Social listening can reveal clues that can help you improve engagement in your digital presence.
As the world is constantly turning around on social media and people are spending more and more time on their favorite platforms, there is likely a conversation about you or your business. If that is the case, you can use this to your benefit and improve your standings online.
It’s not only important to build a good social media following base, but you also need to maintain your audience engaged. And if you listen to your followers closely, you will be able to gather insights on how you can actually improve your business or do something different that your followers will appreciate.
The worst thing that can happen is to give your audience something that they are not interested in. This way, you will lose followers instead of gaining more new ones and it might be the downfall of your brand.
That is the real reason why it is important to follow and analyze the social media platforms, for the sole reason of building a business strategy that will help you set industry trends and initiate successful social media marketing campaigns. Also, this process can assist you in increasing your social media presence. But let’s dive more deeply into this topic and find out what social listening actually is.
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What is social listening?
The term social listening actually explains itself; you are following the most used social platforms and find any mentions on your name, brand, competition, whole industries, or any targeted keyword. This is a way to monitor social media channels and look for any feedback from current customers or potential new clients.
Social listening will actually help you to understand and look into those conversations (if they are public of course) and pick up from there. You will have the opportunity to see what this target audience has to say about you and this info might be of crucial importance in the end.
If you do this process successfully, you will be able to make and provide the type of content that your audience needs and wants and come up with brand new ideas on how you can work towards improving the experience for them and build something new to maintain your follower base happy.
Another benefit that you can get from successful social monitoring/listening is that you can contact your clients directly and act on their needs. Especially if you are having experienced customer service team that will know how to approach potential customers.
To simplify the whole process and break it down into two separate points, we’ll probably divide it like this:
- Point #1 – Monitor/Listen to social media platforms where your name or brand is mentioned, or simply listen to desired targeted keywords.
- Point #2 – Use the information you gather to act and improve your brand, or simply work towards customer satisfaction.
What is the difference between social listening and social monitoring?
When you first compare these two terms, it seems like they are the same, but they are two completely different processes that have different purposes when it comes to getting details from your social media profiles.
We already looked into what social listening is. When it comes to social media monitoring, this is the process that allows you to collect data based on various metrics that will help you look back and check any past topics where your keyword is mentioned. Those metrics include competitor mentions, important hashtags, brand mentions, social media sentiment, and industry trends.
Competitor Mentions – This is the process where you are monitoring your competitors as well. From there you will also be able to gather some important info that you can use for your business. These social media analytics and collecting data processes can set you on a path where your mutual followers are giving advice and suggestions to your competition that you can use for your own brand.
Consider this kind of free insight into your brand, it will just take some time to go through your competitors and analyze their older content. There are also various tools that can help you with this, but we will get to that later in this article.
Brand Hashtags – With the expansion of usage of hashtags on all of the modern and current social media, there will also be a hashtag that you might be interested in. This doesn’t include the hashtags where your brand is mentioned, but also every little keyword that is somehow connected to your business niche (relevant hashtags competitor).
Another easy and simple way to collect data from online conversations and also identify influencers that are using your terms. No matter if it is positive or negative customer feedback, you will be able to get better brand perception and use it as a part of your social media analysis.
Brand Mentions – When it comes to brand mentions, the term clearly states that we are monitoring our own business mentions. The social media mentions will impact directly your brand and you will be getting info connected to your own business.
This surely is a great way to get information on what the community says and thinks of your services and products because you are getting first-hand info from these relevant conversations. With these details, you will be able to make the right changes and satisfy your clientele, initiate a proper marketing campaign, and plan your brand strategy.
Social Media Sentiment Analysis – The sentiment analysis is also an important part of social media listening since it helps you to get an idea of how other people are feeling about your brand or your competitors.
By doing this, you will be able to find out the online mood of your potential customers and act based on that. Social media users are very direct and will share their thoughts on everything without any hesitation or limits – so use these details to build your social media strategy. These thoughts can be positive, negative, or even neutral, but most definitively these thoughts are very important when it comes to improving the online status of your brand.
Industry Trends – The term industry trends is also a clear one. This means simply monitoring the trends that are happening in your line of business. Not only to follow your competitors directly or certain hashtags but the whole industry.
The social media data you can collect from this process is also really important. For example, if you are in the business of music production, analyzing the manufacturers that are creating new instruments and tools might get you details on how to expand your business or even “steal” some marketing ideas that you can implement in your business.
Getting a wider view of the industry will expand your horizons and can help you to get your brand online easier and get your deserved market share.
What are the 2 types of social listening?
Primary listening
The primary layer of social listening includes studying your own followers by taking a look at their posts around your branded hashtags, handles, and or pages.
