Social media is a powerful tool if you know how to use it. In this article, we’ll show you how to listen to your audience and gain insights into what they really want.
Social media is all about engagement and it’s a great tool for discovering what your audience really thinks about your products or services. Here are some of the ways you can find out what your audience is saying about you and how you can learn from it.
Monitoring Social Media
If you really want to listen to your audience then you’ll need to monitor social media closely. Luckily, this is pretty easy. All you have to do is search each platform for the key terms that describe your product, service or business.
Look for any mentions that are relevant to your business and then learn from them. This can take a variety of forms, including responding to customer complaints, clearing up any issues they may be having, or thanking them for a kind review.
Engaging with customers is a great way to build loyalty and brand trust and, in the long run, it will grow your customer base organically.
What if no one is talking about you?
If you’re checking through social media and no one is talking about you, don’t worry, it doesn’t mean you’ve done anything wrong. In fact, this will be the case for 99.9% of companies, especially if they aren’t focusing their efforts on social media engagement.
The truth is, people only really talk about companies and products for 3 reasons.
- They love it
- They hate it
- They are selling it
Not every company needs people to talk about them online for them to be successful. However, if people are talking about you, then it’s often a good indicator of success.
If you are looking for people to engage with your business and you want to boost your social media following to find new customers, then paid advertising is the most effective way.
Responding to Customer Comments
If you’re doing affiliate marketing, then paid advertising on social media is most likely going to be your bread and butter. However, what many affiliates fail to do is engage with the people who comment on their ads. The result, especially if you’re using Facebook, is that your page will seem less legitimate and Facebook will have less trust in your business.
One of the easiest ways to drive engagement and ensure that you are responsive to customer messages is to use a chatbot. Chatbots can reply instantly on your behalf and even drive people to your funnels from comment sections.
Getting people from your ad comments into your flows can be an additional source of income, and can even turn sceptical visitors into customers.
If you want to get tips on the best services to use, then register with Converting Team today and speak to us directly.
Keep your Eye on the Competition
Taking the time to look at what’s happening on social media doesn’t just mean looking for what people are saying about you. You should also check out what people are saying about your competitors.
To find out more about the things your competition is doing well, and to see things that you think you could do better, hunt down their channels of communication. If you can see that they regularly use certain hashtags or discuss certain topics, you can use those to find their audience.
If you’re using Facebook, then you can check out the ads your competitors are using via the Facebook Ads Library by searching for their page name.
Monitor the Wider Social Impact for your Niche
Depending on the products or services you are selling, it’s worth looking at the world through the lens of your prospective customers. When it comes to marketing, understanding your target audience is key and the more you know about what makes them tick, the better placed you will be to sell to them.
One of the interesting things about societies is that, while we’re all individuals, we are far from unique. Large sections of society form very similar habits and often hold similar views. Tapping into these can be an awesome source of inspiration for your campaigns.
To do this, look at your product/service from outside of the box. Let’s say you are selling umbrellas. What are the pros and cons?
Pros:
- Keeps you dry when it rains.
Cons:
- It doesn’t really keep you dry when it rains.
- You have to carry it.
- People always lose them.
- They break when it’s windy
- They are awkward to hold.
- Take ages to dry properly
- The little catch thing always gets jammed.
- When you finally release the little catch thing, you’ve applied so much pressure that you open it with enough force to turn it inside out and end up breaking it.
- The pocket-sized ones with the little bags are impossible to get back into the bag once you’ve taken them out.
- You end up with 12 of the damn things because the ones you lost eventually show up.
- When you take it out it never rains.
- On the rare chance when you do take it out and it does rain, anyone who’s with you will walk awkwardly next to you to try to get shelter until you get so fed up you just give them the umbrella because it’s easier to get wet than get stepped on.
In short, umbrellas are just awful. But, they are awful for everyone and that’s an interesting shared experience.
Finding out all of these pain points and understanding them, can help you play them to your advantage. Sometimes, acknowledging your customers’ experiences and using them can give you the winning edge. Plus, if you know what your customers’ complaints are, you can start to sow the seeds of change.
People are not put off buying them and it’s possible to find positives in the negatives. Here are a couple of examples:
When you remember to take your umbrella out, it never rains. - It never rains when you have your umbrella!
People scramble to get under your umbrella when it does rain. - Umbrellas bring people together.
Umbrellas are awkward things but that awkwardness creates fun social interactions, and regardless of how much people might think they dislike them, they ultimately have a place in the cultural psyche. If you can play into that, then you can create powerful campaigns that appeal to people at their core.
The Bottom Line
The more you know about your audience the better. Every little piece of information you have at your disposal can be used to paint a picture of what makes them tick. At the end of the day, behind all of the algorithms and data, there are real people, with real lives, real desires and real experiences and understanding the human element can give you the edge in your campaigns.