Discover the What, Why, and How of Social Listening
In today’s marketing landscape, it’s no secret that social media is a potent tool. Countless companies have ventured into the realm of social platforms, leveraging them to create content, build audiences, and promote their brands. However, there’s an often-underestimated facet of social media that holds immense value: social listening.
So, what exactly is social listening? It’s a strategic approach that empowers your brand to harness the vast and profound world of social media. It allows you to pinpoint the sentiments, thoughts, and conversations of your target audience, and most importantly, understand the reasons behind them.
By investing in social listening, you open the door to a deeper comprehension of not only what’s being said about your brand but also the broader industry in which you operate. This, in turn, provides invaluable insights that can drive multiple aspects of your business.
In this article, we will delve into the core of social listening, explaining its significance in the modern business landscape. We’ll also introduce you to the tools at your disposal for effective social listening. And as the icing on the cake, we’ll equip you with practical tips to kickstart your social listening strategy.
Are you ready to embark on this enlightening journey? Let’s dive in.
What Exactly Is Social Listening?
Social listening, in essence, is the art of monitoring discussions and dialogues taking place on social media that pertain to your brand. It goes beyond mere observation; it involves the intricate analysis of these conversations and the extraction of invaluable insights that can profoundly shape your future marketing endeavors.
The realm of these discussions is vast, encompassing everything from direct mentions of your brand or products to the broader landscape of your industry. It also includes deliberations about your competitors, relevant keywords, and other subjects that, although not directly related to your business, have a certain tangential relevance.
Picture it as an act of getting to know your audience intimately. You’re effectively eavesdropping on their chats, learning about their concerns, uncovering their interests, gauging their current excitements, and delving into much more.
The data gathered through social listening, once scrutinized, can serve as a catalyst for various aspects of your business. From gleaning insights for product development to igniting the spark of new content ideas or discovering improved methods to serve your customers, the applications are diverse and far-reaching.
Here’s a glimpse of what you can accomplish through the practice of social listening:
- Tracking Mentions: Keep tabs on references to your brand, products, or services across various social platforms.
- Assessing Sentiment: Delve into the public’s perception and sentiment towards your brand by discerning whether mentions tilt towards positivity, negativity, or neutrality.
- Uncovering Trends: Detect emerging trends among your target audience by identifying recurring themes, topics, or keywords in the ongoing conversations.
- Understanding Your Audience: Gain a more profound comprehension of your audience – who they are, where they congregate online, their desires, and how your brand can seamlessly connect with them.
In essence, social listening isn’t merely a formidable asset in the realm of marketing. It’s a multifaceted tool that can also enhance customer engagement, improve service quality, stimulate product development, and wield its influence over various facets of your business.
Social Listening vs Social Monitoring
If you’ve ever found yourself puzzled by the distinction between social listening and social monitoring, you’re certainly not alone. These terms are often employed interchangeably, though their scopes and objectives genuinely set them apart.
In broad strokes, social monitoring tends to be more confined in its focus, centering primarily on your brand. On the other hand, social listening adopts a broader, more comprehensive perspective, delving into the realm of insights with a big-picture mindset.
Social monitoring essentially involves the tracking of social activities directly tied to your brand. It serves the purpose of keeping you well-informed about real-time developments and allows you to address any pressing concerns effectively.
This facet of social media engagement often finds its place within a company’s customer support program, aiding in the prompt response to queries, provision of answers, and the resolution of complaints.
Moreover, social monitoring proves invaluable for identifying current trends or industry occurrences that might have relevance for your brand. Essentially, it revolves around staying abreast of the social media landscape pertaining to your brand, enabling swift reactions.
Social listening encompasses all these aspects but extends its reach even further. It diversifies the spectrum of what you track and places a significant emphasis on gaining insights that can profoundly impact brand strategy, content creation, and decision-making.
While social monitoring may hone in on mentions of your brand, social listening takes a leap beyond this point. It delves into broader consumer behavior and emerging industry trends, subjecting the conversations within those domains to qualitative analysis.
To draw a helpful analogy that elucidates the difference: If social monitoring is akin to tending to your own backyard, social listening is akin to taking a leisurely stroll through your neighborhood, eavesdropping on conversations to gain a deeper understanding of your neighbors’ interests and concerns.
In this article, our primary focus centers on social listening. However, it’s crucial to recognize that both social monitoring and social listening constitute integral components of a well-rounded and effective marketing strategy.
The Significance of Social Listening
As previously highlighted, the practice of social listening brings forth a plethora of advantages spanning various facets of your business, impacting everything from your marketing strategies to your product development and customer support. All of these positive outcomes, in turn, have the potential to significantly bolster your bottom line.
