• Media Intelligence: How Small Business Can Leverage Social Listening?

Small businesses can benefit from social listening since a strong social listening platform can be utilized for numerous purposes within the company. Although social listening programs range in price from free to premium, they all follow the same adage as most other things in life: you get what you pay for.

5 Ways to Make the Most of a Social Listening Tool for Small Businesses
Examine the competition

Every business strategy should include a competitive analysis. While a competitive study used to be a lengthy, time-consuming, and often costly process involving external contractors and agencies, social listening can now be used to benchmark yourself against your competitors in a variety of creative ways:

• Positioning: What are your rivals saying about themselves, and is it resonating with the right people? Examine how your competitors are positioning themselves and their products, and see if they’re receiving any input from relevant community members that could help you with your marketing. Don’t just adopt the insights you find right away; go a little deeper and track how conversations evolve over a few months to see if you can spot a pattern. Whether you’re a small business, it’s a good idea to see what other small businesses are doing to see if your budget can reach the same results.
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• Product: Are your small business competitors leaking information about what they’re working on? How can you use your method to combat this? Again, don’t change your company’s strategy just because your competition is working on something. Use the information you’ve gathered to go deeper. For example, conduct an industry keyword search on the information you’ve gathered to see if there’s a steady increase in interaction. Just because a rival is doing something does not indicate it is correct. For example, you may notice that discussion on a specific topic is waning, indicating that following suit is not a good decision.

• Share of Voice: Which of you receives the most attention? Vanity metrics like “following” aren’t the greatest way to assess a social marketing campaign’s effectiveness. After all, followers can only contribute if they interact with you. As a result, instead of counting followers, consider using interaction as a success indicator.

• Awareness: Is their brand awareness among relevant audiences rising or diminishing, and how does this compare to yours? Look at if engagement is increasing or declining and whether the people connecting with your brand and your competitor’s brand are the same small group of people or growing.

 
Creative Direction 

Twitter is a fantastic tool for experimenting with topic lines and messaging on your followers. You can submit the same content on several days and see which taglines, hooks, and positioning garner the most traffic. This strategy is also effective in crisis communication: if you’re trying to handle a public relations problem, check to see whether your message consistently resonates with your customers with your brand.

Product Development

Your competitors aren’t the only ones discussing items; industry influencers and customers are as well. You never know what you’ll find if you use your small business’s brand name as a general industry search keyword. If your firm is new, you’ll rarely find discussions regarding it; but, what relevant followers have to say about your sector as a whole/products competitor’s is equally significant and forms the foundation of a strong R&D strategy.

HR

Do you have any idea what your coworkers are saying about you? Because sites like Glassdoor cater to the naysayer, it’s not always possible to gain an accurate picture of how you’re seen in the real world. 

Regardless, it’s critical to know what people think of your brand because it can significantly impact the people you hire to work for your small business. Skills are important, but so is a good brand reputation for filling in any skill shortfalls.

Chase Market Trends

There are customers and industry influencers, and then there are investors. When it comes to market trends, all three are worth listening to, and any effective social media monitoring software will offer community capabilities that let you tag and follow influencers.

Hopefully, this post has demonstrated how your small business may use social marketing and social media listening to inform all of your company’s strategies, not just the marketing department’s.

Read more: How Micro-Influencers Benefits Your Brand