Listening to Your Audience Is Good Business Your return on investment (ROI) with social media is to listen to your audience. Butrecent studies indicate that many brands are falling woefully short in this regard.Brands that listen to their audience can not only reduce costs, but turn negativesentiment into positive support, and earn them additional customers. Listening allows your company to obtain some basic insights into getting successfulstrategies in social media. Listening also allows you to know its audience, compare itto its market, identify new markets where the brand should be, manage the brand’sreputation, and optimize the performance of the brand’s community managementefforts.

Also, listening to your audience is especially vital in upcoming economies where it’sestimated that nine out of 10 Internet users are already in social networks. The rapidlyrising population in these developing nations considers social channels as one of theirbest sources to make purchases. People use social networks to connect with brands.In a recent study:

• 44 percent follow or like a brand in Facebook

• 28 percent wrote something about a brand

• 75 percent have looked at paid advertising on social networks

• 62 percent have read reviews about a brand

Despite this convincing data, it is estimated that 61 percent of the complaints that aremade through social networks are not acted upon by the companies involved. Failing to respond to social media suggestions or complaints creates two problems:

• Bad Reputation. Inattention not only creates a negative image for yourcompany or brand and the individual responsible, but also it’s bad foreveryone in that person’s network. This is especially true when an alienatedconsumer complains about the brand online where everybody can see it.

• Lost Opportunities. A brand that fails to listen to suggestions or complaintswill lose out on the chance to turn negative attitudes into positive attitudes.According to a recent study, almost half of users whose complaints were paidattention and responded to in a positive manner had an equally positivereaction towards the brand.

• But the most surprising finding is that they not only stopped writing negativethings, but started writing positive comments in 22 percent of the casesstudied.

Brands also can lose out on potential sales, and that is a critical point. Another studyshows that 88 percent of the visitors who see unattended complaints of a particularbrand in a social network are less inclined to purchase the products made by thatcompany. And brands can lose out on the chance to reduce their costs as well. Properlyimplemented customer support can enable a brand to save costs, especially thoserequired to address call center problems. Listening to Your Audience Is Good Business. By listening to your audience you canoptimize your brand’s strategies to solve many crisis problems and improve yourreputation. Listening to your audience is good business. Period.