A Key to Social Media Success: Listen!

I read a lot. Old-fashioned paper books, Kindle books, and online blog posts and articles. Sometimes I read about Internet marketing. And recently, the same message has come up over and over: One of the keys to social media success is to listen.

Honestly, this is something that is on my resolutions list. To listen more.

In my personal life, but also as it relates to online marketing and social media.

What Is Social Media Success?

Before we dive into the art of listening, let’s determine what we consider social media success.

And here it comes: it’s going to depend on your business goals. However, generally, social media success means that you have built an active community of online supporters (whether for your brand, your cause, or an individual initiative) who talk about you and share information with each other.

For most businesses and organizations, social media success also means driving traffic to your site (your 24/7 salesperson) and increasing sales (ideally by more dollars than you spent on your social media strategy).

Why Listen?

But isn’t social media all about getting your name out there and tweeting cool links and posting groovy YouTube videos? Well, that’s one component. However, until you start listening to your future supporters, you won’t know what to say to get them to join you!

Listening actually transcends social media success. It’s about being successful as a business. Period. Ever heard about market research? Listening. Customer service? Listening.

Learn the Ropes

In social media, it’s especially important to listen if you’re new to a given platform. What’s the etiquette? What type of information is shared? What are people looking for (hint: not blatant advertising)?

Build Relationships

A pretty common metaphor when discussing listening is the cocktail party. Nobody wants to talk to the guy who only talks about himself. This is true online as well. It’s better to ask questions and listen. People will respect you if you’re not all “me, me, me!!”

Once you get to know people, they’ll be more receptive to hear what you have to say.

Reputation Management

It’s also important to listen to find out what people are saying about you. I recently read about the United Airlines customer service fiasco in Likeable Social Media by Dave Kerpen. (He’s a cool guy, btw. You should read his book!) If you look at the video, you’ll notice one of the airline representatives covering her ears. That was the point of the story… United wouldn’t listen to the complaints about the destroyed guitar. Hence the video with 11+ million views. United never responded. Not good.

Respond quickly to all bad comments. ~Dave Kerpen

How to Listen?

Listening to somebody in a face to face conversation without thinking about your next comment or traversing your todo-list in your head is hard enough. How do you listen online?

Twitter

Twitter is a good place to listen to what other people have to say. You can create searches like “pizza” to find out what people are saying about pizza. Like this one:

If I were Happys Pizza, I’d probably want to do something about that!

LinkedIn Answers

LinkedIn has a wonderful area where users can ask questions and get answers from fellow LinkedIn users. For example, if you’re an insurance agent, you may want to search for questions with the word “insurance.” If you do this, you may find the following question:

Now you can read the answers and see what people think. Free market research right at your fingertips!

Google Alerts

Google Alerts are great for finding out when somebody is talking about you, or your brand, or any keyword anywhere on the Internet. There are several settings for how frequently you want to receive email alerts, and you can specify broad matches (without quotes) and exact matches (with quotes).

By getting these alerts, you can quickly respond to negative comments (or positive ones, for that matter) and manage your reputation.

There are a lot of other ways to listen. You need to determine the tools that work best for you and your business goals.

Action item: Make sure you set aside some time each day to listen. 15 minutes is more than enough (unless you’re United Airlines or of similar size). You’re on your way to social media success!!