Each day your audience is getting more chatty. They’re using social media to talk about everything from things they love to things they hate.

To customers, social media can be an outlet for true self-expression. To businesses, it can be a marketing goldmine filled with valuable customer information. With this in mind, it is important to use social listening for your business.

Here’s why…

How To Use Social Listening For Your Business

Find Out Who’s Talking About Your Business

Discovering who is talking about your business helps you do the following:

• Find new influencers who amplify your brand message.
• Develop new products or services to offer your current customers.
• Understand how audiences are utilizing your products.

Using social listening for your business to understand what customers are thinking when considering–or using–your product or service. “Marketing smarter” means acquiring as much information as possible about your customer. This information allows you to better serve them by creating relevant products and simplifying the purchase process.

Tip: Twitter is a great channel to start. Search by hashtag to find out who’s talking about your business or industry. Check out this video that explains Twitter search:

Social media is permeating into the lives of your audience at a rapid pace. No matter who your target is, their social media engagement grows by leaps and bounds each day. Take advantage.

What Type of Content Are They Consuming

When using social listening for your business, you understand what content your audience is consuming. As a result, you can use this information to enhance your content marketing strategy.

Understanding this will help you discover the following:

• Whether your audience is sharing other people’s content or creating their own.
• The style and tone of content consumed which helps shape the tone of your communications.
• Whether your audience is sharing images, video or links.

Getting a feel for the format and style of shared content will help shape your content marketing channel mix.

When Are They Talking About Your Business

When developing and disseminating relevant content, timing is key. Social listening helps you discover the times conversations are taking place. With this information, you can discover a trend that improves the timing of communications sent to your audience.

Understanding the frequency of social media posting will also provide an understanding of your audience’s social media activity.

Finding the optimal timing to post your content naturally increases your engagement.

So, paying attention to both your timing and cadence is a key component to making sure your message resonates with your target audience.

Where Are They Talking About Your Business

Is your target audience talking about your business via LinkedIn, Twitter, or YouTube? It’s important to understand where your target audience resides and engage appropriately.

I recall a client who was head-strong on prioritizing Facebook in his marketing strategy. Although half the world is on the site, it was best he focus on where his target audience resides. In this case, it was Yelp and Twitter.

After doing some research, it came to our attention that his business was frequently being talked about on these sites. Now we developed a micro-strategy to successfully leverage these networks. Overall, this case study is an example of why it’s important to understand where your audience is talking about your organization. Once this takes place, you can adjust your marketing accordingly.

Why Are They Talking About Your Organization

What’s motivating your target audience to talk about your organization? Take a look at all factors to determine how to best motivate your audience and convince them to care about your content.

Tip: When crafting your content, remember it must demonstrate the following to resonate truly with your target audience:

• Relevance – Make sure that your content is strategically developed for your audience only. Meeting their needs should be your priority. Once you do this, their business will follow.
• Appeal – Try to develop content so great that it impels your audience to share.

Conclusion

A common fallacy for many marketers is attributing online behavior as the quintessential factor for audience insight. By understanding who is talking about your organization, you are able to gain true audience insight that goes beyond content clicks and sharing.

This is where social listening is critical to your marketing objectives. Simply put, what your audience says online may have different meanings than what content they consume and share.

For instance, users may click on content by mistake or share content without even consuming it. So, if you want to truly understand your target audience, you should consider social listening when developing your marketing strategy.