Social Listening - SWOT Analysis: Strengths

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    Companies are much more aware of the benefits of listening online and buzz monitoring platforms are an essential part of the social media toolset.
  
  
  • –  More businesses are beyond the experimental stage of engaging with social media, which means the focus is on optimising social media activity, measuring value and garnering actionable insights.
    
  • –  Senior management buy-in is less of an issue, as the value of social listening is clearly seen as important.
    
  • –  The value of social monitoring tools includes stronger relationships with customers, but they also include feedback, ideas for product improvements and development, and finding opportunities.
    
•   Companies are investing more money in marketing technology and, in general, the level of spending on online reputation monitoring software is steadily increasing.
  
•   There is more focus on the importance of social analytics as businesses are increasingly interested in measuring the impact of their social media activity.
  
•   In many cases, having appropriate reputation monitoring software in place would have helped to mitigate the threat of a potential growing online crisis.
  – Companies have plenty of case studies available to them, which illustrate what happens when companies ignore the voice of the customer or do not deal with complaints and issues.
  
•   Many tools are evolving beyond simply monitoring to become business intelligence tools. Listening platforms are able to incorporate different sources of data, which allows companies to reap more value from the tools.
  – Beyond just monitoring, online reputation tools can feed insights into workflows and provide actionable insights that companies can use to improve products or services.
  
•   Consumers increasingly expect businesses to reply to them in real-time, which means being having visibility on the pulse of the customer is essential.
  – The expected time for a response is decreasing, which means customers expect companies to resolve issues and deal with complaints faster.
   This subtle behavioural change means online reputation tools are clearly not going away any time soon.
  
•   The insights from social media are no longer the remit of one department, but rather, there is greater recognition that social media has consequences across all business functions.
  – More companies are employing a multichannel approach, of which social media is an essential part.