In today’s digital age, how businesses and brands interact with customers is becoming increasingly important. With so much online chatter, it’s essential to have an effective system to monitor conversations, measure customer sentiment, and respond accordingly. This is where social listening comes into play.
In this article, we will explore what social listening is, why it’s important, how it works, and its benefits for businesses. By understanding social listening, your business, and brand can gain a competitive edge and make informed decisions to improve its marketing and customer service efforts.
What Is Social Listening?
Social listening, also known as social media listening, refers to tracking digital conversations across online platforms to understand what customers say regarding a brand or industry.
Social listening enables companies to take action based on the insights they have gathered. It can be compared to knowledge regarding your audience, competitors, or industry overall. These days, social media platforms provide an opportunity to look at the feedback from our customers directly – first-hand data – which we need to dive deeper into.
Social listening can be tricky to understand since it involves the word listening, and there is no possible way to actually “listen” on social media platforms. The term takes its meaning from how this process would look if it were in-person, not digital. Let’s walk through it.
How to Define Social Listening?
Social listening is the invaluable practice of attentively monitoring and analyzing online conversations to gain insights into customer sentiment, trends, and brand perception. In the digital realm, it involves actively listening across various platforms to gather feedback, comments, and critiques about your brand.
The insights gained through social listening can be invaluable. They can help you identify weak links in your current process, and enhance your customer experience. In the dynamic world of social media, data is key. If you are not listening, you miss out on many great insights.
Key Takeaways
The process of monitoring mentions and conversations regarding your brand on social media platforms and acting upon them is called social listening;
Collecting data on what customers mention, relevant keywords and trends on social media platforms is social media monitoring, while social listening is taking action based on collected data;
The practice of social listening can be a source of many powerful first-hand insights regarding your brand;
Social listening can be measured based on the volume of conversations online mentioning your brand, your relevant engagement rate, and your share of voice in the market.
Why Is Social Listening Important?
Customer data is an invaluable resource for businesses. Since social listening is an excellent source of raw customer data, it has become essential in creating customer profiles.
1. Increase your ROI
With the help of social listening, we can understand more about our target audience or even discover other potential leads. We can tie our analysis to the most used keywords or mentions and engage with our audience. We can also spot the top influences in our industry or potential brand ambassadors.
As a result, we can track the performance of our brand, tailor the campaigns for the audience’s needs, generate even better ideas for the future, and improve the overall customer experience.
2. Helps identify trends
By monitoring social media conversations and online discussions, businesses can stay ahead of the curve and identify emerging trends in their industry. This valuable information allows companies to adapt their strategies, products, and services to align with current market demands.
Whether it’s detecting shifts in customer preferences or spotting new opportunities, social listening enables businesses to stay relevant and competitive in a fast-paced digital landscape.
3. Essential for product feedback
Gathering feedback directly from customers is vital for improving products and services. Social listening provides a direct line of communication with customers, allowing businesses to capture real-time feedback, opinions, and suggestions.
When you are actively listening and engaging with customers’ thoughts and experiences, you can identify areas for improvement, address issues promptly, and enhance customer satisfaction. Leveraging social listening for product feedback not only strengthens customer relationships but also fosters brand loyalty and drives continuous innovation.
Pros
- Real-time customer insights and feedback
- Better understanding of customer sentiment and preferences
- Identifying trends and staying ahead of the competition
- Enhanced customer engagement and relationship building
- Opportunities for product improvement and innovation
Cons
- Information overload and difficulty in managing vast amounts of data
- Negative feedback and criticism may be overwhelming
- Need for skilled resources and tools to analyze data effectively
- Potential privacy concerns and ethical considerations
- Difficulty in measuring the direct impact on ROI
Social Listening vs Social Monitoring
Social listening can seem very similar, almost equal to social monitoring. But in theory, these two terms differ.
Social media monitoring is just the simple process of following essential metrics and collecting data about them. For example, suppose you want to do social media monitoring. In that case, you can start tracking your brand mentions on social media, the relevant hashtags connected to your brand, competitor mentions, emerging industry trends, etc.
While social media monitoring collects and tracks the metrics mentioned above, social listening is acting upon them. When you decide to take action regarding the findings of your social media monitoring, you are starting the social listening process.
How Is Social Listening measured?
There are a few metrics that can help you measure social listening. Afterward, as a result, you can develop an excellent social media listening strategy.
1. Look at the volume of the conversation
This is the number of times your brand or product has been mentioned on social media platforms. When you are actively running campaigns, it is normal for this number to be increased.
2. Measure your engagement rate
You can measure the engagement rate by looking at the number of shares, replies, times customers mention your brand, and retweets you receive on social media platforms. This will give you a clear perspective of whether your posts go viral.
3. Calculate your share of voice
Share of voice presents the market your brand owns compared to your competitors. It also stands for how much share your company has in the total demand of your industry. This metric can help you see how notable your campaigns are compared to the ones from your competitors.
