This week’s key points:
- Social listening: what is it? And how can you use it to help develop your brand?
- Social media is becoming a product research tool for consumers
- Why personalizing experiences for your customers is important
Besides providing endless hours of mind numbing entertainment, social media can be a powerful tool for your business in ways you may not expect. With the proper know-how, you can use social to uncover the uncensored desires, needs, and opinions of your audience as they pertain to your product and brand. In addition, as social media grows into a shopping hub, you can use it to create personalized experiences for prospective customers and clients with shopping tools.
Social Listening
Social listening enables you to engage with your consumer in real time, as well as better understand how your consumer feels about your brand and messaging.
Clarabridge explains the importance of social listening as most consumers turn to social media to find new brands and products. Likewise, social platforms are a trusted source for product reviews since consumers place a lot of trust within peer reviews. The implementation of social listening can help inform your social media content choices and business decisions, as well as create authentic connections between your brand and consumer.
Social listening allows you to effectively analyze your messaging and interact with consumers in real time. This process allows your brand to stay at the forefront of the consumer’s mind. We are seeing companies integrate humor into their social messaging and create a sense of humanity through interactions. When done right, various social trends prove to be just the thing that consumers are looking for from their favorite brands.
As social media remains a prevalent source of communication, there are many ways to use social listening: social customer service, witty comebacks to competitors, and hopping on trends. Social listening is proving to be an important key in honing brand awareness and loyalty.
Social listening is so simple, you can do it right now. Just go on Twitter and search your company’s name to see what people are saying about you. Take it one step further by interacting directly with your consumers.
Social Media as a Product Research Tool
The landscape of social media is changing with a push towards e-commerce. Instagram and Facebook have created specific shopping tools that go beyond advertising to create an online shopping experience within their own platform. Now, brands are able to set up shop right on social platforms for easy and quick shopping. Consumers are able to purchase in the moment with no further external steps.
As the social media landscape goes beyond sociability, we are witnessing more room for brand discovery. Each day provides a new opportunity for your brand to spread awareness about your product or service as social media becomes a hub for commerce. Insider Intelligence explains:
“While consumers may go online to search for a product that they need, social commerce could fill a void when people go online without knowledge of what they’re looking for or even intent to buy. Through social media platforms, brands and companies are looking to help consumers with product discovery.”
With the help of social listening, you can reach consumers in a new way and direct them towards your product. The ability to purchase items within social media platforms may be the aspect we’ve been waiting for to reach your business goals.
Personalization
With the presence of targeting tools, the personalization of social commerce is increasingly important to consumers. A personalized experience shows deeper consumer understanding and care. A survey from Segment revealed that “nearly half of shoppers surveyed (49 percent) have purchased a product they did not intend to buy after receiving a personalized recommendation from a brand”.
With a combination of social listening and social media as a research tool, brands are expected to create personalized shopping experiences for their consumers–and it’s paying off.
You know your business, we know social. Let’s talk.
Thanks for reading, and we’ll see you for the next installment of Media Trends Monday! Have a great week.