Let’s delve deeper into some of the key reasons why social listening is a pivotal tool within your business’s arsenal:
- Reputation Management
Social listening acts as a window into the sentiments surrounding your brand, products, messaging, or services. It enables you to gauge how your audience – including the general public – perceives your business. By comprehending both positive and negative sentiments and their sources, you can address deficiencies and enhance the overall perception of your company. - Understanding Your Audience
In the same vein, social listening serves as a valuable avenue for gaining comprehensive insights into your audience, encompassing current customers, potential prospects, and more. It provides valuable access to their thoughts, opinions, pain points, desires, and more. Armed with this knowledge, you possess the ability to tailor your content, messaging, and product offerings to better align with their needs. - Market Analysis
Social listening serves as a robust instrument for unearthing insights within your industry. This encompasses the identification of emerging trends, understanding consumer behaviors, spotting potential opportunities, and more. Armed with this type of information, you can position yourself ahead of competitors and deliver an unparalleled customer experience. - Competitive Insights
Incorporating social listening into your business strategy enables you to keep a vigilant watch over your competitors. You can draw essential learnings from their triumphs and pitfalls. Active listening provides the means to discern how your target market perceives your competitors and, in turn, apply these findings to set your business apart from the crowd. - Crisis Management
It’s an undeniable truth that crises can manifest in any business or industry. Social listening empowers you to detect potential crises before they escalate into full-blown problems, allowing for timely intervention and resolution. - Content Strategy
Do you seek insights into which content types and formats resonate most effectively with your audience? Social listening holds the key. With the acquired insights, you can craft content that engages your audience on a deeper level. - Lead Generation
Social listening can be harnessed as a robust lead generation tool. It assists in the discovery of prospects exhibiting interest in your industry, product niche, or subjects related to your business. Furthermore, by leveraging social listening insights to enhance your content strategy, reputation, products, customer experience, and more, you ultimately generate a greater number of leads for your business.
Social Listening Tools
Considering the vast amount of data involved in social listening, utilizing dedicated tools is highly recommended to streamline your efforts. Here are some well-regarded social listening tools:
1.Sprout Social
An influential player in the social media management arena, Sprout Social excels in social listening.
The Smart Inbox feature consolidates mentions, comments, and direct messages from all your social platforms into a unified feed for efficient management.
Additional features include audience analysis, campaign evaluation, crisis management, competitor analysis, influencer identification, sentiment analysis, and more.
Pricing:
30-day free trial.
Paid plans begin at $249/month for the Standard tier, $399/month for the Professional tier, and $499/month for the Advanced tier (annually billed).
Enterprise tier with custom pricing is available.
2. Hootsuite
Renowned for its social management capabilities, Hootsuite offers a comprehensive set of features for effective social listening.
Create custom streams to track hashtags, keywords, or mentions across various social platforms, enabling real-time monitoring and engagement.
Hootsuite provides tools and integrations for tracking brand sentiment, monitoring Reddit discussions, accessing consumer insights, and more.
Pricing:
30-day free trial.
Paid plans start at $99/month for the Professional tier and $249/month for the Team tier (annually billed).
Enterprise tier with custom pricing is also available.
3. Talkwalker
Talkwalker, a prominent name in the social listening sphere, monitors 150 million websites and over 10 social networks to power real-time listening.
It offers AI-driven sentiment analysis in more than 127 languages, notifications for unusual activities, issue detection, conversation clustering, and various other features.
Pricing:
Contact the Talkwalker team to obtain pricing details.
4. Brandwatch
Brandwatch is a robust social listening and analytics platform designed to monitor and analyze online conversations, pulling data from 100 million sources to ensure comprehensive coverage.
It conducts real-time sentiment and perception analysis of brand mentions, saving valuable time and effort.
Additional features include AI alerts for unusual mention activity, conversation translation across multiple languages, extensive historical data, and more.
Pricing:
Schedule a meeting with the Brandwatch team for pricing information.
5. Meltwater
Meltwater’s social listening tool monitors data from various feeds, including Facebook, Instagram, Twitch, Reddit, YouTube, and more, even detecting mentions of your brand in podcasts.
Key functionalities comprise analysis of topic and conversation trends, custom dashboard and report creation, consumer segmentation and behavior analysis, crisis management, and more.
Pricing:
Contact the Meltwater team for detailed pricing.
How To Build a Social Listening Strategy – Learn 6 Tips here
Now that you have a grasp of what social listening is and its significance, along with an understanding of the tools available to support your social listening efforts, it’s time to formulate your strategy. Here are six steps we recommend for constructing an effective social listening strategy:
Set Your Goals and Objectives
Before embarking on any significant project, your first step should be to establish clear goals for what you aim to achieve. Why are you venturing into social listening, and what are the desired outcomes? Sit down with your team to discuss and align your objectives.You may have one primary objective or several. Possible objectives could include:
- Enhancing your company’s customer service and support.Gaining insights to inform product development and improve product offerings.Monitoring brand sentiment among current and potential customers.Developing a deeper understanding of the competitive landscape in your industry and your competitors’ performance with social audiences.Staying updated on industry events and trends to identify content gaps and opportunities in advance.
