Social Listening: The Key to Differentiating Your Content from Your Competitors’ 

No matter what industry you belong to, it’s no longer uncommon to see a market full of similar-looking content.  The way companies describe their products and services are almost identical, brands cover similar topics in their blog posts, and marketing messages sound almost the same.

Without a doubt, it’s becoming increasingly difficult for businesses to set themselves apart from their competitors, especially in terms of content.

But, difficult doesn’t mean impossible.

There’s actually a secret to creating highly relevant and differentiated content: Social listening.

As your go-to SEO company in West Palm Beach, we will share with you why social listening is important for your business and how it can help you set your content apart from your competitors.

Before we delve into that, let’s first discuss what social listening is.

What Is Social Listening?

Social listening happens when you monitor your social media accounts for mentions and conversations that have something to do with your company. Then, you gather that information and analyze them for insights to discover what your target audience wants and needs, and what your competitors are up to.

You might think that social listening is similar to social media monitoring, but they’re completely different. Here’s how:

Social media monitoring focuses on metrics, like engagement rate and the number of mentions, whereas social listening observes beyond the numbers and dives deeper into the sentiments behind the data.

Social listening allows you to better understand how people feel about your brand, and your products or services. It also enables you to respond to positive or negative feedback right away. Most importantly, it provides insights you can use to keep your marketing efforts on track.

Why Is Social Listening Important for Your Business?

Engage with Customers

Through social listening, you can engage with your customers or target audience whenever they talk about your brand or your products and services on social platforms.

For example, a customer posts about how they love your products on Facebook, or an angry customer tweets about how bad your service is.

What’s great about this is that you can respond to questions, queries, and mentions immediately, helping you build rapport and allowing you to take control of any PR disasters and turn the situation around.

Keep Track of What People Say About Your Competitors

Aside from knowing what people are saying about you, you also want to monitor what they’re saying about your competitors. This will give you insights into where you should position your business in relation to your competitors.

You can also use social insights to find out what your competitors are doing on social media in real-time. Are they running new ads? Developing new marketing campaigns? Launching a new product?

Knowing all these things allows you to plan and respond suitably.

Discover Customer Pain Points

As much as people like talking about what they love on social media, they’re also very open to sharing about what they don’t love, especially regarding products and services they feel like they wasted money on.

Through social listening, you can find out what’s working and what’s not for your customers. And, you can use this information to refine your products and offerings and improve your customer service.

Some customers might even have an idea on how to tweak your existing product or services to better solve their problems. Use this to develop new products, which might end up to be the next big thing in the market.

Discover Micro-Influencers and Advocates

Micro-influencers are just as influential as macro-influencers, minus the hefty price tag. They can influence how their followers and fans feel about you and your products or services.

That’s why it’s important to connect with key influencers in your industry and build a relationship with them.

You also want to tap into people who already love and patronize your products and services. They are natural brand advocates, so be sureto reach out to them and collaborate.

Find New Sales Leads

You can use social listening to develop relationships with potential customers. But remember, people hate being sold to. So, focus on providing them with valuable content first and building a relationship.

How Can Social Listening Help You Make Highly Differentiated Content?

Now that you know what social listening is and why it’s important, let’s discuss how it can help you create highly differentiated content.

Better Understand Your Ideal and Existing Customers

You can use social listening as an audience research tactic to help you better understand your customers and ideal customers.

By finding out what your target audience shares, engage, or post on social media, you can extract information that reveals what topics they’re talking about, what they’re interested in, and how they feel about your products and services.

You can also use social listening to discover keywords your ideal customers and customers use and don’t use, so you know what to utilize and avoid in your content.

The data you gather can help you and your marketing team develop new content that your customers and target audience will most likely be responsive to.

Anticipate Emerging Trends

Anticipating emerging trends is necessary if you want to truly get ahead of your competitors. However, trends are moving faster than ever before.

So, what can you do to identify emerging trends and key themes in your industry?

By putting a finger on the pulse of your target audience!

When you target your search to get data in a recent time and on well-known voices and thought leaders in your niche, you can keep up with your customers’ and ideal customers’ ever-changing interests. This can help you produce content that is relevant, timely, and in-demand.

Increase Your Chances of Standing Out from Your Competition

When you and your competitors use the same description for your products and services, publish similar content, and use the same themes in your content marketing efforts, your audience can feel confused. This won’t help them move along the customer journey.

Through social listening, you can:

• Compile a list of words or phrases your competitors use for every social activity they have. You’ll be able to identify where you’re very similar in using the language and if you’re sending the same message.
• Use data from your competitors’ social channels to compare creative elements, such as style, formatting, visuals, and messages.
• Identify the white space in your market. What topics are your competitors not discussing in their articles, podcasts, and other content? Or, is there anything that they weren’t able to thoroughly discuss?
• Use the information you gather to create content that aims to meet the unmet needs of your target audience.

As the top SEO Company in West Palm Beach, we suggest that you use all these information to make sure that your ads, blog posts, videos, and other forms of content are highly differentiated from your competitors.

Track, Measure and Analyze Your Competitor

Social listening provides significant details about your competitor’s content, including the following:

• How frequently they put out publications, media, and virtual events
• Measure your competitor’s brand exposure based on their total social media mentions and conversations
• Data about their customers’ sentiments. What made their customers happy? What made them disappointed?
• Identify who your competitors are collaborating with on social media

All of these can provide you with valuable materials you can use to further refine your content marketing strategy and efforts.

For instance, if you see that their live videos don’t attract any engagement or interaction from their audience, you can avoid wasting your time doing live on your channel. Or, try to figure out why it isn’t working and avoid the same mistakes they made.

Looking for an SEO Company in West Palm Beach?

Social listening can be a powerful tool you can use to create highly differentiated content. It will not only put you ahead of your competitors, but also establish you as a key resource of information.

Digital Resource is your go-to SEO company in West Palm Beach! We can help you publish expertly written, highly differentiated content that will help you stand out and put you ahead of your competitors.

Now that everybody is on social media, including your ideal and existing customers, it’s high time you include social listening as a part of your digital marketing strategy.

Need help getting started? Contact us today to know what our social media marketing experts can do for you!

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