Social Listening Helps Brands Identify Industry Influencers and Advocates

By Kelly Wilson
5 Min Read
Social Listening Helps Brands Identify Industry Influencers and Advocates 1

Social listening refers to the process of tracking and segmenting digital conversations by monitoring a brand’s social media content followed by an analysis of the data obtained for actionable insights. The whole process helps marketing teams prioritize and evaluate consumer feedback on brand products and services. It is also helpful in assisting a brand in identifying industry influencers and advocates.

Social listening is valuable for upholding a brand’s customer engagement, making real-time changes to marketing strategies, and comparing a brand’s position to that of its competitors. It also helps with uncovering customer pain points and developing new sales leads.

Industry Influencers and Advocates

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Industry influencers and advocates are individuals who can use their social networking skills and abilities to help potential customers ultimately make a buying decision for your brand’s products and services. They, therefore, come in handy in helping a brand achieve its business objectives while increasing a company’s humanity.

Influencers can take the form of social media experts, industry experts, product reviewers, bloggers, famous people, and even trusted sources of information so long as they are unique to your brand’s products and services or your field. As such, social listening is an excellent way of identifying them.

Why You Need Industry Influencers and Advocates

These individuals reach core demographics by using their content driving more attention to your brand’s products and services. By doing so, not only do they help your brand find new customers but also keep existing customers happy.

Industry influencers and advocates also help in building meaningful relationships with your target audience over time both in the short and long term. Additionally, they increase SEO value by giving a brand more mentions and increasing backlinks to your brand’s site. This helps in stepping up your brand’s content marketing.

What to Look for

When using social listening to identify industry influencers and advocates, you should look for mutual goals between your brand and the industry influencer or advocate. Heavy lifting has to come from both parties to ensure you each meet your goals. Mapping these out, in the beginning, ensure that you are all on the same page.

If your industry influencer or advocate can help you reach a niche audience, the better. Using their content, industry influencers and advocates come in handy in helping you reach a specific audience since the target market can easily relate and engage with the content delivered.

When it comes to reaching, an industry influencer or advocate’s impact in the marketplace, you should check how large their following is and whether these numbers relate to the size of the audience you want to reach. Also, consider how well they are known across the industry and how well they resonate with the community you are trying to reach.

How to Reach Out

Identifying and reaching out to industry influencers and advocates is not the easiest of tasks. However, social listening simplifies this process using tools that allow you to measure and monitor content from various individuals using keywords you are also interested in. Some of these tools come with features that allow you to reach out to identified influencers and advocates while helping you weed out those who will not be of use to your cause.

To reach out to these individuals, you can start by liking their content such as shares and posts. You can also send them meaningful messages concerning their content. This will help them warm up to you before you add them to your network or join theirs. It is best, to be honest when telling them how you located them since it creates credibility on your part. Lastly, let them know you would like to work together with them but ensure you show that you value their time.

However, before you embark on this mission, conduct due diligence by finding out specific and nice things to say regarding what the influencer or advocate does. Also, ensure that you do not sound rushed or robotic during your exchange.

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Kelly Wilson is an experienced and skilled Business Consultant and Financial advisor in the USA.  She helps clients both personal and professional in long-term wealth building plans. During her spare time, she loves to write on Insta 4 likes, Business, Finance, Marketing, Social Media. She loves to share her knowledge and Expert tips with her readers.