Effectively Leveraging Social Media to Improve Your Business

Featured article by Ulrik Bo Larsen, CEO, Falcon Social

ARE YOU LISTENING?

When it comes to understanding your market and customer base, social media can be an incredibly effective tool for gaining the insights you need – the data doesn’t lie.

However, in the midst of all the social media insights and capabilities now available, listening to Social Media is becoming a forgotten skill set. In the early stages of social media marketing, listening was at the very top of the list in a social media strategy. Companies placed emphasis on listening to social media conversations to see who was talking about them and hear what they had to say.

Nowadays, when building out social media strategy, brands have started focusing on community management and ad spend – but they shouldn’t forget the critical staple of listening as part of their social media toolbox.

Why Listen?

Effective listening allows brands to tap into conversations, hear what’s being said, and use those insights to discover influencers and unknown sites where they can engage in relevant conversations. It’s also important to make listening a priority to answer questions or provide relevant information, respond, engage and share posts. This enables brands to truly use social media as a platform to build relationships, provide customer service, and identify leads. For reputation and brand management, listening is the critical first step upon which successful engagement hinges. It also allows you do conduct market research and effectively manage crises.

Get in your customers’ shoes

When setting up listening projects, the keywords you use should be specific to your customers’ perspective, and to each department and metric you are measuring. Go beyond just looking at what your brand offers and think about how your customer views your brand, diving into the needs and challenges that would lead them towards your product. You should also use language, location and other qualifiers in your parameters to hone in on users. For instance, you can filter for high follower numbers in order to use listening to keep track of influencer and celebrity mentions.

Spread the word

Using listening to understand your target audience will help you to define listening parameters that enable you to dive into revealing conversations. In order to put the insights gained from listening to the best possible use, make sure to share the information gathered throughout the organization. For example, share customer support opportunities with the CS team, as social media is a necessary, healthy channel to use for addressing customer support issues. By communicating listening findings throughout the organization, a true understanding of the audience can be built out which will help determine where other departments can join conversations. Listening to conversations on social media can give the entire organization an understanding of how well defined their market position is, ultimately allowing teams to build internal strategies to drive business based on this feedback.

Make it a point to turn listening into engagement, by devoting time to understanding and analyzing what is heard from tuning into social conversations. Brands will be surprised to see how far the brand’s voice can be taken once there’s awareness of the conversations already taking place. For instance, when the proper lines of communication are established across departments, insights from listening to social media can help to inform proactive customer service efforts based on customer issues that are being referenced in social conversations. Brands can also use close listening to social media to foster relationships with earned media, by proactively engaging with brand advocates in real-time or using feedback to inspire new marketing ideas. Brands will find that engagement is significantly more effective if it is based on insights from a foundation of listening closely and carefully to what customers are already saying.

Ulrik Bo Larsen is a self-taught software engineer who has worked for global brands for many years and has extensive experience in developing products and servicing clients in the groove between Marketing and Technology.

He is a product of the Copenhagen tech environment – confident, innovative, and inclined to take risks. Ulrik built enterprise social media platform Falcon Social from scratch and launched it successfully into to the global market, helping brands around the world make the most of social media marketing.

Prior to Falcon, Ulrik founded a digital agency and built the first Scandinavian social network from the ground up to acquisition.