The Role of Social Listening in Understanding Your Audience

The value of social media is forming, growing, and interacting with your business or nonprofit’s audience. It allows you to directly connect and communicate with those who are interested in your business. However, social media is not just useful for getting your message out. It also provides exceptional opportunities to learn from and understand your audience. We’ll explain what the role of this social listening is and how you can use it to better understand your target audience.

What are Social Listening and its Benefits?

Along with insightful metrics, the power of social media is the conversation. Social listening is using social media to get a sense of your audience’s thoughts about your business and its products or services. This is extremely beneficial for small businesses since it provides a fuller sense of what their wider digital community thinks or wants. That helps your business better understand its target audience and begin to make decisions about those desires or expectations. This listening and reacting also helps to foster a stronger and more dedicated community on social media as your audience realizes they are being heard.

Social Listening and Small Businesses

Social listening is an area of digital marketing where small businesses really shine. Larger businesses can be inundated with posts and comments that can be difficult, if not impossible, to sift through. Listening requires attention and focus, and that is a daunting task with a massive audience with myriad of voices. However, small businesses tend to have smaller, more focused audiences. That means it’s much easier for your social staff or digital marketing team to track and listen to most of your audience. Since at least 42% of users use social media to voice concerns about a product or service expecting a resolution, small businesses are better able to hear those customers. This focus is the same strength small businesses have on social media more generally. They can genuinely engage with their community.

How to Listen: Social Listening Strategies

To be fully comprehensive, social listening needs to employ multiple strategies to understand a target audience.

• Listening to Direct Communications: Comments and private messages are direct communications with your business. Noting these means you are both paying attention to important comments or feedback. Responding to these communications also shows your audience that you’re actively listening.
• Collecting Feedback: You can also foster direct communication with engaging posts. These might ask for input about what products or services they want to see offered, what their favourites are, or any other useful information.
• Tracking Mentions, Keywords, and Tags: A lot of what you should listen to from your target audience isn’t said directly to you. For example, 96% of displeased customers don’t tell the company; they tell friends. The same goes for celebrating or recommending a product or service. Tracking keywords, mentions, and tags of your business, products, or services will provide a fuller sense of what your audience is saying. You or your marketing team can also track these for related brands or similar businesses to better understand your wider audience.
• Attentive Listening: As you listen and respond to your audience. Be sure to listen attentively and consider the frequency of what they are saying. For example, if there is an issue with another company’s product or service, pay attention to what they say, and you may find a specific place where your business can address that issue and directly address it in your marketing. Similarly, if your audience repeatedly asks a similar question, it’s a good idea to provide a featured post that answers that question.
• Understanding What is Beneficial: Not every comment, feedback, or impression will be informative. Not every social post or comment is thoughtful and attentive. Your marketing team will consider everything, but they will analyze and determine what is useful.

Start Listening, Start Understanding

Social listening is a key strategy for any business to understand its audience. Social media has given every user and business the unique opportunity for having a platform and communicating. A key part of communication is listening, not just speaking. By attentively and strategically listening on social media, you or your digital marketing team can begin to truly understand your audience and make effective and resonating decisions for your business. If you’re ready to start listening or want help mastering your strategy, contact the social media marketing team at Rosewood.