Why Social Listening is Key to Understanding Your Customers
Many moons ago, business owners could get away with dropping into the crowd and figuring out what their customers wanted through some good, old-fashioned eavesdropping. The owner of the booming department store on Fifth Avenue could gauge what people really wanted to find with a simple stroll across the sales floor. With a minor disguise, they could make a trip across the street to their competitor and figure out what their prospective customers were lacking.
In other words, social listening was pretty self-explanatory. Leave the office for an hour, drop into a social space, and start listening.
These days, social listening demands a lot more from businesses, but that’s not to say it needs to be over-complicated. In fact, nowadays, social listening (done right) is a lot less time-consuming than it was for the Victorian department store tycoon.