Social Media Listening, also known as Social Media Monitoring, is the process of identifying and assessing what is being said about a company, individual, product, or brand on the Internet. Conversations on the Internet produce massive amounts of unstructured data.
Social Media Listening falls under some if not all channel-specific social media management disciplines. Whereby, the easiest way to view social media management services is to consider its three disciplines. Including, social media listening, social media analytics, and social media engagement.
Comparatively, social listening is when you gather everything that is being said about your brand. On the other hand, social analytics helps you understand all the social media chatter and relate it to possible business changes.
While, social engagement is the act of interacting, usually 1-on-1 but occasionally at scale, with customers over social channels. Although, during online services & solutions delivery, most businesses take on social engagement to close the loop with customers on their issues.
What is Social Media Listening used for?
Any company knows that it’s essential to build a solid reputation and following on its social media. It’s ideal for your brand to become a household name as that’s when you’ve attained a high brand awareness.
However, things aren’t always so black and white. The last thing you want is to develop a reputation for all the wrong reasons. Due to what can suddenly become a rocky road, it’s vital to continuously track your brand’s social media channels and look out for any red flags.
That’s where social listening comes in. As can be seen from our illustration above, social media listening is the monitoring of your brand’s social media channels. Especially, for any customer feedback and direct mentions of your brand or discussions. In regards to;
- specific keywords,
- topics,
- competitors,
- or industries.
Followed by analysis to gain insights and act on those opportunities. Thus, social media listening is a two-part process, unlike social media monitoring.
Social monitoring merely does the former, keeping track of social media mentions and conversations. However, without the analysis and actionable responses, your brand cannot sufficiently meet the needs of its customers.
Can you use Social Listening in Data structuring?
Conversations on the Internet produce massive amounts of unstructured data. It’s important, therefore, to define what the goals are for a social media listening initiative.
Depending on the goal, the right tool might be a series of free Google Alerts or an expensive software suite. That eventually, includes ad hoc analysis and full integration with legacy customer relationship management (CRM) applications.
Both social media and person-to-person information-gathering have value, but social media listening is quickly becoming an important customer intelligence tool.
There are several ways to use social media to gain insight. Including, monitoring online customer support forums, and using software tools to gather comments from social outlets. Such as Facebook and Twitter and encouraging customers to suggest new product features and vote on their favorites.
In a large enterprise, social media monitoring tools can mine the text for specific keywords on social networking websites and blogs and in discussion forums and other social media.
Essentially, monitoring software transposes specific words or phrases in unstructured data into numerical values which are linked to structured data in a database so the data can be analyzed with traditional data mining techniques.
Why is Social Media Listening important?
As a matter of fact, social media listening finds root causes behind social conversations and implements long-term strategy changes. By performing social listening, you can create the kind of content your followers actually want.
Also, come up with new ideas based on industry trends, and improve your consumer experience by interacting directly with customers. In addition to continuously shifting your customer strategy to fit the current need.
In general, it’s important to come to these conclusions because it promotes a customer-centric mindset in your company. Rather than making assumptions about what your customers want or need, you should hear exactly what they’re saying.
It’s common for people to publicly share their opinions. Whether they be about the political state of our nation or about the latest meme. So it’s no surprise they do the same about the brands they interact with. Below are more exclusive and elaborate benefits of social media listening;
1. Customers like it when Brands respond
Customers want to feel heard on social media. According to research done by Sprout Social, 83% of respondents like when brands respond to questions, and 68% like when brands join conversations. Being responsive to social media clearly makes a difference.
After all, 48% of customers make a purchase with a brand that is responsive to its customers and prospects on social media. They want you to respond. But, it’s more than that. It’s about using social listening to thoughtfully craft responses that provide real value. Those are the kinds of responses that will elicit brand loyalty and increase customer retention rates.
2. You can Keep Track of your Brand’s growth
Sometimes, brands face scandals or serious issues. Things happen, but even one incident can cause a wave of negativity to plague your social media. It’s easy to ignore a couple of rude comments here and there, but it’s troublesome if the negative ones seem to outweigh the positive.
This is a great time to use social listening. By analyzing the recent incident, you can do some research and see if the rise in negative comments has actually led to a decrease in followers, sales, or whatever metric you choose to investigate. Then, you can determine whether serious measures need to be taken in response, or whether it’s simply a phase with no lasting effects.
