Think about the last time you spoke with a business owner or employee who made you feel as if you were a truly valued customer. Didn’t you come away from that encounter feeling heard? Visible? Understood? Wouldn’t you want a customer to feel that way when they engage with you on Facebook and Twitter?

In the often noisy atmosphere of social media it can feel like we are trying to listen to others and trying to be heard at the same time. But business owners are starting to understand that social marketing is not traditional broadcast advertising. We can’t make being heard our first priority. Rather, how we listen is now the most valuable aspect of our social marketing.

Listening is about validating someone else. It’s about making him or her visible in a world crowded with millions of people vying for attention. Active listening happens when we let go of our natural inclination to rebut, respond, defend, explain, etc., while someone is speaking to us. In social media, it’s about shutting up our inner thoughts, suspending our urge to immediately start typing a response and instead really understand what the other person is saying. We need to hear where their conversation is going and allow it to go there. Once there, we can use the resulting knowledge to keep writing the conversation forward.

In social media, listening to the customer allows us to recognize those customers who give our brand their ongoing loyalty. It allows us opportunities to create solutions for customer needs. And it allows us to interact with new customers before they even step foot inside our business. That’s big. In traditional broadcast advertising, we can’t participate in this kind of real-time dialogue because the only interaction that is encouraged is a sale. And traditional customer service relies upon stock phrases such as “How may I help you” and “Have a nice day” to maintain bare minimum interaction. That’s not listening. That’s lip service. There’s a difference.

It’s important to understand that our customer no longer wants to be “sold” something. She wants to matter to our business. Do you know what drives her end of the conversation? Being recognized, included, and heard, because she’s the person in social media actively supporting our business. She is not some nameless, faceless entity. Her avatar might be a dog or a flower or the face of her child, but she is real. She cares enough to let us know that she is following our brand, telling us what she loves about it, what she isn’t so crazy about and what she would like to see more of from us. She is engaged in our passion. Our business thrives because of her. So let’s adjust our social volume, listen in and hear what she has to say. Because in the end, a successful social marketing campaign is not about us, it’s about her.

Meagan V. Albury