Listening to what the customer wants has always been important in marketing, but with machine learning, we’re taking that to a whole new level.

Social listening analyzes reactions to a product or service. This includes looking at brand mentions, online reviews and interactions with users on a company’s social media.

Of course, there’s technology you can buy that gathers all of this information, plugs it into an algorithm and tells you where you’re exceeding expectations and where you’re lacking. 

Most social scheduling tools have social monitoring built in. Hootsuite and Buffer both have inboxes that allow you to monitor and respond to brand mentions.  Monitoring your mentions and engaging with your audience is only part of the puzzle for social listening though.

Buffer gives you analytics on engagement and audience behavior. That’s social listening — looking at the data as a whole to find trends, outliers and abnormalities. It gives you a better understanding of the public’s views of your company as a whole. 

Once you have this intel, you can use this ‘bigger picture’ to tweak your brand strategy. Up your marketing game on what you’re doing well on. Or, scoring well on.  Listening also allows you to see trends in issues with your product or service, so you can fix the problem — and take care of it right away.

I’m Robin Samora with the Fast Marketing Minute. I’ve just written a special report on Social PR Trends. Would you like a copy? Download it at RobinSamora.com/SocialPR. Talk tomorrow!