Social Media Listening – What Is It And Why Is It Important?

A business must create a strong impression and a reputation for its audience. Following social media and remaining quite active can become an asset for your brand to attain high brand awareness. However, things are not always smooth and positive because certain content can give you a bad reputation, such as scams, scandals, bad service, or other problems causing negative social media presence. It is the reason to track your social media channels of brands continuously, and that’s where social media listening comes into the picture. 

What Is Social Media Listening?

Social media listening is tracking your business’s presence on all the active social media platforms. This includes monitoring online conversations and mentions about your company and then analyzing them for insights to check out new opportunities. It is a two-step procedure.

• First, monitor social media channels for mentions of your products, brand, keywords, competitors and industry trends.
• Analyze the information to design a plan of action for improvement.

Social listening tools enable you to develop a solid understanding of how potential customers think about you by learning what they say on social channels. You can also learn what they believe regarding the competition.

Social Listening vs. Social Monitoring

Social listening has a wider range than social media monitoring. You track brand mentions, industry news, customer feedback, and many more with social listening. On the other hand,  social media monitoring has a narrow focus on certain keywords or campaigns.

The main difference between the two is the analysis. While social monitoring keeps track of social media conversations and mentions, it does not help with an action plan. Without a viable action plan, your brand cannot meet customers’ requirements sufficiently. That is when social listening comes to the rescue. With an analysis of the findings, social listening finds the root causes behind social conversations and helps execute long-term strategies. 

Why Does Social Listening Matter?

Now we have a clear idea of what social listening is and its role in social media marketing, let’s take a look at the reasons why social listening matters. 

Engage with Customers

Customers like it when brands respond to them. They want to be heard on social media. As per research, around 46% of consumers believe that engaging with a brand’s audience on social media makes the brand popular in the online world. 

Being active and responsive in the online world makes a huge difference for social marketing. By responding to relevant content on priority, social media marketers can influence consumer behavior positively to gain a profit for the entire business. Whenever consumers follow brands over social media platforms, around 90% are likely to buy goods and services.

Manage Crises

Social listening allows you to track user opinions to know if there is any change in it or how many people are having online conversations about you or the tone behind what they discuss. It is similar to an early warning system that alerts negative and positive changes in how your brand is displayed online. In this way, you can manage the crisis at the initial stages without letting it get beyond control. 

Track Competitors

You can track the growth of your brand and your competitors. Brands face serious problems or scandals where things happen, and even one incident can result in a negative wave to plague your social media. Listen and learn what your competition is doing differently that makes them better, and what they are not doing so you can do better. With a good social listening strategy, you can be ready for everything by tracking your brand’s insights as well as your rivals. 

Find Pain Points

While conducting social listening campaigns, you must not only monitor interactions about your selected competitors or your business. Allocate resources and time for monitoring more general discussions about your industry. While monitoring industry conversations, ask a few questions from yourself. 

• Any topic often discussed that your brand could use as an interaction tool?
• What are the reasons behind customers being unhappy with your work?
• Do your products or services meet consumer needs?

Whenever you start a social media listening procedure, it is essential to see what’s bothering your audience. Utilize social listening to know gaps in your product or industry.

Discover New Sales Leads

You will often see that your customers do the work for you. When some begin to complain about the same issue or some begin to appreciate the service, it is an indication that you need to take a note. Monitor such changes and utilize social listening to find out ways for innovating on changes. If you take this positively, you know that it will help you discover new leads. 

Identify Influencers and Advocates

Influencers love to talk about customer service problems, brand products, and services both offline and online. Active social listening can be helpful to find out critical influencers so that you can collect valuable insight about your industry, brand, or product. Once you identify your advocate or key influencers, you must create the influencer management plan by building crucial relationships.

While identifying advocates or influencers, look for the following criteria.

• Their social reach
• Their engaging post rates
• Volume and frequency of social activities

Social Listening Strategies

Are you having questions regarding customers, competitors, or products? Most probably social listening can help you find answers. Building a social listening strategy may help you run a good marketing campaign. We have a list of key conversations around which a business can plan its strategy. 

Brand Health

Knowing the brand’s public perception or their most essential products is an important starting point to take the strategy to another level. Additionally, you will get insights into negative or positive feelings people connect with your brand, features, and the specific traits that spark their attention.

Industry Insights

Social media listening strategies are helpful to pick up on industry trends in advance which in turn will help to guide your campaigns. Analyzing discussions or hashtags can make you better understand where your market is heading. It will help you repost or create content and products, which will become a key talking point as trends occur.

Competitive Analysis

Social media platforms are competitive battlegrounds for brands. Running an analysis of your competitors will help you understand your share of the social media audience. It will tell you what the competitors are doing better or lacking and how you can use it to introduce new products or services and give a better customer experience. 

Campaign Analysis

Businesses and brands spend a significant amount of time developing new marketing campaigns to launch. Still, without insight into the success of the campaign, they have no information about how to build or improve efficiency. This is a key conversation you need to include in your social listening.

Event Monitoring

Businesses often focus on the hashtags and miss out on the essential aspects like titles and critical themes. Looking out for queries and resolving them can ease the monitoring task and help improve the business monitoring opportunities. 

Custom Topic

Irrespective of the event, it’s vital for the business to get a comprehensive idea of the goals that resonated with the audience. The company must know whether the event was successful, and these insights can be attained better by listening to relevant conversations online.

Social Media Listening and Tracking Tools

With the vast amount of online conversations, it is necessary to utilize social listening tools. Here are some of the best social listening tools you can use free of charge. 

Buffer

Buffer is a system toolkit with all your social media stuff. It allows you to focus on doing what you love for your business and earn great returns. Further, it will enable you to monitor multiple social networks simultaneously. It combines all your social media accounts under a single roof.

BuzzSumo

BuzzSumo is a platform that works on cloud-based systems and allows you to discover the utmost engagement and outreach opportunities. It helps the businesses to monitor the competitors and get up-to-date industrial updates. Further, it enables you to find new keywords beneficial for your content success.

Mention

An effective social media and web monitoring tool which helps to receive real-time alerts for a keyword. It can monitor millions of sources in real-time and in multiple languages. 

Agorapulse

This is a social media management tool beneficial for businesses, agencies, and marketers. It allows companies to manage social media messages, schedules, and content publishing. Besides, it helps monitor social channels and get special reports in a single go.

Conclusion

Social media listening data indicates growth and shifting of customer trends. It’s vital to pay attention and make your brand grow among the competition. Customers seek an interactive brand that provides engaging services and can catch their attention. Tracking online conversations will give you valuable data about your target audience which will go a long way in improving your overall business strategy.