Social listening entails monitoring your brand, product, and competitors’ mentions on social media platforms. It allows businesses to analyze, track and respond to comments about them on social media platforms. With social media listening, you can learn about what your customers say and their opinions. This way, you can change your business model to meet your customers’ preferences and satisfaction.
What is Social Listening
Social media listening is the process of tracking your business’ related conversations and mentions on social media channels and then analyzing them to get the right insights. Listening involves two processes:
- Monitoring your social media accounts for your brand, product and competitors’ mention.
- Analyzing the available information on how to put them into action. It can be something small like responding to a customer’s comment or something massive like shifting your brand position.
When you start taking action on the collected data, it is the process of listening.
Listening may seem like social monitoring at first glance, but the two concepts are different. Social media monitoring entails looking at varying metrics like competitor mentions, brand mentions, industry trends, and relevant hashtags.
While social listening is about understanding how people feel about your brand and your competitors, social monitoring looks at the number of mentions and engagement rates. As a business owner, you should learn different ways to keep tabs on your social media mood (social media sentiments) as part of listening.
Getting to know how consumers feel about your brand helps your product developments and marketing efforts track. With listening, you can respond immediately to negative and positive posts. The good thing about social listening is it looks backward and forward. It is about information analysis and using it to strategize your daily actions.
Benefits of Social Listening
If you are not using social media listening, you miss valuable insights. You may be missing out on the bigger picture of what your customers are discussing. You have to know what people are talking about you and what they expect of your brand. If you care about their reviews, you might want to look at the benefits of listening.
1. Engage with Consumers
With listening, you can actively engage with your consumers about your products. For example, if a customer reaches out to your Facebook account with a question or post on how much they love your brand, dedicate some time to respond to them. It shows you care about them and how they perceive your brand.
2. Helps You Manage Crises
Engagements are good when they come with a positive online sentiment. Social media listening allows you to track the sentiments in real-time. This way, you can see which posts are suitable for your brand and those that are not.
If your brand is getting positive engagements, find the reasons behind that. Customers share a lot of information about what they like and don’t like. This information may guide you in coming up with the right social media strategy.
On most occasions, social media listening might help you handle a PR disaster before it escalates. If you are getting fewer engagements, go back to customers’ reviews and feedback and learn what to avoid and different ways to handle the misstep.
Good social listening is what your listening is about. It means you have to choose the right keywords for your business. The keywords are also likely to evolve after a while. With the right listening tools, you will learn different words people use when talking about other brands.
NetBase Quid, a digital market and consumer company, is also the best listening platform. It offers contextual insights about marketing trends, consumer connection, and understanding the market and competitor stories.
Nikhil Kore
Lucy Adam