Social media is a powerful tool that your business can use to strategize and grow. After all, 60% of the world’s population uses social media – and for an average of a whopping two hours and 24 minutes per day. Think of all the conversations there that your business could be tapping into – if, that is, you have the right approach.
Social listening is a powerful tool that helps you to understand the public perception of your brand. You can use this information to improve your products, connect with your customers and grow your business.
Below, we’ll answer the question “what is social listening”, and explain why it’s a must for your brand. We’ll also provide a few social listening examples – that is, three tools your brand can benefit from today – and offer up our top social listening tips. Ready to stop merely talking to your customers… but actually listening to them, too? Continue reading!
What is Social Media Listening?
Social listening, also known as “social media listening”, is the process of monitoring, analyzing, and tracking online conversations, discussions, mentions, and posts across different social media platforms, including blogs, forums, other online channels, and more.
The Goal
The goal? To gain insights into what people are saying about your brand, products, industry – or whatever topic your business is most interested in – in real time. This allows you to understand the public’s perception of your business and their sentiment towards it. It also allows you to track trends as they emerge and develop, using feedback to refine the brand’s approach.
Why is Social Listening Important?
Social listening is important for a wide variety of reasons – we’ll unpack each, in detail, below.
Brand Reputation Management
Social listening allows you to monitor and manage the online reputation of your business by tracking mentions and sentiment. Through this, you can quickly respond to negative reviews, comments or concerns, and maintain a positive image of your brand.
Competitor Analysis
Social listening tools and strategies can be used to not only track insights about your brand, but also those of your competitors. To this end, social listening can help you better understand the strengths and weaknesses of other companies in your niche, and inform effective competitive strategies and market positioning.
Product and Service Improvement
Analyzing social media conversations that are relevant to the offerings of your business can help you gather valuable feedback about your products and service: guiding improvements and fueling innovation. It will also enable you to better meet the evolving needs of your customers.
By understanding the audience’s perceptions of your products, as well as those of your competitors’ similar products and services, you can better align your product development with their expectations.
Customer Engagement and Loyalty
Social listening allows you to build a lasting relationship with your audience by fostering a sense loyalty and connection.
Market Research and Trend Analysis
Social listening allows you to identify emerging trends, topics, and guide strategic planning. It also keeps your business ahead of the shifting sands in your industry.
Because social listening works in real time, you’re well placed to act on these evolving situations not days, weeks, or even months down the track – but right now. You can make quick and informed decisions that will help you to drive your marketing campaigns, or to respond to current trends while they are still relevant.
Top Social Listening Tips
Here are some tips to get you started with social media listening and then grow and manage your efforts.
Getting Started with Social Listening
- Clearly outline your social listening goals and objectives. Reputation management? Competitor analysis? Trend identification? This clarity will help guide your strategy.
- Choose the right tools – we’ll cover our top social listening platforms below.
- Identify the keywords, hashtags, and phrases most relevant to your brand, industry, or products – these are what your social listening strategy will be tracking.
- Set up real-time alerts using your social listening tool for the terms that you have outlined.
Growing and Enhancing Your Social Listening Practices
- Expand your keyword list regularly as your brand and industry evolve.
- Incorporate Boolean operators (AND, OR, and NOT) to make your queries more specific. This will filter out irrelevant mentions and provide more accurate insights.
- Group social mentions into categories for deeper analysis. This segmentation can include sentiment, demographic or geographic location analysis.
- Engage actively in conversations with your audience. This will demonstrate your responsiveness and boost your brand’s presence online.
Tracking and Monitoring Your Social Listening Practices
- Regularly review your social listening analytics: tracking key metrics such as sentiment trends and engagement metrics.
- Benchmark your social listening data against your competitors to identify your strengths.
- Combine your social listening data with other sources, such as customer surveys or sales data, for a more holistic approach.
- Invest in training so that your team understands how to use your chosen social listening tool and can interpret the data it provides.
3 Social Listening Tools that Make the Job Easier
Looking for a bit of help with your social listening strategy? You need some help with your social media listening strategy. We don’t blame you – keeping tabs on the entire internet is no mean feat! Fortunately, there’s a litany of social listening tools (also known as social media monitoring tools) to help.
What are social media monitoring tools, you ask? Well, they’re platforms that help you monitor and analyze conversations, mentions, or discussions relevant to your business from across the internet. They harness advanced algorithms and analytics in order to track the most important keywords, phrases, hashtags, and discussions for your business.
