It’s no secret that social networks are the center of consumers’ online worlds. They’re where consumers spend the majority of their online time. Many believe that the social networks are here to stay, and companies need to learn how to make the best of this.
If you are a company today, people are out there talking about your brand. If you don’t listen to them, you’re not only ignoring valuable feedback, you’re damaging potentially positive relationships.
To see why it’s extremely important to listen, look at what happens when a company blatantly does the opposite. Intel, for example, freaked out when protestors of conflict minerals flooded their Facebook wall with comments. Instead of interacting, they ended up reacting, and deleted all of the comments. It ended up being a huge social media mistake that did two terrible things at the same time — it made them look like the bad guys, and it gave the issue even more publicity than it had before.
To start listening to what’s being said about you online, there are some great, free sites that exist to help you search the social web:
- Setting up Google Alerts is an easy way to be notified every day of anything that comes up on the search engine about your brand.
- Addictomatic is a great way to get a quick high-level overview of what’s going on.
Once you see what areas are getting the most activity, you can delve deeper with these next four:
Even more important than listening to your customers is doing something with what you hear. Use all of this unsolicited praise and/or criticism to improve everything — whether it be the company’s product or future communications. And always speak back in real-time — vocal consumers are speaking out for a reason, and, more than anything, they want to know that they’re being heard.