Listening

 The first topic I read was about mastering the art of listening. A lot of times on social media we are bombarded with different people sell or advocating for different things. Half of which you’re really not interested in. Some might manage to catch your interest, but ultimately most just end up pissing you off. That is not the kind of disruption you need to build a fan base.

Humans by nature would always like to feel heard or like some one is listening,  so it’s not really possible to over emphasis the act of listening to you customers. Before I embarked on my quest of becoming likeable, I would always just bombard our fans with items I felt would compel people to look at and hence like our page, never once prompting for feedback of any sort, our fan base grew but only organically. 1like here 1like there, one comment here one comment there, that sort of growth. It took a while for me to realize that I was just one person and what I might find compelling and attractive others might not, talk less of having the time to stop, like the page, read and put up a post. Nonetheless without any tact I continued posting my deals and selling my brand Circuit Atlantic. After learning the importance of listening I stop and asked fan to tell us what they really think about us

 "Today is Circuit Atlantic's Customer Appreciation Day!(actually every day is customer appreciation day for us here!). Tell us what you think about our services and how you think we can serve you better. And don't forget we loving listening to you!"

Those were my exact words, and this got people talking, not too many but some at least I got 3 comments which I promptly replied to( people only know you are listening when you reply), well not too bad for a start. Another thing with listening is that you have to be ready to hear the good, the bad and the ugly, because more likely than not you’ll get all 3. If you are good at what you do, the good comments should out weight the bad and ugly, if you get more bad comments than good may be you’re not yet ready for social media. 

After the few comments I received form my first exercise, I realized that I needed more people in my fan bases to enable me get more comments or at least likes for the questions or comments I put up so as to have more people see it. Simply put, the stories you see on your Facebook page whenever you visit are not the most recent stories, but the stories that have a lot of likes and engagement, of course the most recent also appear but those that people are talking about more and also have more like will stay longer on individual pages. So I learnt that from this first lesson to respond as quickly as possible to any comment received there’s a higher chance of engaging or starting a conversation when you reply to people this will keep you on keep higher up on their wall and thus more people have the opportunity to view and also respond to your post!

The cost of not listening could be huge, before taking this position, we already had an existing Facebook page and also Twitter accounts. I did a check on twitter checking all the times we had been mentioned and I was surprised to see that we had been mentioned quite a number of times; with no response. We hadn't tweeted or at least responded to the tweets even those that were direct questions for us to answer.  We may have lost customers in this process of not listen. If I were a customer or a potential customer and I asked a question and my question wasn't responded to I probably wouldn't shop/do business with the company.

Also listen in on your competition; in our case the only one worth listening to was BringitBay, I went through their Facebook page and saw nothing interesting, so I moved on to twitter they had a stronger following on twitter, also noticed that they had one of the leading tech blogs in the country do an article on them. This seemed to me like a minus, because for me from a customers stand point why would you pay to get a review? And only the positive parts of your business are highlighted I would probably look at them as being insincere. I would prefer a sincere review where they look for the short comings of your site as well as the positive parts. Customers would react a lot better to that as sincerity breeds trust, and what more does a business need like their customers trust! Also worth while might be listening in or searching for related subjects, for instance doing a twitter search for I want to buy a new dress or shoe for a clothing store, for us we could do a combination of I want to buy…

Plan of action; Ensure I get notification whenever anything is placed on my wall Facebook and twitter (on my phone) and respond immediately. Here in Nigeria people might not always be on the internet, so it is helpful when you can respond to comments almost immediately while they are still on their computers. There are also platforms where you can listen in on all your different social media(am not interested yet in that I could easily see all the notifications as am still on my way to an uncontrollable fan base). I think it would be helpful to indicate my current number of likes on Facebook (1466) and followers on twitter (120). So if you are a Social Media Expert Wannabe like me you may find extra ways which you can listen in, to find out what your customers are thinking or how exactly they feel about your products and services, listening without any doubt has its rewards.