Social media is one of the most powerful levers your business can pull and strategize for. 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. 60% of the global population uses social media, and they do so for an average of two hours and twenty-four minutes per day. Think of all the conversations there that your business could be tapping into – if, that is, you have the right approach.
Imagine all the conversations that your business can tap into, if you have the right approach. Social listening gives you the tools and techniques you need to unlock the power of public perception – to understand what your audience is saying about you online, and harness these insights to refine your products, resonate with your customers, and grow your business. 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 answer “what is social listening” and explain why it’s essential 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. We will also give you some social listening examples, i.e. three tools that your brand can use today. And we’ll share our top social listening tips.
Are you ready to stop just talking to your clients… and start actually listening to them? Read on! Continue reading!
Social listening (also known as “social media listening”) is the process of monitoring and analyzing online conversations, discussions, and mentions across different social media platforms: plus a whole range of blogs, forums, and other online channels. Social listening, also known as “social media listening”, is the process of monitoring, analyzing, and tracking online conversations, discussions, mentions, and posts across a variety of social media platforms, including blogs, forums, other online channels, and more.
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. Real-time insights into what people say about your brand, your products, your industry, or any other topic that interests your business. This helps you understand public perceptions of, and sentiment toward, your business. 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 your brand’s approach. You can also track trends as they develop and emerge, and use 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. We’ll explore each of these reasons in detail below.
Social listening allows you to monitor and manage the online reputation of your business by tracking mentions and sentiment. Through this, you can quickly address negative reviews, comments, or concerns – and maintain a positive brand image. This allows you to quickly respond to negative reviews, comments or concerns, and maintain a positive image of your brand.
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. Social listening can help you to better understand the strengths, weaknesses, and competitive strategies of other companies within your niche.
Analyzing social media conversations that are relevant to the offerings of your business can help you gather valuable feedback about your products and services: guiding improvements, fueling innovation, and enabling you to better meet the evolving needs of your customers. 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. What’s more, by getting to grips with audience sentiment around not only your products – but the similar stock and services your competitors are selling – you can refine product development to align with your audience’s expectations. 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.
Engaging with your customers directly through social listening fosters a sense of connection with, and loyalty toward, your brand, helping you build a positive and enduring relationship with your audience. Social listening allows you to build a lasting relationship with your audience by fostering a sense loyalty and connection.
Social listening helps you identify emerging trends and topics, guiding strategic planning, and keeping your business one step ahead of your industry’s shifting sands. 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. Better still, 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. Social listening is real-time, so you can react to these situations as they develop, not weeks, days or even months later. You can act now. You can make quick, informed decisions to propel your marketing campaigns or respond to topical trends while they’re still relevant. 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.
Ready to get your business’s social listening efforts off the ground?
Here are our top tips for getting started with social listening – and then growing and managing your endeavors ongoing.
Getting Started with Social Listening
To begin, be sure to:
- Clearly outline your social listening goals and objectives. Outline your goals and objectives for social listening. 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.
- Use your social listening tool to set up alerts for real-time notifications for the terms you outlined above.
Growing and Enhancing Your Social Listening Practices
To expand your efforts, try:
- Expanding 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 could include sentiment, demographic, or geographic location analysis.
- Engage actively in conversations with your audience to demonstrate responsiveness and bolster your brand’s online presence.
Tracking and Monitoring Your Social Listening Practices
To manage your social listening strategy, explore:
- Regularly reviewing your social listening analytics: tracking key KPIs such as sentiment trends, share of voice, and engagement metrics.
- Benchmarking: Compare your social listening data to your competitors to identify your strengths and weaknesses.
- Combine your social listening data with other sources – such as customer surveys, sales data, and website analytics – for a more holistic approach.
- Invest in training to ensure your team is well-versed in your chosen social listening tools, and are well-equipped to interpret the data they provide.
3 Social Listening Tools to 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! We don’t fault you – keeping track of the entire internet can be a difficult task!
Fortunately, there’s a litany of social listening tools (also known as social media monitoring tools) to help. There are a number of social media monitoring tools that can help. What are social media monitoring tools, you ask? What are social media tools? Well, they’re platforms to help you monitor and analyze conversations, mentions, and discussions relevant to your brand from across the web. They’re platforms that help you monitor and analyse conversations, mentions, or discussions relevant to your business from across the internet. They harness advanced algorithms and analytics to track the keywords, phrases, and hashtags most important for understanding and growing your business. They use 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:
| Tool Name | Description | Pricing | Pros | Cons |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Brandwatch | Brandwatch is a leading social listening tool, with specific plans targeted at researchers, influencer marketers, and social media managers respectively. It won several G2 awards for social listening in 2023 and is a popular tool that has a variety of applications and uses. | Pricing is not transparent; you need to book a meeting to learn about costs. | Offers “game-changing consumer and market intelligence”. Versatile with a wide range of applications. | Lack of phone support and opaque pricing. Customer support options are subpar. |
| Hootsuite | Trusted by over 200,000 brands including IKEA, Domino’s, and Allianz, Hootsuite is a tried-and-tested social listening solution. It offers a 30-day free trial and various plans to suit different needs. |
|
Top-notch customer support with multiple contact options. Trusted by major brands and offers impressive scalability. | Higher pricing tiers can be expensive for smaller businesses. |
| Mention | Mention is ideal for businesses looking for a complete social listening tool that also allows competition analysis, social media management, and brand perception tracking. It is highly rated on G2 and used by brands like Microsoft and Deliveroo. |
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Transparent and affordable pricing. Intuitive interface and versatile functionality. | May require upgrading for larger teams or higher mention volumes. |
Mention is an intuitive social listening tool that offers four transparent pricing plans. The software’s interface and its sleek design are both easy on the eyes and the wallet.
Challenges and Ethical Considerations
Like many of the most effective business strategies, social listening isn’t without its challenges – and comes with its fair share of ethical considerations, too. Social listening, like many other effective business strategies, is not without its challenges. It also comes with its fair amount of ethical considerations.
Let’s break them down. The challenges of social listening include:
- Data privacy concerns: Because you are collecting and analyzing publicly available data, you must respect privacy rights and avoid infringing personal boundaries. You’ll need to ensure you’re collecting data in a way that complies with privacy regulations, and – where necessary – obtain consent from users, especially when dealing with their sensitive information. 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 if dealing with 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. Social media data can also be biased based on demographics, which can impact the reliability of 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.
With social listening, you’ll also need to consider ethical issues. These include:
- 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 offer users clear options to opt out of social listening activities if they wish, and ensure you’re respecting their preferences at every turn.
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 tools and algorithms you use. Not only for your staff but also 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. Filtering and priority techniques can help cut the noise, while adding diversity to data sources can minimize and mitigate the effect of bias on social listening data.
Summary
Above, we’ve provided a definition of social listening, and explored its wide – and indispensable – range of benefits for your business. 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. Social listening can provide a wealth of information, from helping you to understand your audience and your position in the market to giving you insights on how to promote your site.
And neither, as it turns out, can your customers – so get started with one of the social listening tools above (in Hootsuite’s case, for 30 days at no cost) to start listening to them. You can’t either, it turns out. 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. Please let us know how you found the article and if you have any social listening tips that we didn’t cover.
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