The art of social conversation is all about listening

The proliferation of Social Media in recent years has provided companies with an increasingly complex and substantial bulk of data and information. By “actively listening” to this data, brands have an opportunity to better understand their current and potential customers’ desires and purchasing intentions.

Through Social Media Listening, companies can exploit this huge mass of data, by continually monitoring online conversations about a product, service or brand. This approach uses all the online communication tools and channels (websites, blogs, social networks, wikis, podcasts, forums, videos, microblogging, etc.) to generate sales, increase customer satisfaction, and obtain leads.

Yet most firms do not use data from the web systematically. That is because social listening entails active monitoring, which often demands a major effort and considerable resource deployment in the form of tools and ad hoc training to analyse and manage the data properly.

Always at the cutting edge, Reply has decided to “exploit” the potential of social data by offering business customers a social-listening service based on using the data to best effect. It involves analysing sentiment and trends, identifying users’ buying intentions, boosting engagement, and generating leads. Reply uses the most innovative tools, such as Radian6 and Oracle Social Relationship Management, to implement social listening in the following areas:

• Social Media Marketing: By listening to online conversations during marketing campaigns, brands can study consumers’ reactions and thus respond proactively to feedback and make “adjustments” in real time. Evaluating a campaign’s success and gleaning ideas for future activities also become easier than before.
• Customer care: Active listening offers the opportunity to handle critical situations most effectively, by picking up on customer dissatisfaction faster and responding in real time to their comments.
• Brand Management: By monitoring how their brand is perceived, businesses can understand customers’ attitudes to it in a better way, and thus identify new Engagement opportunities.
• Market Insights: A brand’s strengths and weaknesses can be identified more swiftly, along with the associated opportunities, by analysing how customers view it compared to its competitors.