If you’re a small business like us and you want to compete with the big boys, you’re going to want every advantage you can get. And one way you can get ahead of the competition is social listening. But what is it? How can it help small businesses find leads?
We’re covering all that today, so keep on reading.
What is social listening?
Social listening is understanding the conversations online about your brand and its products, services, events, and other things relevant to your business.
This helps give you insight into the sentiments of your audience which, in turn, helps you understand what they like and dislike about your brand as well as what they want from you moving forward.
You can also use social listening on your competitor so you know exactly what people think about them, too.
Pretty powerful stuff, eh? It sounds an awful lot like social monitoring, though, so what’s the difference?
Social listening VS. Social monitoring
I like to think the difference between social monitoring and social listening is similar to trying to pass an exam versus trying to graduate from a course.
You can pass an exam by familiarizing yourself with certain topics and terms. But, to graduate, you need to understand entire subjects.
That being said, social monitoring is just tracking social media metrics such as followers, mentions, likes, and comments in real-time. This, by the way, is also useful as it helps you respond to both positive (and more importantly) negative reactions about your brand. Social listening helps you understand those metrics so that you can do more with them.
Another way to see this is that social monitoring is a reactive way of dealing with metrics whereas social listening is more proactive and can, therefore, help your PT clinic find leads.
6 ways social listening can help you find leads
1. You can swoop in on trends relevant to your practice
Social listening helps your business get more leads by getting ahead of trends surrounding your niche. Of course, in this case, it’s physical therapy.
For example, let’s say your social listening notices an uptick in the sale of massage guns. What do you do?
You stock up on massage guns, you create campaigns that talk about their benefits and uses, and you then you advertise it to your audience.
2. Social listening lets you woo your competitor’s customers.
As previously stated, social listening also lets you listen in on what your competitor’s customers are saying about them. So, when you find something negative, you can use it to your advantage.
For example, let’s say you heard a customer from a competing PT clinic complaining about not understanding what their treatments were for. You then use this information to remind your staff of the importance of building good rapport and patient education. This way, your business doesn’t suffer the same negative sentiments.
And, if your clinic doesn’t suffer from the same issue, you can spark a conversation with the disgruntled customer and help them with their problem.
Don’t — I repeat, DON’T — hard sell your products and services right away. No one likes a sales-y brand. Nurture the conversation and build a relationship until, eventually, it all leads to a sale.
3. Social listening gives you a roadmap to be better than your competition.
Social listening doesn’t just let you in on the negative sentiments surrounding your competition. No, it tells you about the good things they’re doing, too.
And, again, you can use this to your advantage by finding ways to beat them at their own game.
For example, let’s imagine that your PT clinic has a competitor just a couple of miles away. Many of their clients prefer them over you because they also have at-home physical therapy services and you don’t.
What do you do? You add at-home PT to your list of services.
4. It helps you choose which influencers to link up with.
Influencers have become a big part of modern-day marketing. Partnering up with them helps you expand your brand’s reach and, potentially, sales.
Social listening helps you find influencers to link up with by tracking conversations and mentions of these online personalities so that you know when they’re talking about topics related to your business, or discussing products and services that would be a good fit for yours.
5. You can use your analysis to uncover more marketing opportunities.
Social listening can uncover opportunities you might not have thought of which, in turn, help your business find more leads.
For instance, let’s say you’re running a campaign to sell your services to seniors with osteoarthritis. With social listening, you found out that many of these same people still enjoy walking outdoors. You might find more leads if you expanded your ads to physically active seniors, too.
6. You can bolster your social media campaigns.
The key to any successful social media campaign is personalization. It’s how you make your brand feel more human — which is the whole purpose of social media marketing anyway.
Social listening helps you do that by gaining better insight into your target audience’s pain points, interests, and other things that you can then use to create content that speaks directly to them.
Social listening tools that we recommend you start with
It’s hard, if not impossible to understand the murmurs around social media if you don’t have the tools to gather data. There are a lot of them around, both free and paid, but we do have our favorites.
Oh, and by the way, these tools are all free. So, they’re perfect for businesses-on-a-budget like us!
Google Alerts
Google alerts lets you stay up to date on topics, people, keywords, and anything you and your brand are interested in.
We like it because it’s very intuitive. You only have to type in whatever it is you’re interested in and Google is going to send you an email whenever it’s brought up.
Twitter advanced search
Twitter’s advanced search lets you easily scour Twitter to find keywords and topics relevant to your brand. The tool also allows you to further streamline your search through many filters, including setting a range for engagements and dates.
We find this very helpful for businesses because, more than likely, your brand will need a Twitter account anyway. It’s the best social network for frequent updates, after all, so it’s easier to nurture conversations and build a following while keeping your audience in the loop.
Here’s a guide that Twitter wrote about how you can use their advanced search tool.
Conclusion
If the goals you set for your brand tell you where to go, social listening helps you adjust your course so you get to where you want to be. Think of it like Google maps adjusting your route when it finds a road with less traffic or when you miss your turn.
To us, this makes social listening a valuable part of any campaign you run on social media.
Now, of course, you can do all of this on your own. But, if you’ve already got your hands full, we’d love to help. Give us a call!
