As social media and online content sharing continue to grow in popularity, active listening is becoming an important tool in the B2B marketer’s toolkit. You are probably already monitoring social media for mentions of your brand, but you need to do more than simply defend your brand’s online reputation. You must also actively listen for your keywords to learn what your customers, prospects and competitors are talking about – and then use that information to continuously create and enhance your messaging.

In its Active Listening: The Key to Relevance and PR Results white paper, PR Newswire states that active listening “measures the quality of the interaction between your brand and your audiences, yields continuous market intelligence and lets you find and fix issues as they arise, in real-time.”

PR Newswire also notes that “active listening builds the confidence and effectiveness needed to establish thought leadership and manage brand messaging in this challenging new environment.” Having this type of information can improve any PR or marketing program.

Here are three ways that you can get started with active listening:

• Provide B2B Thought Leadership: Take advantage of free tools like Google News Alerts to monitor your keywords and join discussions taking place in LinkedIn Answers and Groups to identify areas where there is a knowledge gap in your industry. This gives you the opportunity to provide valuable information that people need, which will build trust for your brand and relationships for your company.

• Communicate More Relevantly: Once you find these knowledge gaps, join the conversation to generate interest and sales leads. Have your employees post highly relevant, non-promotional content that educates in LinkedIn Groups and Answers and comment on industry news stories and blog posts. This will demonstrate that your company is a valuable information provider – and make it more likely that your audience will share your content and generate earned media for your brand.

• Optimize Brand Messaging: With social media, you must focus on what the person interacting with you is asking for – not on what you want to tell them – to build credibility and visibility. Active listening can help you do this by providing instant feedback on whether your messages are reaching the desired audience and if they are driving engagement. This allows you to promptly assess and enhance your brand messaging as needed.

Still not sure what will work for you? You can learn more about active listening techniques in the Active Listening: The Key to Relevance and PR Results whitepaper. Download the white paper from our friends at PR Newswire.