With Social Media becoming a must-have tool for all business people, small to medium enterprises and mega-corporations, it’s no secret that it is a vast resource with great flexibility and an unrated amount of potential market information. Not only that, but each platform is constantly growing and expanding its capabilities, for example Instagram recently bought out Instagram shopping in order to satisfy the hunger for social media shopping and Facebook added stories to compete with rival outfit Snapchat. All of these advancements mean there is more data flowing through the social media system than ever before, so it’s no surprise that people listen to it… and no… We don’t mean you are all being spied on we mean something called “Social Listening”.

Social monitoring and social listening often get confused. Social listening is classed as anything from scrolling your timeline (we all love a good meme, right? ?) to setting up alerts via Twitter when a certain account tweets.

“Social monitoring and social listening offer brands two use cases,” said a media manager at Sprout Social – Our Preferred social media management and social listening tool. “Whilst monitoring sees the trees; listening views the entire forest.”

This allows for broader view of industry trends, demographics, customer behaviour patterns and geographical location, as well as gaining information on customer personality, which has been shown to influence buying decisions. If a potential client group is impatient and is prone to impulse buying through online and contactless methods, it may mean that your slow loading web pages from your social media links are enough to deter their purchase.

Simply put, if you know what your target audience likes, you can talk about it more and make moves to improve what you do to make them more likely to choose YOUR business.

Want to know what you could do if someone was listening to your business’ social media channels? You’d be surprised at what you could find out about your own customer base and how that information could benefit your marketing, sales and overall customer experience to keep them coming back. Luckily here at Super Digital we are a team of digital marketing superheroes; not only can we listen into your social channels, but we can assist and advise the next step into getting your finger on the pulse of your target audience.