For instance, it’s possible you’ll choose to ask a question via your social channels, then “listen” to the feedback on your profile to get an idea of how individuals are reacting to certain matters at the moment.
At this stage, you’re not searching for deep audience perception. It’s not possible except you’re working 24-hour days to examine the profile of each consumer who engages with your content. Therefore, this information doesn’t provide help to segment your viewers, however quite keeps you within the know of what’s happening at any given second.
Deep listening
Deep listening includes monitoring basic social posts and a couple of topics, not simply posts directed at your brand or related to the topics you posted on your profile. With this superior type of listening, you’ll be able to uncover lots of, possibly hundreds of posts from customers talking about a particular subject.
For instance, let’s say you’re thinking about monitoring opinions around cooking. In the event you’re not utilizing a third-party tool, you’re in all probability utilizing the native search function on Twitter (or another social channel) to search out related posts.
The good thing about a third-party party tool is that it allows you to observe numerous key phrases, or filter information by a number of variables like the whole variety of people engaged, sentiment, content type, and so forth.
This may answer questions like, are there certain matters which might be extra necessary to your viewers? What sort of tone do you have to use when speaking about certain matters primarily based on your customers’ sentiment towards them?
Deep listening helps you acquire a complete view of your target audiences. It begins to put the basis for validating personas. However, like fundamental listening, it doesn’t fairly present the deep viewers’ perception of understanding your customers as individuals with a number of interests, ideas, and motivations.
How to use data gathered from social listening?
The social listening process is going hand in hand with your business necessities for the reason to improve and get better at what you are doing. When performing the social listening strategy, you should focus on getting more and more details on trendy topics, marketing campaigns, audience behavior, customer experience, and key conversations.
Bad experience from customers is actually more constructive than getting good reviews when it comes to improvement. If the customer is satisfied, that means that you are doing a good job and that’s it – you did it right. In that case, maybe you do not need to perform thorough social monitoring and listening because you are good.
In case the customer shares bad feedback, this means that there is a space for improvements. Use this data you gathered from the social listening and create a strategy around it that will meet the user requirements and actually get better at what you are doing. This is a free schooling method where the clients and followers are teaching you passively how to get the best out of you for your own business.
The ultimate result you will be getting from successful social listening and monitoring is perfecting the customer experience, creating the right marketing strategy, and being the best in your industry.
With all the relevant data you will gather you will be able to react based on it. This is called real-time brand monitoring, where you react right away and do not leave space for the customer to leave bad feedback on your profile or on any review sites. Use these social listening tips and you are on the right way to getting better on these social platforms.
The value of listening strategy
In case you are not into social listening yet, this means that you are shooting with your eyes closed when it comes to sharing your business online. Many people are already talking about your industry and business online and it is of great importance to be part of those conversations and actually hear what they are saying.
This is a way of showing that you are dedicated and that you are caring about your clients, their thoughts and ideas, and their problems. There are many values of social listening and we are going to share them now.
Opportunities and Collabs
When monitoring social media and analyzing the space, you will be able to find out who is the “loudest” in your industry and find who gets the most audience engagement on their content. These are the type of people that you want to get in touch with and try to collaborate with them, for the sole purpose of promoting your brand.
Engaging with social media influencers is often a two-way road – meaning that you need to give in order to get something in return. The opportunity here is that they can mention your brand and even tag you to direct their audience to your profile where you will present your services and/or products. This doesn’t mean that you do not need to focus on building your own social media audience, but it is one way where you will easier expose your business to the target audience.
This will open a brand new door where you will connect with other people that are interested in doing business with you and are related to the niche you already work in.
Provide Support and Answer Questions
Social media is a great way for your consumers to ask for any assistance and see what other people think about their problems connected to your business. This is the chance for you to jump in and assist them. This will show additional incentive that you care about the people that are interested in doing business with you.
Social listening will help you find these chances and prove that you are present online by showing compassion and care for your clients. Also, these are opportunities where you can connect with your consumers and expand on your brand with them, by presenting any novelties that you have.
To mention, it is not a good practice to straight away jump in and pitch your sale. This will usually drive them away because that shows you are only interested in getting their money and nothing more. Be more subtle about this process and actually show more care. By doing it in a subtle way, the client will recognize that you prefer to help instead of going directly to monetize them.
Danger Management
Following the social media talks will sometimes help you predict any potential crisis that is happening or might happen in the industry you are in. There are two benefits when it comes to managing a crisis: preventing industry-wide crisis and preventing personal brand crisis.
Industry-Wide Crisis – This means that something bad might or is already happening in the industry you work in. There are various incidents or happenings that can affect how your business performs at a certain period. If you are notified and informed on time, you can react and let your clients know about it and explain that you are not part of the problem, but part of the solution. Besides showing care, you also inform them of potential problems that might occur. Another benefit of showing this before everybody and being the first to let the wider audience know is that such social media posts might go viral and even get better reach and engagement.
