One of the best ways social media can help your business is by improving the way you listen to your customers. In, fact the best way to start any social media strategy is to ‘listen’.
In the offline world, companies spend vast amounts of money trying to listen to their customers through market research. But they aren’t really listening; they are getting answers to questions they have asked or put together.
Companies might also use focus groups to listen to a subset of customers, but what about those that aren’t in the focus group? Is the focus group really representative?
Using social media to listen is easy. There are a number of different, cost-effective ways to do it too:
Monitor mentions of your brand – this you can do without even being on a social network. You can use a vast range of free brand monitoring tools to listen to what your customers are saying. This can alert you to all sorts of things. By recording and tallying up common grievances, you can prioritize areas that you might need to change
Start a forum – rather than run offline focus groups, you can do a similar thing online with a much larger group of customers or clients. Why not set up a private forum and invite some of your customers to join? Encourage them to share their thoughts and feelings about the company – warts and all. Incentivise them to keep coming back and sharing more with you
Ask for feedback – if you don’t ask, you don’t get! So, if you have built up a following on social networks like Twitter or Facebook, ask your community for feedback. You might be launching or developing a new product or putting in place a new customer service system. Ask them what they think. You’ll be surprised how happy they will be to give you their thoughts
Listening to your customers through social media channels will build up more brand affinity and will let you ensure that what you do as a business meets your customers needs, desires and expectations.
Loading ...