When building your social media strategy, do something unconventional: actually invest time and energy (maybe even money) into social listening. Social listening can help you proactively listen to conversations happening about your business or industry so that you take part in them. It has benefits for building brand awareness, generating leads, and providing customer service.

Social media monitoring and social searches can be used to find people and build awareness with people who would be ideal prospects, if they only knew about your brand/product/solution. Once you find them, initiating a conversation can help to generate leads.

Doing this can also help you to proactively provide customer service by identifying customer pain points to provide fast, direct responses to questions, complaints, and comments. It can also be used to surface feedback that can help improve or differentiate your brand, product, or service.

Not everyone who talks about your brand on social media will tag you so start by finding people who are already having conversations that you can organically participate in. The easiest way to do this is to use social search engines and search by keyword, branded term, industry term, or influential personality in your organization.

If you are a local business, often times you can use geographic search to find local issues and conversations, and nearby influencers.