Here is a plain and straightforward definition of social listening–
Social listening refers to the process of monitoring conversations or mentions of your brand over social media. Simply put, it is the process to find out what people are saying about your brand over social media channels.
Let’s understand it with this simple example–
Imagine you run a cafe. One day you overhear some customers in line talking about your products.
“I like the latte here,” one says.
“Yeah, a latte is awesome. But I don’t like the pastries. They feel too dry.” the other one responds.
Now you got a reality check what your products are all about. Does everyone say the same thing about your pastries? So you start to hear other opinions about your pastries. Based on the feedback you get you start making changes to your pastries. And it pays off. Your pastries become the bestseller in your cafe.
That’s because you just used a tried and true method to interact with your customers and create or improve what they love.
This is how social listening can benefit you.
If social listening is still NOT part of your digital marketing strategy, you are missing out on a lot of useful insights that can make a difference.
It is all about tracking those conversations happening on social media platforms about your brand. Social listening has become an important tool to understand your customers better.
Why Social Listening is Important For the Growth of Your Business
Here are some convincing reasons why to include social listening in your marketing strategy.
- More than one million people view tweets about customer support, and over 70% of them are negative.
- Over 90% of unsatisfied customers won’t complain to you but will tell their friends about their disappointment with you.
- Half of the global marketers have opted for social listening to understand their customers better during the COVID 19.
- Over 60% of social media marketers believe social media listening is going to become more important than ever over the years.
What are the Benefits of Social Listening?
Getting a Competitive Edge:
Social listening also involves keeping a check on the customers’ discussion about your competitor. What are the things they like about your competitor? What is the thing they don’t like about them? From there, you can step in and show how your products can benefit them.
This will help you find new customers as well as new opportunities. It will convey a message that you care and that can make your business more attractive to prospective customers.
Increasing Engagement with Customers:
Social listening also lets you engage with your customers. For instance, a customer might have tweeted about the benefits of your products, or they might have approached you for customer service over social media.
Getting Familiar to Pain Points:
Tracking conversations gives you plenty of insights about what’s working and what’s not working. Such insights are valuable for your product and marketing team.
Maybe your products fail to help the customers. In such a scenario, you can figure out the problems through their conversations and improve your products accordingly. Once you make the necessary improvement to your product, you can tell customers about it with a targeted marketing campaign.
Finding Influencers:
Influencers refer to people who are known for their expertise and knowledge on a certain topic. They have vast access to a huge audience and can convince them to act. And there are a lot of social media posts that are about these social media influencers. Maybe your customers talk about them. You can reach out to these influencers for collaboration.
Improving Customer Service:
When you monitor the conversation of your customers over social media, you get to hear both positive and negative feedback. While positive feedbacks are encouraging, negative feedbacks helps you improve your products.
If a person takes the time to complain, they haven’t turned their back to you yet, meaning that they still like your brand.
What are Top Social Listening Tools?
Why do you need tools for social listening?
Finding the mention of your brand in the vast sea of social media is just finding a needle in the haystack. Moreover, there is a need to provide a timely response to the feedback of your customers. Here comes social listening tools. These tools automate the process, meaning that you can quickly gain insights as well as respond timely.
Here we have rounded up some useful social listening tools you can use.
Falcon:
Key Features:
- Keeping a tab on conversations associated with your brands/products
- Tracking and engaging wherever you have followers.
- Filtering extensively, accessing and viewing date by keyword, source, influencers, and content type.
- Offering sentiment analysis in multiple languages.
- Notifying if there is a spike in specific mentions.
- Letting you react to negative comments.
- Helping you identify influencers who interact with your topics.
HubSpot Social Media Management Software:
Key Features:
- Letting you monitor interactions, audiences, and conversations
- Letting you handle all of your social media tools as well as turn your content into social posts.
- Monitoring interactions, audiences, and conversations on social media.
Sprout Social:
Key Features:
- Monitoring and managing engagement across social networks in the smart inbox.
- Mapping out a content strategy and scheduling posts with the Publishing posts.
- Learning about your audience; bringing trends in social conversations and getting actionable insights.
HootSuite:
Key Features:
- Managing and monitoring all social media activity
- Tracking mentions and responds directly
- Personalizing paid social media campaigns
- Tracking results
Brand24:
Key Features:
- Showing what people say about your brands
- Letting you join in and engage in discussion directly from its platform
- Graphically showing your brand’s mentions
- Showing the reviews of industry influencers
Understanding the Difference between Social Listening and Social Monitoring
Although social listening is to monitor the conversion about your brand, it shouldn’t be confused with social monitoring.
Monitoring is all about watching, observing, and keeping track of things over time, while listening involves hearing and interpreting.
Social listening, on the other hand, is gathering data from those social mentions and customer conversations, and getting insights from them so you can make an informed decision.
You might call it becoming aware of the attitudes and opinions of people that you are talking to. Simply put, listening lets you understand how people are talking about you, your competitors, and the market landscape.
How to Create an Effective Social Listening Strategy?
How Do People Feel About Your Brand?
It is important to understand the public perception of your brand. It lets you get insights into the positive and negative feelings people have about your brand.
Identify the Best Channels:
Target the channels where your audience is likely to become more active. Is it Twitter or Instagram? Facebook? LinkedIn? When you are initiating your social listening strategy, you want to focus on the platforms that can make the most impact.
You can also choose social media tools to keep track of those conversations and mentions associated with your brand.
Invest in a Social Listening Tool:
Tools, as I said before, automate the process of social listening. These tools can track conversations, keywords, topic areas, and mentions in one place.
Build an Engagement Plan:
When you have your methods, goals, and process in place to monitor conversations, you require a plan for responding and interacting with social media users. It will let you respond quickly and join conversations when they are taking place. According to one study, over 70% of customers expect companies to respond within a day. Brands that are quick and proactive on social media build trust and ensure a more genuine customer experience.
The Bottom Line:
As more people use social media to talk about brands, creating a social listening strategy is important. Because social media is one of the most important channels for businesses to develop relationships with their buyers. Customers who feel engaged by companies on social media more time with them than other customers.
Using a combination of social monitoring and social listening can lead to better interactions with leads, prospects, and current customers on social networks.
So it makes sense to put real thought and planning into the way that your teams incorporate insights from when they “listen in” on what people are saying about your brand online.
Started working as a digital marketing expert, Varun Sharma is now also a well-known digital marketing speaker – a speaker on performance development, and a trusted mentor to businesses in the digital world. His keynote expositions are based on the digital marketing theories, which provide a fascinating insight into the secrets of high performance.