Social Listening by Geolocation: Are You Listening to Your Customers?


May 27, 2015

social listening

In the early days of social listening, typical practice centered around monitoring keywords pertinent to your brand, products, or competitors. This gave marketers a glimpse of how their customers or potential customers referred to the product. But what are your customers talking about when they’re not talking about you?

Significant innovations in social listening platforms have recently given marketers an answer to this question and allowed greater access and opportunity to understand and reach customers in a meaningful way. 

Once such advancement is social listening by geolocation, making it possible to gather intel on people based on a predefined place and time. Combining the power of “what and why,” Gravy allows you to combine data and social listening to better understand consumer behavior at a hyper local level. Using CRM data to identify a target audience, the tool then gathers behavioral analytics within a geofenced area.

For example, let’s say your customer walks into a mall. What do they do there? Are moms shopping for themselves? Their kids? Did they stop and buy a latte after an hour or a glass of wine after three hours? Where did your customer stop just prior to entering your store, and what did they do when they left?

Beyond tracking behavior, do you want to know what people are sharing online when they are in a specific location? With a tool like Geofeedia, you can actually draw a map around a location and listen to all social media activity happening in that space. From there, you can refine by keywords, sort by frequency and use of social channel, develop audience demographics, and identify trends in consumer behavior — wants, needs, frustrations, or joys.

Forget traditional marketing personas. Conducting this level of analysis — by listening to people beyond those times when they’re talking about your brand — marketers can form a more holistic understanding of their customer that extends beyond the moment of brand-interaction. 

With this information, marketers have greater opportunity to: 

Keyword monitoring has its place but sophistication in geo-listening might significantly enhance your approach. This might be a good time to take a look at your overall strategy and see where you might be able to take advantage of new opportunities. 

How can you up your social listening game?

Photo via Flickr user Tim Pierce

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is a strategist, speaker, educator, and author of Brand Now: How to Stand Out in a Crowded, Distracted World and Get Scrappy: Smarter Digital Marketing for Businesses Big and Small. He is the Chief Brand Strategist at Brand Driven Digital, an educator at the University of Iowa, and host of the On Brand podcast. More about Nick.