The Role of Social Media Listening in Influencer Marketing
In eCommerce, it is crucial to listen to what your customers want from your brand, and thanks to social media, that couldn’t be easier. People everywhere are delivering their opinion on everything, even your brand. You just have to listen. But with a world so vast as the internet, how do you hear what’s important, and skip what isn’t? Take a look at our guide to learn more about social listening.
What is social listening?
Social listening is often compared to social monitoring. They’re the same in that you’re looking at mentions of your brand and making decisions on it, but social monitoring is more reactive. You go looking for mentions of your brand, get one opinion from one user, and go looking for more to back it up before you make your next move. Social listening is more strategic in that through a social listening platform, you can pool together all the chat around your brand and get a big-picture idea of what people are saying about you.
But how can you use it?
Determining demographics
Demographics can be simple or nuanced. Take toys for example. The toy aisle is pretty determinedly split between pink and blue. It might not be the most PC thing but it’s still a fact. There might be girls that want to play with the tank and boys that want to play with the doll, but the marketing knows who they are targeting.
On the other hand, makeup brands are coming to an interesting realisation: men like wearing quality makeup too. More and more MUA’s are appearing that are men, not to mention the rise of drag queens and beauty influencers, and just people who want to cover the bags under their eyes before a date. And men’s razors are benefiting from the pink tax in that women aren’t willing to pay more for lower-quality items, so head to the men’s aisle for their hair removal solutions.
Demographics are hard to pin down. But with social listening, you can pull together all the people who say they are buying your brand and what they like about it, and perhaps you’ll get some surprises.
Watching competitors
There is also the possibility to keep your eye on the competition. You can set your social listening platform to listen for a brand name that you are competing with and see what people are saying about them. Are they doing something wrong? You can then present yourself as the brand that is doing the same thing right or doesn’t have the problem there customers are complaining about. This will be useful for your social media marketing campaign.
Making decisive changes
Alternatively, if you’re doing the same thing, you can get a jump on making those changes in your own products and services. By analysing what your customers are saying about you and your competitors, you can be quick about making decisions and make important moves quickly. And your customers are not about to be kind about it. They will get straight to the point and inform you directly about what they want to see in your products and what they think about it, which gives you a clear road path to success.
