Social listening is a powerful tool for eCommerce retailers.
It can help you spot trends, gain insight into your customers’ needs, monitor competitors, and even predict future sales.
But how do you use social listening?
There are lots of ways to listen to what people are saying about your company or products on social media. To get started, here are five easy ways you can put social listening to work for your eCommerce business.
1. Monitor the Competition
Monitoring the competition is one of the most obvious ways to use social listening. You can see what they’re doing right and wrong and make changes accordingly.
Social listening can help you stay on top of what’s happening with your competitors. You can find out what they’re saying about themselves as well as discover new opportunities for product development and marketing campaigns based on what people are saying about them.
It’s important to keep up with the competition so that you don’t fall behind, particularly with your SEO strategy and your web design — staying up to date with the latest trends is important for your brand image.
If people are talking negatively about a competitor’s product, then this could be an opportunity for you. For example, if your competitors are receiving poor feedback for a major website overhaul, it may give you insight into what to avoid for your upcoming redesign.
2. Identify Influencers and Community Leaders
If you have a strong online community, it can be helpful to know who the influencers are in that space. These people may be able to help promote your brand or generate referrals for new customers if they like what they see when shopping around on your site or visiting one of your brick-and-mortar locations. Leaders in your niche will be directing the trends you should be implementing with regard to your website’s design and your SEO strategy.
3. Find Opportunities to Engage with Customers Through Support Channels
Social channels are an excellent place to find out what your customers are saying about your brand or products. You can use a tool like Sprout Social or Hootsuite to monitor Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and other social networks in real-time.
If a customer has a problem with their order or an issue with the product they received, they’re going to reach out to your brand on social media. By monitoring conversations about your brand and products, you can identify and react quickly in these situations.
4. Test New Content Ideas
Social listening is also useful for testing out new content ideas before publishing them on your site. For example, if you want to write an article about how consumers feel about shipping costs on certain products, look at what people are complaining about, and then make sure that you address these issues in your article. This will give you a good sense of whether people will respond positively to this type of content before investing time and energy into creating it.
5. Monitor Trends
Social media users discuss trends on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram all of the time — it’s one of the main reasons why people use these platforms. If you want your business to be on trend with its customers, make sure you’re keeping up with popular topics in your industry by monitoring relevant hashtags and keywords. This will also give you insight into what type of content resonates most with your target audience (and what doesn’t).
Create an alert for keywords related to your industry or products. You can do this in Google Alerts or Mention by setting up an alert that will email you whenever someone mentions one of these keywords on Twitter or Instagram. For example, if you sell women’s clothing online and want to know when new styles come out, set up an alert for “women’s fashion.”
Expand Your eCommerce Empire with Help from DigitlHaus
Social listening can help you identify opportunities for growth, learn about customer preferences, and even uncover new markets.
DigitlHaus is here to help you start selling online and expand your reach. We provide design, development, and SEO services for eCommerce businesses designed to help them reach their maximum potential. To learn more about how we can help your company grow, please contact our team today. We look forward to speaking with you.
