Social Business

Over the past decade social media has increasingly consumed our lives as we have hit a point where we cannot eat our favorite foods, spend a night at a hotel or even consume a television show without being bombarded by social media queues.

Like us, follow us, join the conversation and so many other flares are sent screaming across our viewing plane that we have literally embedded the social media lexicon into our everyday vernacular. Yeah…try and say that fast five times.

I mean, we have songs and memes making an absolute mockery out of the hashtag, and let’s face it, our children under the age of about 15 don’t even know what a pound sign is. It’s just “The Hashtag.”

But before dance music anthems were named after a new favorite past time (#Selfie) and our fun friends at Esurance mocked us further with their “Hashbrown Selfie” campaign, there was a point, a purpose and a meaning behind the hashtag. It was designed to search through millions of pieces of publically shared content so we could find others who were talking about things that we wanted to listen to.

At first this was for the users. The socialites and early adopters, but later it became more; it became a tool for the next frontier of social media connoisseurs known as “Brand Marketers.”

While the Hashtag may serve as the favorite phrase and now most recognizable queue for social media search and listening, the viability of social listening has continued to gain momentum, as marketers are more and more eager to find out what their prospects, customers and competitors are saying.

Essentially social listening has become an integral part of the entire customer lifecycle.

• Market Overview: With social listening it is easier than ever for a brand to gather insights that can help them understand a market for a new product or service. For instance, an app builder may be considering a new productivity tool. They can listen to user-generated content across dozens of networks to seek out what buyers of similar products are seeking in a new application.


• Competitive Analysis: Never before has competitive intelligence been so widely available for businesses. Much like the market overview, social listening can provide clear insights into who your competitors are and what they are doing. Imagine knowing before you launch a new service exactly what the market is willing to pay for your service or what else they are looking for that your competitors aren’t offering. With social listening it is like 24x7x365 competitive intelligence gathering all by the marketplace of customers you wish to serve.


• Customer Sentiment: Have you ever wished you could quickly gather insights as to whether or not your customers are happy? Social listening provides a forum for customers to share their experiences and sentiment for a product or service. Many brands create communities online so their customer can talk and share their ideas, but the real magic for a brand is filtering that content to better understand how happy their customers are.


• Pre-Sales Support: When a potential client is considering a complex purchase a few of the things they immediately turn to are content and social media. This is where influence can play a big role, but social listening also has a big impact here. Consider how a potential B2B buyer goes into a group on LinkedIn to discuss the pros and cons of a new software package. If you are engaged in social listening you may have the chance to pull that interested buyers conversation and turn it into a dialogue with a sales engineer. You now have a buyer moving through the cycle that you have now connected to your brand


• Purchase Signals: Another key insight businesses are often seeking is what are the last signals of a purchase, both of their product and others. What leads one to buy and one to stray? Social listening tools enable companies to monitor those purchase signals and ascertain what a serious buyer is looking for. Perhaps what is the last content that a buyer liked on LinkedIn or shared on Twitter? Can they sift through these behaviors to determine commonality at the end of the purchase cycle? Social listening makes this possible.


• Customer Service and Retention: Last, but by no means least is customer service and retention. Social listening gives companies the ability to listen and monitor owned and shared channels to make sure they quickly respond to the requests of their customers. Given that customer acquisition is 6x more expensive than retention, social listening provides a consistent platform for brands to actively connect and converse with their customers to not only solve problems but to keep customers. Many consumer brands like Comcast, Zappos and Bluehost are known for highly engaged teams that manage, monitor and respond to social queues. This has also been a quickly growing trend in other service industries like air transport and hotels as they seek to build strong communities of active brand evangelists.

Social Listening May Just Be The Ultimate Enabler Of Social Business

As you can probably tell, I don’t for even an instance doubt the power of social business. I believe emphatically that a social business enables greater connectivity between employees, customers and stakeholders. Having said that, what may lack in more businesses than anything else when it comes to social business is a defined strategy by which to become a social business.

After all, there isn’t a social business switch, and even a certificate from your favorite social media expert doesn’t really make you a social business.

Perhaps what makes a business truly social is how they utilize the vast platforms, tools and user generated content to better search, listen, engage and enchant their customers. By understanding what is possible by properly using social listening tools, it enables a business and its employees to truly march in harmony with their customers. And not just for part of the buyer’s journey, but from the first step until well, that is for each and every business to decide.

What we do know is that for a business to be social, it needs social employees and perhaps more than anything it needs to move from product or service centric to customer centric. Because the root of social business is social employees that wake up every day striving to create better more meaningful customer experiences.

Image: Courtesy of Creative Commons via Flickr

Why Social Listening Will Drive Social Business