Social Listening- Why & How

So how do you build a community around your business? The first step is Social Listening: Some years ago if you had a complaint about a product, you would tell your friends, your family and maybe your colleagues, but today if you bought a cream that made you itch, your Canada waala chaacha ke padosi ke bade bhai ka ladka will also know about it, because now, we turn to Twitter and Facebook to vent out about a product. And our new audience has no geographical boundaries, and sometimes no boundaries of any sort. This means any complaints about you are easily amplified. Not all these customers will address you directly, however, so you have to be listening. To listen effectively you need to become part of the conversations that are relevant to your business. Make sure customers can contact you easily, so as to prevent upset users from going on an online rant. Audio Clip Social listening will help you gain insights on what it is that your customers want, what’s working and what isn’t. But remember, every customer is not Steve Jobs, so don’t take customer feedback as gospel truth. Customers often do not even know what they want. Henry Ford was supposed to have once said, “If I asked my customers what they wanted, they would have said faster horses”. As most of you know Ford later went on to build cars, not faster horses! Just saying. But there are ways to get the most out of social listening. The first one is by creating tester communities. Make a list of online users who seem to be most active or extremely influential in conversations that are relevant to your business. Because not all users are equal. So how do you build a community around your business? The first step is Social Listening: Some years ago if you had a complaint about a product, you would tell your friends, your family and maybe your colleagues, but today if you bought a cream that made you itch, your Canada waala chaacha ke padosi ke bade bhai ka ladka will also know about it, because now, we turn to Twitter and Facebook to vent out about a product. And our new audience has no geographical boundaries, and sometimes no boundaries of any sort (sarcastic). This means any complaints about you are easily amplified. Not all these customers will address you directly, however, so you have to be listening. To listen effectively you need to become part of the conversations that are relevant to your business. Make sure customers can contact you easily, so as to prevent upset users from going on an online rant. Social listening will help you gain insights on what it is that your customers want, what’s working and what isn’t. But remember, every customer is not Steve Jobs, so don’t take customer feedback as gospel truth. Customers often do not even know what they want. Henry Ford was supposed to have once said, “If I asked my customers what they wanted, they would have said faster horses”. As most of you know Ford later went on to build cars, not faster horses! Just saying. But there are ways to get the most out of social listening. The first one is by creating tester communities. Make a list of online users who seem to be most active or extremely influential in conversations that are relevant to your business. Because not all users are equal. Audio clip Sorry, that’s just not how it works. Every internet community has what is called power users. After doing some social listening you’ll probably notice that some users tend to dominate conversations that relate to your product. Like my hypothetical friend Pinky from Bathinda. Pinky is a housewife from Punjab but she has a youtube channel that gives make-up tips on how to look like Kareena Kapoor, Katrina Kaif and Jacqueline Fernandes combined. Her Youtube channel has over 1.5 lakh subscribers. In the world of social media, she is Shah Rukh Khan. What I mean is she is a celebrity. And if you own MuhChamkaoing.com, the cosmetic company we spoke about earlier, she could be a power user in conversations that relate to you. If she even so much as likes you on Facebook, all her followers are automatically exposed to your ads and posts about your product. And if she mentions your product in one of her videos that explains how to make pouty lips, you have got yourself a social media endorsement. Power users are different for different brands. For a mobile company for example it could be a tech blogger who has a million followers, for a diaper company it could be a mother who gives parenting advice on her Facebook page, for a camera company it could be a photographer on Instagram. Connect with these users through e-mail or a Facebook group and let them engage, converse and network with each other while participating in conversations you generate. Exclusive access to your group could also be a reward for them as it could lead to a lot of networking, exclusive information and insights for them as well. So everybody wins! Yaaay! The next thing you can do to get the most out of social listening, is to listen to your competition. What’s going right and wrong with your competition can be a treasure trove of information for you. The third thing to do is to measure the performance of your social channels. Do certain posts do much better than other posts about similar products? You can find out using tools like Simply Measured and True Social Metrics, along with tools that the networks themselves provide. The bottom line is your customers and potential customers are openly talking about what they want. To use it usefully, all you need to do is listen. Hopefully we’ve given you enough background to understand the concept of listening. Go ahead and try it out in conversations that you are already a part of. When you’re back we’ll talk about how to respond with the right kind of content….