3. You can Discover new Opportunities
Often, your customers do the work for you. When many customers start complaining about the same problem — or rooting for the same win — it’s a sign that that’s something to take note of and run with. Rather than simply monitoring these changes, you can use social listening to find ways to innovate on the changes.
For instance, maybe you work for a fitness center. Your customers have been sharing how frustrated they are about fitness classes filling up so quickly. There is an opportunity there for you to consider creating more classes, opening up more spots in each class.
Not to mention, which may require moving to larger spaces — or putting a limit on how many classes any one individual can sign up for in a week. Any of these options may have pros and cons, but testing out different methods can relay important results and, hopefully, satisfy more of your customers.
4. A leeway for Increased Customer acquisition
Social media holds many opportunities for broadening your reach to prospects. After all, your followers aren’t just your loyal customers; they’re also simply people who enjoy your content or who fell upon your social media. These are the kinds of people you should be targeting.
Inbound marketing highlights the importance of providing interesting, useful content that provides value to people. This initially attracts them to your brand and avoids you being forced to bombard them with distracting ads. It’s much easier to convert your content viewers and followers into leads and, eventually, customers, than it is to approach random strangers and hope they’ll be interested in your products or services.
What are the best Social Listening Tools?
Using social listening, you can discover the kinds of content that those who follow and mention you enjoy by viewing their posts, shares, hashtags, and photos.
Then, you can accordingly create relevant content that matches their taste and will ultimately draw them into your brand. Luckily, there are several tools available online to help you analyze the results of your social listening. Such as;
Sprout Social
Sprout Social offers social media management software to offer solutions that will ultimately improve your social media interactions with customers and prospects.
On the other hand, it offers Twitter Listener dashboards and reports to analyze your Twitter presence.
In addition, the platform uses real-time brand monitoring to track direct messages and brand-specific keywords.
Equally important, it also offers advanced social listening to help you notice emerging trends and influencers. With the help of the Sprout platform, you can;
- access in-depth data analytics to inform strategic decisions,
- streamline and scale your engagement efforts,
- publish content and campaigns, and, most importantly,
- uncover trends and insights through social listening to drive strategic changes.
The platform ultimately offers priceless insights that can help you consistently track and improve your social strategy.
Hootsuite
Hootsuite also offers a social monitoring and listening platform. Social media marketing and management dashboards help you build and grow relationships with your social media followers.
Then again, Hootsuite allows you to view all your messages, comments, and brand mentions across several social channels in one concise dashboard from which you can respond to them all.
You can also track influencers and leads into lists that can be imported and shared with others in your company.
You can use Hootsuite Analytics and Reports to track what’s being discussed about your brand, competitors, and your industry and improve your campaigns accordingly.
HubSpot
In general, HubSpot is marketing, sales, and service software that helps your business grow without compromise. Because “good for the business” should also mean “good for the customer.” Also, HubSpot offers a social media product to help you prioritize your social interactions and connect with all the right people.
All on one tool, you can build marketing campaigns, share content like blog posts and landing pages, automatically share content to various social channels, and discover the best times to post. You can also monitor social interactions with contacts in your database, and even create custom keyword monitoring streams.
In addition, it allows you to trigger email alerts so your sales team knows when your prospects mention you. Not forgetting, you can even compare performance across your social channels and keep track of the number of visits and leads you to receive.
The platform offers more than just social listening; it offers you an all-inclusive inbound marketing software. In particular to which benefits your entire team and helps you integrate socially as an integral part of the company.
Next, read this post on great customer service tweets from real brands. And also, learn more about social media marketing foundations.
Takeaway,
Social media can indicate growing and shifting customer trends. However, if you don’t pay attention and roll with the punches, your brand will falter among the brands that do.
Your customers want a brand that is fresh and interactive and provides them with products, services, support, and content that are genuinely useful and engaging.
I hope the above guide was useful in your preparation for your brand, business, or even product social media profiling strategy.
However, if you’ll have additional information, contributions, or even suggestions that demand our attention, please Contact Us.
Related Sources;
By the same token, you can share your thoughts in the comments box below this blog post.
All in all, below are more useful and related topic links that might best interest you.
- The Importance of Social Media in Business
- 12 Useful Web Tools You Didn’t Know About
- Social Analytics: What is Social Analytics?
- What is Social Engagement and Why is it Important?
- LinkedIn: Improving your Listening Skills
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