Personal Brand Crisis – The personal brand crisis is more focused on talks, especially on your brand and the business you are in. This is a way to also predict and follow what other people are talking about you, no matter if it is in a positive or negative connotation. In case you are having a surge of visits, more than you usually have, investigate what is happening and find the reason behind it. Sometimes it might be because something bad is said about you and people are coming over to check it out. In hand with the audience sentiment, you will be able to find what exactly is the problem and react on time. If the sentiment is negative and people are not satisfied with something you stand for, now is a good time to pull a PR tactic to change their opinion, apologize and improve.
Service/Product Intel
Another benefit that you can have from successful social brand monitoring is that you will be able to gather all the proper details on how your products and services perform – and also how your competition is doing as well.
This will tell you what you need to change (if there is a need) in terms of the quality of your service or product in order to increase sales and satisfy your customer needs. The brand sentiment and consumer behavior will simply tell if you need to make such changes. We just want to point out and not sleep on the audience talks. By disregarding what they have to say about your services, you will lose business and followers, and your product will not sell.
Another good thing that you can do in order to get more info about your product/service is to ask your existing buyers for their honest opinion. This is a gold mine of ideas where people who already use your service will tell you what they liked or disliked about the service you provide – meaning that their reviews will guide you to improve.
Brand, Competition, and Industry Intel
Similar to following and analyzing intel about your products and services, this type of gathering intel is a little bit on a wider scale because you need to do it for your brand, your competition, and the whole industry.
Checking out online discussions in your industry will let you know of emerging trends, new products by your competition, marketing campaigns, and more. This will help you to find your place in the whole industry you are in and try to build up from there. This intel is of crucial importance because based on that, you will start planning how to overcome your competition and become a leading brand in your industry.
One other important point is that by doing this analysis, you will be able to find some topic and target that is not that populated – meaning that you will have the chance to fill it up. Or you can find some products and services that are not that good, meaning that you will be able to provide better service and beat your competition. Unfortunately, this is a cruel process, but know that someone else is doing the same and trying to kick you down. Look at this as a race where, of course, you are trying to be the first crossing the finish line.
7 Tools to help you with social listening
The good thing about this whole process is that you do not need to do it all manually. There are various social listening tools online that you can use to get easier access to social listening data. Below we listed some of the social media monitoring tools that you can reach for in order to ease up your job.
Falcon
Falcon is one of the most widely used social media listening tools for publishing, promoting, measuring, and buyer information control. Its social listening tools give a transparent image of what’s occurring and who’s concerned.
You need to use them to determine popular subjects and hashtags to follow to higher design your campaigns and content material. You may keep tabs on conversations happening around your brand and services.
Falcon.io offers you a lot of flexibility. You may track anything from brand names, subjects, and keywords – refining your queries with superior parameters. Certainly, if in case you have a global audience, you’ll be able to track and have interaction wherever you might have followers. Also, you possibly can filter extensively, accessing and viewing information by keyword, demographics, influencers, and content material type.
Falcon provides sentiment evaluation in a number of languages, marking mentions as positive, neutral, or negative that will help you prioritize engagement. Customers can set notifications to alert if there’s a spike in particular mentions. You may react to unfavorable publicity before it will get out of hand. To help with this, you possibly can arrange automated reports of trending subjects and mentions, sending them to your inbox.
With Falcon.io, you will be able to determine influencers who work together on your topics of interest and, consequently, create methods for collaboration and brand development. It’s also possible to produce audiences from any social listening project – groups of people that meet particular standards you set.
NetBase
NetBase offers real-time perception into customer social conversations. It makes use of AI to find out sentiment, behaviors, attributes, hashtags, individuals, and types from social posts. NetBase’s platform processes hundreds of millions of social media posts each month.
Client and Market intelligence platform NetBase presents quite a lot of merchandise, including a Social Listening tool. With historic and real-time social media evaluation, their AI-driven platform provides social listening insights into any matter or brand you want to observe.
NetBase social tool takes the leg work out of gathering social information, whether or not for brand administration or market analysis, that means customers can concentrate on the tasks that actually matter. Straight away, this platform can uncover client insights, assist to establish client trends, and assist the consumer to grasp brand perception.
You can too use NetBase’s AI to find when your brand appears in photos. This may help you find out the preferred user-generated content material regarding your brand on visible platforms, such as Instagram. At the same time, you will be able to see if anyone has misused your logo.
Sprout Social
Sprout Social is a professional social media monitoring tool. Though most of its options are related to social media management and optimization, it additionally consists of social CRM tools and social media listening functionality. It consists of many collaboration tools, making it straightforward to work with a group.