To be able to judge based on the metrics above, you will need to compare your own brand to your competitors’ online presence. By comparing the metrics, you can estimate if you are doing better or worse than your competitors and adjust your further actions.
Pro tip
While measuring the metrics above, you should also pay attention to the Sentiment Analysis. Even if your volume of conversation, engagement rate, or share of voice is glowing, none of this will matter if it is negative. Additionally, social listening tools can make this process much faster.
Some of the most popular social listening tools are Sprout Social, Brandwatch, and Brand24. Use these tools to gain insights into brand mentions and stay ahead by monitoring customer sentiment, tracking industry trends, and analyzing competitor activity.
These tools offer powerful analytics, real-time monitoring, and data visualization, helping businesses respond swiftly to feedback and make informed decisions.
What Are The Best Social Listening Strategies?
Have the following strategies in mind to ease up and improve the process of social listening. The process can be complex and time-consuming, but worth it.
1. Pay attention to social media
Listen everywhere! The process’s first step is finding where your audience will likely mention your brand. This is a great way to start. First, you will know which platform to monitor most actively, and second, you can adjust your further marketing approach towards this platform.
Listening on every platform can give you a clear direction on joining the conversation online and boosting your engagement rate. Organically or via paid advertising.
Also, every platform speaks for itself. On each platform, the conversations are different. That’s why monitoring digital discussions regarding your brand on multiple platforms can give you insights from various aspects. For example, the conversations on LinkedIn will be much different than those on Instagram.
In addition, you may notice that people talk about you a lot on Facebook, but they have yet to mention you on Twitter.
2. Look what your competition is doing
You can learn many valuable things by looking at what your competitors are doing. That means you should track digital conversations regarding your brand and other brands that are eligible to be your competitors.
You can see upward what is successful in your industry and what is not performing as well as expected. And especially, you can learn a lot about your competitors from first-hand experience – how people feel towards them.
At the end of the day, it is much less painful to see others make mistakes and learn from them than to make them by yourself and learn the lesson the hard way. Many social listening tools also enable you to look at what your competition is doing.
3. Work with other teams
You may read a few comments on one social media platform with no significant value. Thus, you may obtain powerful positive and negative insights, which will present an opportunity for action from your side.
That is why you should also inform other teams that you are starting this process so they can be aware and ready to act as required at every moment. Collaboration between teams is very crucial here. Make sure to communicate your findings with other members as well.
4. Spot changes
If you follow what people say about your brand on online platforms for a longer time, you can develop a sense of how a regular conversation regarding your brand will look like.
Once you know how people regularly feel regarding your brand, you can easily spot a drop-down in the sentiment of your audience towards your brand. In these cases, it is not essential just to spot the change but also to investigate the reason for it so that you can take relevant actions.
5. Take action
Remember, the only thing differentiating social media listening from social media monitoring is that you should take action regarding your findings here. If you don’t take action, you only monitor social media.
Social listening is tracking metrics, gaining valuable insights from your customers, and acting upon those comments and feedback. If your brand is big and has been operating on the market for a few years, you will probably have many mentions on social media platforms.
Make sure to avoid drawing conclusions based on a few or individual comments. Make sure to analyze enough data for statistical significance, then take proper action.
Related Concepts
Explore these marketing concepts to deepen your understanding of social listening and enhance your overall marketing strategy.
Additional Tips & Tricks
- 62% of marketers claim that social listening is the best SMM tactic;
- Social listening tools can be of great help. Explore using a social listening tool such as BrandWatch and how they could improve your social listening efforts.
- Actively engage with your audience in real-time to build relationships and address customer concerns promptly. 76% of users on social media expect a response in the first 24 hours.
The Bottom Line
Social listening tracks and analyzes conversations on social media platforms to gain insights into customer behavior, interests, and more. By effectively implementing a social listening strategy, a business can gain access to valuable customer data and adapt its marketing strategies accordingly.
You’ve learned what social listening is, and you’ve got tips for your social listening strategy. With all this information, it’s up to you now to determine if utilizing social media listening is the business approach you need to take for your company or organization.
Social Listening FAQs
Social media listening gathers valuable information that can be used to improve customer service as well as the overall customer experience. In fact, social media listening without improving customer service and the customer experience is simply social media monitoring.
A social listening tool is a piece of software that enables social listening. Using social listening tools can make the process a much smoother experience. However, picking the right social listening tool for you is essential, as some can be expensive.
Social media listening provides valuable insight into customers’ sentiments towards a brand. The ability to identify brand sentiment and the benefits of social media listening for company analytics make it a valuable tool.
In short, brand sentiment refers to customers’ sentiment towards a brand. The feelings and perceptions they have to make up their sentiment. The overall social media sentiment toward your brand is vital for your social network reputation.