Here are three that we love.
1. Brandwatch
Brandwatch is a leading social listening tool, with plans for researchers, influencer marketing, and social media managers. Having scooped several big G2 awards in 2023, Brandwatch is a popular tool that has a variety of applications and uses. Its only real drawback is its lack of phone-based support – you’ll have to complete an enquiry on its website for service, and even this is only available Monday to Friday.
What’s more, its pricing isn’t transparent, and you’ll have to book a meeting with the Brandwatch team to learn more about how much your business can expect to pay. Brandwatch’s claim of “game-changing consumer and market intelligence” checks out, although its opaque pricing and subpar customer support options count against it.
2. Hootsuite
Hootsuite, a social listening tool trusted by over 200,000 brands, including household names like IKEA, Domino’s and Allianz, is a tried-and-tested solution.
You can get started with a 30-day free trial on either Hootsuite’s ‘Professional’ plan ($99/month) or its ‘Team’ plan ($249/month). The former enables one user and 10 social accounts; the latter three users and 30 accounts. For a package that includes five users and up to 50 social accounts, the ‘Enterprise’ plan is available with custom pricing.
Hootsuite customer support is also top-notch: you can contact the social listening tool team directly from your Hootsuite account dashboard, send an email to your account representative for support, or submit a request through the website. Hootsuite is used by some of the biggest brands in the world, and boasts impressive numbers.
3. Mention
Mention is the perfect tool for businesses that want to not only have a social listening tool but also analyze their competition, manage their social media efforts and keep track of perceptions about their brand.
Highly rated on G2 and with customers such as Microsoft, Deliveroo and other heavyweight brands, Mention’s prices are both refreshingly transparent and surprisingly affordable.
| Plan | Price | Features |
|---|---|---|
| Solo | $41/month | One user, one account per social network, two alerts, and 5,000 mentions |
| Pro | $83/month | More users, social networks, mentions, and alerts |
| ProPlus | $149/month | Unlimited users, up to 15 social networks, and 20,000 mentions |
| Company | Custom Pricing | Most comprehensive social listening level |
Mention is an intuitive social listening tool that offers four transparent pricing plans. The software’s slick interface is as pleasing to the eye as it is to the wallet.
Challenges and Ethical Considerations
Social listening, like many other effective business strategies, is not without its challenges. It also comes with a fair share of ethical considerations.
The Challenges of Social Listening
- Data privacy concerns: Because you are collecting and analyzing publicly available data, you must respect privacy rights and avoid infringing personal boundaries. You will need to ensure that you are collecting data in a manner that complies with privacy regulations and – if necessary – obtain the consent of users, especially when dealing with their sensitive information.
- Accuracy and bias: Automated sentiment analysis tools may struggle to interpret nuanced language. This can lead to a skewing of the data collected. What’s more, social media data can contain biases based on the demographics of the platform’s user base, which can also impact the reliability of its insights.
- Volume and noise: The sheer volume of data on social media can be overwhelming. It can be difficult to separate the “noise” of all the irrelevant information from the wheat of useful insights. It can also be tough to distinguish authentic conversations from automated or spammy content.
Social Listening: Ethical Considerations
- Implementing transparent disclosure policies: Clearly communicating social listening activities to users, clients, and stakeholders.
- Anonymizing and aggregating the data you collect: This helps prevent individual users from being identified.
- Providing users with clear consent and opt-out options: You must give users the option to opt out if they so choose, and respect their preferences at all times.
To overcome social listening’s myriad challenges – ethical or otherwise – training can help. Training can help you overcome the many challenges of social listening, whether they are ethical or not. And not only for your staff, either, but for the social listening algorithms and tools you use. Filtering and prioritization techniques can help cut through the noise while adding diversity to your data sources can help minimize and mitigate the effects of bias on your social listening data.
Summary
We’ve discussed the definition of social media listening and its many benefits to your business. From helping you understand your audience and position in the market to providing insights into how to promote your website, social listening’s benefits can’t be ignored.
So, start listening to your customers with one of these social listening tools (in Hootsuite’s case, you get 30 days free) and begin to learn what they have to say.
We’d love to know how you found this article, and if there are any social listening tips you love that we haven’t touched on here, so make sure to leave your thoughts in the comments below.
Before you go, be sure to check out the range of other articles we have here on Website Builder Expert. Whether it’s our top digital marketing tips or the digital skills you need to learn, you’ll find all the knowledge you need to take your business to new heights.
