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. Imagine all the conversations that your business can tap into, if 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 essential for your brand. We’ll also provide a few 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!
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
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. 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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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
To begin, be sure to:
- 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.
- 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.
- Group social mentions into categories for deeper 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 like sentiment trends, share of voice, and engagement metrics.
- Benchmark your social listening data against your competitors to identify your strengths and weaknesses.
- Combine your social listening data with other sources, such as customer surveys or sales data.
- 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 to Make the Job Easier
There are a number of social listening tools that can help. What are social media tools? Well, 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. Here are three that we love.
| Tool | Description | Pricing | Pros | Cons |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Brandwatch | Brandwatch is a leading social listening tool, with plans for researchers, influencer marketing, and social media managers. It won several G2 awards for social listening in 2023. | Opaque pricing. You need to book a meeting to find out costs. | Versatile applications and use cases. Claims to offer “game-changing consumer and market intelligence.” | No phone support. Service inquiries are limited to website submissions available Monday to Friday. |
| Hootsuite | Hootsuite is a trusted social listening tool used by over 200,000 brands, including IKEA, Domino’s, and Allianz. It offers a 30-day free trial on the ‘Professional’ and ‘Team’ plans. |
|
Top-notch customer support. Trusted by some of the world’s biggest brands. | Higher pricing tiers can be expensive for smaller businesses. |
| Mention | Mention is ideal for businesses looking to analyze competition, manage social media efforts, and monitor brand perceptions. It is highly rated on G2 with customers like Microsoft and Deliveroo. |
|
Transparent and affordable pricing. Slick and intuitive interface. | May require upgrading for more advanced features and higher usage needs. |
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’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.
- 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 communicate social listening activities to users, clients, and stakeholders.
- Anonymizing and Aggregating Data: This helps prevent individual users from being identified.
- Providing Clear Consent and Opt-Out Options: 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.
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.
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.
Please let us know how you found the article and if you have any social listening tips that we didn’t cover. Before you go, be sure to check out the range of other articles we have here on Website Builder Expert.
Check out our other articles on Website Builder Expert before you leave. 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.
