How Listening Allows Retailers to Join the Social Media Conversation

“Wisdom is the reward you get for a
lifetime of listening when you'd have preferred to talk.” - Doug Larson

Nothing ruins a good conversation like somebody who never
shuts up. While traditional retail advertising in print and broadcast has been
successful blasting ads across all platforms as loud as possible, the paradigm
shifts when you move into the digital and social arenas. Through the power of
blogs, tightly-knitted communities and transparency that internet has provided,
consumers now have a voice of their own. And they speak loud and often.  In this environment, it is not acceptable to
talk AT your customer or to just blast out sale messages. In this new social
age, it’s time to listen and join the conversation.

What should I monitor?

Retailers can leverages social media to gain key insights about customers by setting
up a personalized listening strategy. 
One of the most obvious things to listen for is the name of your brand. Brainstorm
variations of the brand and check how other users might use it or refer to it. Your
brand name could be abbreviated or misspelled, and if you don’t include those
terms in your search, you might miss some important insights. This is the first
and easiest step in listening, as all of the posts will relate directly to you.
It will help you catch both unhappy customers and raving fans, measure
sentiment about your brand and monitor potential problems before they have time
to damage your brand.

Capitalize on your competitor’s mistakes

Do a quick audit on your competitor’s social media channels and see what their
strengths and weaknesses are.  Are they
pushing out content without acknowledging their fans? Is their Twitter
inactive? Are they doing something you can learn from? You won’t be able to
capitalize any of those mistakes unless you actively listen first.

Geo fencing

Sometimes looking at all the search results can be overwhelming and irrelevant
if it doesn’t affect your store. Geo-targeting filters your search results down
to a specific area, allowing you to focus on what’s important in that region.
Depending on your goals it could be a zip code, a state or the area around your
store. This technique works great if you’re trying to analyze the effects of
your marketing campaign in a specific area or are searching for potential
customers who might have a problem you or your product can solve.

Some
tools to get you started
Google Alerts – Google Alerts has
been a time tested tool which alerts you every time there is a mention of a
specific topic or keyword.
Social Mention – Like Google Alerts but for social media.
Twitter search – One of the most
useful tools to search for specific topics of interest on Twitter.
Hootsuite – a dashboard to unite all of
your social channels.

Retailers who want to get the most out of social media need
to stop treating  it like a traditional
form of advertising and communication, because that tact is an automatic path
towards failure. It’s time to join the conversation by taking the first step of
listening to your customer. Or course, then you have to take the next step –
actually engaging in meaningful conversations with them.

Dmitri Pivtorak, – I'm listening.

Related articles

When Customers Attack: Turning Negative Comments into Opportunities

5 Online Properties Every Business Should Claim Now

How Kmart Used Social Listening (And Some Nerve) To Create A Ship-My-Pants Funny Viral Hit