To say that social media has taken over our lives would be an understatement! Today, the majority of people spend their time scrolling through various social media platforms. Initially, what began as a means to stay in touch with family and friends, has now become a key marketing and advertising platform for businesses across all types of industries – retail, healthcare, education, finance, etc. Businesses have explored the potential of this platform, and needless to say, it has become one of the top avenues for businesses to create awareness about their products/services, brand, etc., and build strong customer relationships and loyalty.
Along with using social media platforms for their generic purpose, several businesses have also started using it as a source of income and this medium has become one of the most competitive mediums. In order to ensure that your social media campaigns are successful and the returns on investment are high, it is not sufficient just to create and distribute the campaigns. There are several techniques and practices that you should follow because one negative comment or post can result in heavy losses for your business.
One of these key practices that businesses should follow includes regular tracking and monitoring of all their social media channels and keeping an eye out for any kind of red flags. In this post, we are going to take a look at one such key practice – social listening. By the end of this post, you will have a clear understanding of the what, when, why, and how of social listening, some key tips, and a list of the top five social listening tools that you can use.
Table of Contents
What is Social Listening?
So, let’s begin with the basic question – what is social listening? In simple words, it means keeping an ear to the ground or, in this case, an ear to all your social media channels to track any mentions and conversations about your business, brand, products/services, etc., and analyze those results to gain some deep, actionable insights. It involves tracking and analyzing conversations related to your overall business industry as well. With the help of social listening, you can find out what people think about your brand, understand why and where these conversations are happening, etc.
You can use the data gathered through social listening to perform various activities, such as fine-tuning your content and making it more specific to what your customers actually want, staying on top of your customer experience strategy, and staying up to date on all the latest industry trends and patterns, etc. To explain broadly, social listening involves two major steps:
- The first step involves monitoring your various social media platforms for any mention of your brand, products, competitors, etc.
- The second step involves analyzing the data and categorizing them into actionable insights. These actionable items can range from something as simple as responding to a customer to something as significant as an overall rebranding uplift.
Social listening has been in the market for a very long time, and you might be familiar with it in the form of surveys and feedback. However, today, with all the technological advancements in place, it has become easier to gather this crucial data without putting in too much manual effort. Slowly, with its importance gaining momentum, industry experts are recommending that social listening strategy should be a core part of every marketing activity.
Social Listening and Social Monitoring – Difference
Many people get confused between social listening and social monitoring, often assuming that they are one and the same. However, this is not true. There are quite a few differences between the two. Social monitoring mainly focuses on collecting the data and using that information to determine what has already happened. It uses various metrics like brand mentions, hashtags, competitor mentions, trends and patterns, keywords, etc. The data from these sources are helpful for monitoring the ROI, performance of A/B testing campaigns, setting annual budgets for social marketing, etc.
Social listening meanwhile focuses on the ‘online mood’ or sentiments behind the data gathered, which is why this technique is also sometimes referred to as social media sentiment. The analysis of this ‘online mood’ is vital as it enables businesses to understand the pulse of their customers as well as competitors. Rather than just providing the numbers on how many brands mentioned you got, it allows you to learn the actual feel and moods of your customers and use that information to drive the business ahead.
To sum it up, social monitoring can be defined as gathering data about things that have already occurred, whereas social listening is all about using the data to fine-tune your strategies and daily activities to take the business forward.
How Does Social Listening Work?
As mentioned earlier, the goal of social listening is to monitor the various social media channels, analyze the data to understand the mood and sentiment of the customers and use that information to build campaigns that will ensure that the sentiment remains positive. To achieve this, social listening involves three major steps:
- Monitoring – First, you would need to monitor the social platforms for mentions of your brand name, keywords related to your products/services, competitor mentions, etc., in social conversations. You can either monitor all this manually on a daily basis or use a tool that can automatically pull up the information.
- Analysis – This is the major step that differentiates social listening from social monitoring. The data gathered through monitoring is analyzed thoroughly to find out what your customers like or do not like about your brand. You can also use the data to identify emerging trends and patterns and design your marketing campaigns accordingly. You can make use of various customer sentiment analysis tools through which you can gain insights into the sentiments behind your customers’ texts.
- Response – The final step is the response that the business may take based on the insights gathered.
Social listening is one of the best techniques through which you can clearly find out who are your happy clients and who are the unhappy ones. You can also use it to measure the quality of your customer experience.
Why Should You Adopt Social Listening?