Select Your Preferred Tool
While social listening can be performed manually, it will never match the comprehensiveness of a dedicated tool or platform. Social media listening tools, as mentioned earlier, can synthesize data from millions of sources simultaneously, providing valuable features such as sentiment analysis, trend identification, and activity tracking.
Although these tools often come with a cost, the insights they offer are invaluable. Conduct your research to choose a tool that aligns with your objectives and budget. Look for a tool that monitors various touchpoints, offers robust analytics, is customizable, and integrates with your existing tech stack, if necessary.
Identify Target Keywords and Topics
This step is of utmost importance. Take the time to define the keywords, topics, and hashtags you wish to monitor, as they serve as the foundation for your listening efforts. Ensure these encompass both keywords relevant to your brand and those related to your industry to gather the most useful information.
You should also consider any keywords or topics you might want to exclude and the reasons for doing so. These selections may evolve over time, but they form a well-considered and focused foundation based on current priorities and your overarching goals.
Establish Your Workflow
Determine who will be responsible for monitoring your social listening data, responding to relevant mentions, and analyzing the data for insights and progress reports. Addressing these aspects early on helps develop a clear workflow with defined responsibilities.Regular monitoring and engagement are essential, so ensure that someone keeps a close eye on your listening activity, and automated alerts can be quite beneficial.
Adapt as Necessary
Within the workflow discussed earlier, designate individuals responsible for routinely analyzing the collected data. The data won’t analyze itself, so create a consistent process for delving into your data, extracting insights, and taking action.It’s crucial to adapt your content strategy, marketing initiatives, customer service, and other areas based on the insights you gain. There’s no point in dedicating resources to social listening if you’re not leveraging the insights to benefit your business.
Don’t Overlook Measurement
Social media measurement is paramount, and this extends to your social listening endeavors. Over time, continue to measure the success of your efforts against the goals and objectives you set initially.This practice helps evaluate the impact of your social listening and identifies areas where you may need to pivot or refine your strategies based on the data you collect. Additionally, tracking social engagement metrics over time can reveal whether your learnings have contributed to improved overall social performance.
What Is Social Monitoring?
Social monitoring, as opposed to social listening, is the practice of tracking content across various online platforms, including social media sites, blogs, news sites, wikis, forums, message boards, and more. It serves as a means to discover what people are discussing regarding your brand, your competitors, your industry, your products or services, or any other subjects of interest. Social monitoring involves the tracking and management of all messages related to your business, products, and services.
It’s common to mix up the concepts of social listening and social monitoring, as they are both vital for brands, and there exists a spectrum between the two. Monitoring informs you about the “what,” while listening delves into the “why.”
With social monitoring, you can effectively “listen in” on conversations related to your brand and areas of interest, all without manually inspecting each message, post, or reply on every social network.
The Purpose of Social Monitoring
There are several reasons to invest time and effort in understanding what people are saying about your brand online. Social monitoring can:
- Enhance brand visibility online by measuring the frequency of brand mentions.
- Gauge the impact of your campaigns by assessing the buzz surrounding them and the sentiment of discussions.
- Identify opportunities for audience engagement and elevate your customer service by promptly responding to brand mentions, whether positive or negative.
- Provide insights into your competitors’ online activity, allowing you to understand what people are saying about them.
- Keep you informed about industry trends, making you more competitive and relevant.
- Alert you to potential crises by highlighting issues and defects through online complaints.
- Assist in the research phase of developing your social media and digital marketing strategy by providing a better understanding of customer sentiment and preferences.
How Social Monitoring Works
Brands utilize a range of social monitoring tools to keep track of online social activity. These tools efficiently perform the time-consuming task of finding mentions of your brand and keywords across the web.
For effective social media monitoring, it’s crucial to carefully select relevant keywords and phrases. Start with your brand name, products, services, and those of your competitors. Additionally, choose industry-related terms.
Social monitoring tools continuously crawl publicly available websites and data, some in real time, indexing the information. They initiate searches for your specific mentions, collating the findings in one place for you to access.
These tools employ techniques like keyword-density checks and smart pattern-matching algorithms to filter out spam and irrelevant content. Duplicate entries and unrelated information are excluded to ensure you receive high-quality data.
Once the data is located and organized, these tools offer various functionalities such as author analysis, metadata review, sentiment and topic analysis, query comparisons, data visualizations, and even the capability to engage with the conversations.
Conclusion
In a world where millions of conversations unfold on social media, any brand that neglects social listening is overlooking a substantial opportunity. By dedicating time to actively and attentively listen to your audience and prospective customers, gaining a deeper understanding of their needs, and effectively applying their feedback, you can achieve significant success for your business.
Therefore, consider the guidance provided here and commence the development of your social listening strategy today!
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