To improve your website’s SEO and direct traffic, you must first understand your audience’s needs and preferences.
To learn what your audience expects from you and how they react to your services, create a social listening strategy that allows you to see what users are saying about you online. A good strategy will include website reviews, OTA reviews, social media feedback, and product-related web searches.
A better way to understand this is through social monitoring and listening. While many businesses use these terms interchangeably, their differences allow you to make the most of the information you collect, making both essential to your business marketing strategy.
Social Monitoring
Social media monitoring is the process of identifying how your company is perceived online by combing through online data, ranging from website reviews to social media mentions and comments.
Social media monitoring is crucial for both your company and your customers because it enables you to create an effective feedback strategy that will help you to respond to reviews and comments as soon as they are made, as well as to prevent or manage PR crises more quickly and effectively.
Social Listening
Social listening takes a more proactive approach to interactions with your customers, whereas social monitoring refers to the response time and type your business uses to reflect customer insights. When you apply the feedback you gained from social monitoring to actually alter the service you offer, you have developed a social listening strategy.
An example of this would be if you receive feedback about the sofa in one of your apartments looking slightly worn out. You can quickly respond to this issue by using social listening, and you can then take concrete steps to change it by examining the sofa’s quality and, if necessary, providing a new one. Making these adjustments will demonstrate that you are paying attention to the customer’s feedback, which will increase their trust in you and help you avoid receiving negative feedback in the future.
When developing a social listening strategy you should consider the following:
- What do users say about your company, brand or services across different internet platforms?
- What are their needs and preferences, and how does your business help them solve their problems?
- What is your competitor doing to attract customers to their business? What services or products can you offer that your competitors can’t?
You can learn more about your brand reputation from social media, OTA (TripAdvisor, Airbnb) and search engine (Google, Bing) reviews. Listen to your customers and use this information to drive your business strategy.