Several businesses work on the assumption about the likes and dislikes of their customers. However, in today’s highly competitive world, there is no room for assumptions. Businesses need to stay on top of their customer’s pulse and reposition their campaigns and brands as required. Here are the top four reasons why you should adopt social listening:
- A study conducted by Sprout Social revealed that 46% customers believe that a brand that engages with their customers on social media is the best in class. According to this research, being responsive makes a huge positive difference and 90% of the customers who follow brands on social media are likely to make a purchase. When businesses respond, it evokes a feeling of being valued which is what every customer wants. With regular interactions and engaging conversations, businesses can increase their client base and client loyalty.
- Social media is quite vast; however, even a tiny negative mention anywhere can result in huge reputation and revenue losses. Through social listening, businesses can analyze the negative comments and see the impact of those comments – has it reduced your number of followers, is there a decrease in your sales, etc. Depending on the results, you can determine if you need to take any steps or measures to control the situation.
- Social listening is a great tool to identify new opportunities. If you notice that several of your customers are complaining about the same issue, or are looking for any particular product or service, you can quickly get on board and come up with the solutions before your competitors. Through social listening, you come up with innovative changes that will ensure that your customers enjoy positive sentiments.
- Customers are the heart of every business and retaining your customer base is absolutely vital. This is where social listening can help you out. You can use the technique to view and analyze the posts, photos, hashtags, shares, likes, etc., that your customers enjoy and develop content accordingly so that they start enjoying and following your brand as well.
When Should You Use Social Listening?
Social listening can be used for multiple purposes, such as:
- Reputation management – Businesses should ensure that the experiences that they are providing are in sync with their reputation. Any mismatch between the two will result in an ‘experience gap’. Hence, it is important that any problem with your brand should be immediately fixed, as reputation damage is an indication of a bad customer experience. By monitoring and analyzing brand sentiment, businesses can ensure they enjoy a positive reputation.
- Competitor analysis – Businesses can use social listening to understand where they stand compared to all their direct and indirect competitors. This insight can help businesses answer several questions, such as which are your strong and weak areas, how efficient your business is, where you stand in terms of customer experience, etc., all in comparison with your competitors. By having these insights, you can develop your marketing strategies and campaigns.
- Leveraging influencers – Social listening is a great way to identify who your true influencers are and how to leverage them successfully. Today, customers are more likely to make a purchase based on peer reviews rather than elaborate advertisements. In such cases, it is vital that you identify who your actual influencers are, what they are saying about your brand, and ensure that you are providing them precise information.
Apart from these, some of the other uses cases for social listening include:
- Customer engagement
- Fix experience gaps
- Content creation
- Crisis management
- Marketing campaign performance
Metrics to Track via Social Listening
There are several metrics that you can track via social listening and use as per your business needs. Some of these metrics worth tracking are:
- Tracking your brand mentions and comparing them with your competitor’s mentions will give you an idea of where you stand in the market.
- The engagement rate of how well your customers are engaging with your content. The word ‘engagement’ refers to various actions, such as likes, shares, comments, tweets, retweets, following direct messages, etc. Higher the engagement rate, the higher the chances of building a positive relationship between you and your customer.
- Sentiment analysis is probably one of the most important metrics to track using social listening. Since sentiments can change over time, it is important that you are aware of any shift in your customer’s sentiments and make changes accordingly.
- Through social listening, you can track the conversion rate of how many users are converting into actual customers for your business.
Key Social Listening Tips
Here are some key social listening tips that you should practice in order to ensure that you are using this technique as effectively as possible.
- Understand your audience and find out who and why they are attracted towards your brand. Find out how to develop marketing campaigns for your targeted audience on their preferred choice of social media platform.
- Data is vast so have a clear idea of what insights you want so that you can ignore the ‘noise’ in the data set.
- Take advantage of keywords to filter social media conversations.
- Social data is unstructured; hence, it is best to use a social listening tool to gather all the required insights.
- Have the right strategies in place – both for social conversations that are favorable as well as those that are unfavorable.
Top 5 Social Listening Tools
Below are the top five social listening tools that you can use to take your business ahead and up your social media presence.
1. Hootsuite
2. Sprout Social
3. Lately
4. TweetDeck
5. Brandwatch
Conclusion
Social media is undoubtedly one of the best mediums available in the market today, and it is highly recommended that businesses take advantage of it as much as possible. To do so, they need to adopt techniques like social listening so that they can stay ahead of their competitors, improve their brand reputation, and build strong customer experiences.
Here are some more social listening tools that you can explore! You can also check out SaaSworthy to gain information about several other useful software to help you build a successful business.
