Social Listening and PR

I know every one of you have heard of the word “listening”. But have you ever heard of a word called “Social Listening”? I’m sure most of you have not heard the word . And even if you have heard the word, I don’t think most of you have a clear understanding of what is the exact meaning of the word social listening. So, I thought of discussing about social listening in this blog post.

First of all I’m going to give you the definition for social listening. According to Track Maven which is the Competitive Intelligence Platform for Enterprise Marketers social listening is the process of monitoring digital media channels to devise a strategy that will better influence consumers. A company can use that information for analyzing consumer behavior, determining the public’s perception of a company, and comparing a company’s public reputation to its competitors’.

After social media, social listening is considered as the most noteworthy technology to come to the field of marketing. The best thing about social listening is its effectiveness can be used not only for marketing but for all the other functions of the company. Companies can listen for industry trends, competitive analysis, product insights and lots of other instances.

First of all you have to identify that are you listening to all the important conversations going on in the industry, what are they talking about your company etc.? If not I can say that you are missing thousands of opportunities every second you spend. If you are running any kind of social media for your company it is very important that you listen to your customers, competitors and other partners and respond to them as soon as possible.

Since the number of active internet users is increasing day by day, the internet provides a great platform for companies to get online real time feedback from their customers without incurring a cent. Companies can observe and analyse the actions of the internet and social media and analyse those data to draw conclusions. They can see what pages the customers like, what groups they belong to, what are their feedback on new ideas and products by the competitors and so on. And also if you are actively participating in those conversations and replaying to the comments of your customers without a delay it will help you to grow their loyalty towards your company as well.

Merely handling social media or having social media networks is not enough to face the modern competition. Companies should maintain a closer rapport between its stakeholders and have a good public relationship with them due to following reasons.

• When there is a crisis in the society, people start talking about it and with the help of social media it can spread like wild fire.
• How can the company involve in resolving a matter of a customer because the customers have the power to promote your product as well as to evacuate your product from the market.
• Social media listening help the companies to understand customer insights by involving in their real conversations. From those conversations companies can get an idea about how the customers feel about their product, what are the improvements can be done, what are the competitive advantages we have over the competitors. And these conversations also provide real time focus groups for the companies.
• Social media can create organic awareness for your product and brand.
• A successfully carried out social media campaigns can increase the sales and the brand name and reputation.

So if you want to maintain good relationships with your stakeholders and improve the public relationships, it is recommended to maintain a good social listening process.