Winning the confidence of customers was important before the recent crisis. Now, in the forever altered world following the crisis, earning their trust is imperative. Social listening and engagement play a critical role in doing so. During months of social isolation, people turned to and relied on social media to maintain a connection to the outside world.
Businesses must pander to this inclination because it is not going to fade away anytime soon. The crisis may have passed, but some of the shifts that it created are here to stay. For this reason, social listening and engagement should be pillars of every single company’s marketing strategy.
Preferred Form of Customer Service
People are not just averse to waiting on hold on the phone these days, but they are adamantly opposed to it. As a result, they are seeking other ways to receive customer service including via social media platforms. For example, eight billion messages are exchanged between consumers and businesses on Facebook Messenger per month. (1)
This form of customer service extends to comments and questions posted on companies’ social media platforms by customers and potential customers. The need for instant gratification is intensified in this format, making it necessary for businesses to respond with lightning speed to these comments and questions. It is not unreasonable to make doing so a dedicated task for a member of the marketing team.
Increased Sensitivity
Being tone-deaf to any extent is no longer acceptable or even tolerable. The crisis ramped up people’s sensitivity and rendered it necessary to communicate with enormous sensitivity. Social listening plays a crucial role in allowing businesses to take the pulse of their target audiences and respond accordingly.
Why? Unless leadership and marketing personnel can read minds, they will not know what their prospects are thinking and desiring unless they hear it directly from them. They also will have no idea what the perception of their brand is at any given time. Social listening offers a vital solution to these challenges.
Valuable Educational Tool
While it may sound far-fetched, social media interactions are a valuable tool for learning about what customers want and figuring out how to deliver their desires to them. An excellent way to do so is by posting questions about products and services. For example, “What would you like to see us add to our product?” Another good example is, “What features or capabilities would improve your experience in using our product?”
Ideally, these questions will generate answers and the answers will lead to a productive discourse about the product or service between members of the target audience and the marketing team. Responses should always be courteous, respectful and express a strong desire to serve. Asking questions as part of the response can help to elicit further details and engagement from prospects and existing customers. It also demonstrates that the business cares about giving customers value.
The roles that social engagement and social listening play in promoting and furthering business success have grown exponentially and they are not going to shrink anytime soon. Giving them their proper due and effort will give companies a distinct advantage over their competitors.
Uncertain times call for creative thinking. Contact Gavel International to be inspired with solutions that connect and engage your people.
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SOURCES:
1) https://about.fb.com/news/2018/05/f8-2018-new-tools-for-businesses-and-people-to-deepen-connections-in-messenger/
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