People used to pick up a telephone and call a customer support line when they had an issue or a question. It wasn’t uncommon at all for people to get frustrated when they could not immediately get the answers that they were looking for. Those customer lines still exist but they are quickly being taken over by the process of social listening.
Understanding Your Social Media Channels
Most companies have a variety of social media channels that they control and operate. The problem with this is that it quickly gets complicated when there are so many various websites to try to monitor. You can lose sight of what you set out to do when you first created those social media websites. That is why you need social listening to stay on top of things.
Reviewing Analytics
Getting statistics and analytics from your social media platforms is worth its weight in gold. The information that one can get by just reviewing some of their figures from social media can influence the types of decisions that they make about marketing and related activities. Not having that information is really like flying blind in a world that continues to post more and more on social media. If your customers are putting all of this information out on the Internet for free then why wouldn’t you take advantage of it?
Seeing Things In Real Time
The only type of data that is worthwhile in the social media landscape is data that is brought to you in real time. Things are always changing in today’s connected world and it means that if you are operating on data that is not coming to you as it is happening then it is practically worthless.
NetBase is a provider of a social listening platform that helps its users receive the information that they need right as it is happening. Do you need to know exactly when someone is putting a comment on your Facebook post? You can get this information with NetBase.
Getting This Information As You Scale Up
Social media data becomes even more valuable as your business gets larger. It is important as you are growing to be sure, but you will want to have access to it even more as you gain in scale. It becomes practically impossible to monitor all of your social media platforms as a single individual. You will require something that brings you the data so that you can have your social media team react to it as it happens.
Social listening means that you can respond and adapt to the things that you are doing as you are doing them. Make a new decision regarding your marketing? Perhaps you would like to know how customers are reacting to the new pitches that you have been putting out. You can actually get this information from your social media accounts. Another real world use might be to see how some kind of special or discount that you offer is going over with the public. This can all happen when you are practicing social listening.
Let The Machines Learn From Your Data
Perhaps the biggest leveraging of social listening is to use that data to allow machines to learn more from it. In other words, allow the machines to gain more insights from the information that you already have so that you may make better decisions going forward. That is what so many who have gotten into these practices are benefiting from. It doesn’t make the choices for you, but it gives you some ideas about what you can do with the information that you have.