Each time you enter Sprout Social, it presents you with a Dashboard, that gives you ideas of what you need to do next.
Probably the most user-friendly feature of Sprout Social is its unified Smart Inbox. You possibly can reply to your messages, retweet/repost or repin content, like objects, and so on, all from inside Sprout Social. You possibly can group your entire messages in any manner you want. You’ll be able to filter your inbox through a number of methods including keywords and hashtags.
Sprout Social’s social listening function works in a lot the identical manner as the Smart Inbox, and you may observe mentions of your brand, your competition, or chosen keywords. You will be able to rapidly construct complicated queries, utilizing Boolean phrases within the Query Builder, making your question visible and apparent. You can refine your searches to make sure that many of the mentions shown are genuinely about your business.
Digimind
Digimind is a social listening and market intelligence platform that permits customers to grasp and handle their brand popularity, determine influencers of their industry, achieve client intelligence, and way more.
Via their AI-Powered social listening tool customers are capable to monitor, analyze and interact with social media posts that point out or reference the brands they handle. It additionally permits customers to watch the performance of their very own content material on numerous platforms, which means you’ve got a one-stop location for all of your social media administration needs.
Digimind additionally integrates with Zoho, Qualtrics, Salesforce, and Pardot, so you’ll be able to monitor your marketing campaign performance right down to which leads it is producing. We don’t have to tell you how effective that type of integration could be in the case of marketing campaign intelligence.
You also can analyze and benchmark a limitless variety of social accounts concurrently with Digimind Social Analytics. Nevertheless, you’ll be able to go beyond your social networks to see your brand based mostly on Google search conduct. With Digimind’s Top Reputation module, you can observe what your clients want to find out about you and your competitors’ brands, merchandise, individuals, and more, all in real-time.
Synthesio
Synthesio Social Media Intelligence Suite is a social listening platform that displays companies’ online presence and gives their customers actionable insights. It presently captures social media intelligence from 195 countries in over 80 languages. It gives automatic sentiment evaluation (AS) on more than 20 of these languages.
It has customizable Social Listening dashboards, displaying an immense quantity of information referring to social mentions of your brand. All mentions within the Synthesio Social Listening Platform incorporate sturdy metadata concerning the content, writer, and tone. They are often filtered very easily.
It’s also possible to integrate into these dashboards paywall information from LexisNexis, brand recognition capabilities, and client opinions.
It’s also possible to monitor views, likes, favorites, replies, retweets, and shares from Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and YouTube straight in your social media listening dashboards. You’ll be able to add high-level brand intelligence with Media Value and Engagement Rate widgets.
Synthesio allows you to export large pre-filtered information units through API or utilizing an in-house tool, Reveal, and merge Social Listening metrics with performance information in lots of SaaS enterprise intelligence tools.
BuzzSumo
Though it’s best known as a content material analysis tool, BuzzSumo additionally presents a variety of social media listening performance that enables customers to trace mentions, trends, and updates for their brands, opponents, and the broader industry.
It means that you can comb the Internet for any content material that features your search term. It doesn’t simply offer you search results, however, it additionally gives the amount of engagement related to every search result. For instance, in case you set up a search for your brand, BuzzSumo will discover its online mentions.
But it doesn’t just let you know when someone wrote an article criticizing your brand’s service, for example. It additionally tells you that individuals shared that article on Facebook, and tweeted about it – which might require critical damage control.
BuzzSumo offers engagement figures for Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, and Reddit. It additionally offers a complete variety of links each search result has obtained. What’s more, you may get alerts on just about every little thing, which suggests your results never get missed amid all of the noise of your social feeds.
Mention
You will be able to use Mention to scour the net, social media, and more for highly effective market insights. The Solo plan is designed for a solo person to observe their brand. The Starter Plan targets small companies to observe their brand and competitors. It’s at this level that you have a dashboard, have access to sentiment evaluation, and may access an Influencer’s Dashboard.
It’s with the Company Plan, that you just gain entry to lots of Mention’s features, however, that is designed for corporations who want to develop their brand and enterprise, as well as agencies. The Company Plan offers access to further options, corresponding to Facebook crawling, historic data, a Twitter dashboard, and extra.
Mention helps you monitor the web, social media, forums, and blogs to learn more about your brand and your business. You may rapidly analyze public opinion with sentiment evaluation for all mentions. Customize your alerts and filter by source, language, and date. You may refine your alert by including or deleting keywords.
By implementing these tactics and using the aforementioned social media monitoring software tools you can start tracking online conversations, answer direct messages, find enterprise solutions, make the right marketing efforts, and most importantly of all – increase brand loyalty and brand reputation.
Check out more information on how to protect your reputation here on our blog.
