Have you ever heard of the importance of listening? Active listening is important in achieving clear communication and understanding of people. In the digital marketing world, there is a term called “social listening,” and it is significant when it comes to listening to your brand’s audience.
With social listening, you will not only learn the changing preferences of your target audience but also become more aware of what is happening on different channels and social media. In short, you will become updated, and this will give your brand the edge over others.
61% of businesses today employ social listening, and you do not want your business to be part of the remaining percentage. Not knowing any single update or information in the digital marketing realm will negatively impact your construction business/brand. So, you need to listen and be aware of what is happening.
In this blog post, learn every good thing about social listening, the differences between it and social monitoring, its major benefits, and many more.
What is Social Listening?
Social listening is the practice of gathering and analyzing social conversations across multiple platforms to draw actionable, useful business insights. It enables you to dive deep into the ongoing social chatter and actively track mentions of your construction brand and even your closest competitors.
The information you gather from active social listening can help you develop better strategies for improving your products, services, marketing, and overall customer experience. Moreover, social listening offers you a real-time view of:
- • Who your audience is
- What your audience wants
- Where your audience is active and most engaged
- When your audience is exactly engaging with you
- Why does your audience want to communicate with you
- How you can better serve your audience
Insights from social listening can significantly influence your business decisions, especially your product/service strategy, customer support/experience, and even construction marketing strategy. You can use these insights and information to create smarter, data-driven calls to positively impact your business’s bottom line.
The Major Difference Between Social Listening and Social Monitoring
Social listening and social monitoring sound so similar, and they actually are! However, there is a difference between these two, and it is important to know how they differ.
To make it easier for you to understand – Social listening is proactive, while social monitoring is reactive.
Here are two deeper explanations for these two:
- First, social monitoring will look closer at specific brand mentions and will send alerts, especially when your brand is being mentioned online. Sometimes, it is referred to as brand monitoring. This approach is particularly useful for responding to complaints as fast as it is. The only downside of social monitoring is that it will give you a lesser view of what people say about your construction brand or their thoughts about your industry.
- On the other hand, social listening will give you a detailed overview of all online conversations related to your business, brand, products, competitors and industry. This approach is holistic and offers valuable insights that can help you develop strategic decisions about your social media strategy and overall marketing strategy.
In short, if one of your goals is to stay current with social media trends, boost your brand awareness, and understand what people are saying about your brand online, you need to develop a listening strategy.
The Many Benefits of Social Listening for Your Construction Business
Here is how your business can benefit from active social listening:
1. Understand your audience even better
Social listening helps you better understand what your audience really wants from your brand. By nature, people will tell you what they really want. The thing is, you just need to listen. For example, you might have a current customer who goes to Twitter and posts a tweet about your construction service, or you find a recent conversation of people online looking for solutions that your service offerings can provide.
In both cases, you can see this as customer feedback and use it to enhance your service offering and make your construction clients happier and more satisfied.
2. Improves your business and product/service
Tracking conversations around your industry online will help uncover a lot of insights about what is working and what is not. People love to vent and express their opinions in this digital age. In fact, a whopping 96% of dissatisfied customers never complain directly to a business but vent their frustrations directly on social media.
You can use this information to learn more about your customers’ needs, pain points, and expectations regarding your products/services and those of your competitors.
This bulk of information is a gold mine for your marketing and product/service development.
3. Crisis management
Another benefit of social listening is that it enables you to monitor sentiment as it changes over time. Instantly, you will know when there is a change of tone in people’s online conversations, especially when it comes to your brand.
It is like an early warning system for possible crises that can arise. So, with social listening, you can find better opportunities to address and fix issues before they worsen.
4. Customer connection and acquisition
Social listening can help you discover conversations and questions about your sector online, just as we cited above. You will discover some of the most insightful conversations on social media platforms and may become a part of them.
If you want to join a conversation, do it with your target audience in mind. Also, ask yourself, “What value can you add to the conversation?” In the digital realm, you will be surprised to learn that you have many opportunities to develop relationships with your potential customers. You can simply start by social listening and having a conversation.
All these efforts can increase your number of leads and will continue to reinforce your lead acquisition efforts.
Steps to Create a Social Listening Strategy
We will share a quick walkthrough on developing a strong social listening strategy. This strategy, in particular, will help improve your reputation and drive meaningful brand engagement.
1. Choose a social listening tool
You should start by choosing the right social listening tools for this strategy. Many tools designed for social listening can help analyze thousands of social messages within minutes, generating the most helpful insights. Know that analyzing thousands of online messages manually looks very impractical. Also, building a customized social listening system will be too costly and time-consuming.
The right thing to do is to partner with one or more that best suits your needs.
2. Identify your initial goals and expected outcomes
A very specific set of goals is key to achieving your marketing initiatives. It helps guide and inform your overall social listening strategy.
Here are some sample goals you may want to set:
- Monitor your industry or niche to stay abreast of what’s new and what will make great content.
- Run a deep and thorough analysis of your construction brand to understand better what prospects and customers think.
- Always keep an eye on your competitor’s products/services, audiences, and marketing strategies.
- • Determine the most suitable content to share based on current trends and data.
- Determine your key audience on social media platforms and other channels to better inform your targeting strategy.
3. Choose the useful data sources
Deciding what data sources, you will use depends on where your audiences are most active and where you get the most engagement. Generally, X, commonly known as Twitter before, is the best place to find many social listening tools. In fact, it has hidden gems for social listening alone. Similarly, actively listening to customer feedback and opinions on Facebook and Instagram can also help you tap into them.
Ultimately, choose data sources that will give you a full sense of your brand’s position.
4. Build your topics and themes
Another key step to a successful social listening strategy is building a list of listening topics. The first thing to do is brainstorm very specific questions relevant to your brand. You can include terms and words you want to track and noise you want to avoid.
Here is a list of what to query:
- Hashtags
- Keywords and phrases
- User mentions
- Mentions from user
- Mentions to user
5. Take action and compile your findings
In this stage, you can create a system for responding to common social listening findings regarding comments. Note which comments can be acted on immediately and which ones you will ignore. In many cases, actions like liking or reposting a positive comment can be taken instantly. You can also send a quick response if there is a complaint.
Use a spreadsheet to compile your best findings. This can help you easily recognize patterns and trends and turn your findings into actionable insights.
6. Make use of all the insights to inform your strategy
When you want to develop your own social listening strategy, you need to always inform others about it. The more you inform your strategy, the more updated you are with everything that is going on in digital realm estate and your sector. Therefore, you will have the edge.
Inform your entire strategy by simply:
- Continuously tracking mentions
- Focusing on your brand sentiment and share of voice
- Gathering data from your campaigns and social accounts
Start Listening Now!
To sum up, social listening matters. This direct engagement gives you a plethora of benefits when being done right. Now is the time to work out your own strategy, help your construction business gain momentum, and increase your brand loyalty. Are you new to this work? If yes, then you will need professional assistance from a trusted agency. You can work with us!
At ConstructionMarketing.io, we have a great team of seasoned professionals and experts that can help you draft a compelling and winning social listening strategy. We take pride on our different approach. Sure, we know the basics like brand mentions or share of voice. But our team do things differently. We review real consumer conversations. Our ultimate goal is to help you enhance your brand through social listening.
As a full-service digital marketing company, we offer a complete suite of marketing solutions:
Talk to us today! Let’s leverage the power of social listening!