Netbase Quid: 6 Ways to Use Social Listening to Solve Problems and Generate Leads

Many businesses use social networks to listen to market needs, solve problems, and generate leads. Running a business is like walking on a high wire; it requires balance, strong communication skills, and constant focus. Social listening means staying in touch with your customers, learning about them, and responding to them when they need you. Social networks offer a huge opportunity for businesses to do social monitoring and listening, but how can marketers extract the most value from the data? Here are six ways to use social listening to solve problems and generate leads.

1. Gain Insight into Customers

Social platforms offer direct access to the voices of your customers. Use this information to understand better what they like about your company, what they want more of, and how you can improve service or products. You can use social monitoring and listening to analyze the sentiment surrounding your brand. Look for customer satisfaction issues such as negative reviews, and work with your team to improve those elements. Listen closely for trends in complaints or praise, both of which indicate a need that you should address.

Many brands make this error: They spend time manually identifying relevant conversations about their brand and then compiling the data into a report. This process can be time-consuming, frustrating, and inaccurate; it is also a missed opportunity. Marketers should leverage tools to gather, filter, and aggregate relevant social content for analysis.

2. Reach Out to Customers

A brand can have a Twitter-ready crisis on its hands in minutes, making it imperative to respond quickly. Social listening can uncover open-source information about potential issues. Negative mentions of competitors on social media are also good indicators of marketing opportunities.

Once you identify the problem, reach out to customers with some incentive or promotion to show them that you value their business and want to retain them as a fan.

3. Get to Know Your Competitors

There is no such thing as privacy; your competition can listen to you as easily as you can listen to them. Monitor what they are doing and how they talk about their products or services. In addition to positive mentions, track negative comments and work with your team to address those concerns.

In addition to listening for information about your competitors, you can use social media to build rapport with your customers. Find out what people think of them from an unbiased perspective by following the conversations they start.

4. Improve Your SEO

SEO is the process of optimizing a website to rank higher in search results for relevant keywords. Businesses need to be where their customers spend time to win on social media. Where is this? On social networks like Facebook and Twitter.

Social media listening can help you answer these questions: Where else do your potential customers visit online? What do they like and dislike there? What keywords should you be targeting for search? Which content works well across social media and fails to get likes, comments, and shares?

Social listening allows marketers to identify where customers spend time online. You can also find out what they like or dislike about other websites and how to improve your website’s SEO.

5. Build a Personal Connection

The best brands are built on relationships with their customers, and social listening can help you get to know your customers better. When you listen, don’t just hear. Consider what you’re hearing from customers in their words. Look for ways to relate to them and share a common interest or similarity.

You can listen to find out what language your customers use to describe your product, service, industry, and competitors. It can pinpoint keywords relevant to them, so you know which terms you should target for SEO. Social listening gives marketers the ability to get inside the mind of their audience so they can offer the right messaging at the right time.

About Netbase Quid

Netbase Quid delivers a platform that helps companies access, analyze and activate social data. The Netbase Social Media Intelligence Suite uses machine learning algorithms to understand the context around what people are saying about their products, services, and brands.