You want to be up-to-date with the latest marketing trends? Social listening is a great way to stay on top of the latest marketing trends. Social listening is a new marketing technique that will soon be a key part of any social media strategy. 63% believe social listening will be more critical in the coming year.
Social listening is essentially a way to tap into online conversations about any topic, brand, or product. It allows you to understand better your audience, industry competitors, and target customers, and how to improve your social media and video content accordingly.
Does this sound like something you should learn about? We agree. This guide will help you understand social listening and give you tips on how to start.
What is Social Listening?
Two things make up social listening.
“Social” refers to where. Social media is the place where you can socially listen. You can see the conversations on any number of social media platforms that you are interested in following.
Listening is the what. Listening to what people are saying on social media about a company, product, or social media platforms twice.
Why? Social listening allows you to get a pulse on online conversations and provide valuable information that you can use for your business. You might want to use social listening for any of these intents and purposes, that revolve around your products and services or your competitors':
- Gather customer reviews and opinions about your newly-launched products
- Measure your brand awareness and the public's perception of it
- Find out how people view your competitors
- Track down upset customers to address their grievances
Social listening is more than just looking through your inboxes and feeds. The how distinguishes social listening from the rest. Social listening is a proactive process that seeks out comments on specific topics. Social listening tools can help you find conversations about your brand even if they don't tag your handle or talk about a particular topic.
Social listening goes beyond just finding mentions of your brand untagged. This goes beyond hearing what people say about you but also what others think about your industry, competitors, and other relevant topics. You get a complete picture of the current situation.
When? Always. Social listening tools can be set up to monitor conversations and notify when a particular keyword is mentioned. You'll never miss anything that could be of interest to you.
Benefits of social listening
Social listening is a powerful tool because knowledge is power. Social listening has many benefits. It can help you accomplish the following:
- Understanding who your audience is, what they are looking for, and how you can help them, in general, will help you to understand their needs.
- Find out about your industry and the trends in it
- Learn about your competitors and who they are. Also, learn what drives them to succeed.
- Learn how people respond to your brand, products, and services
- Ask customers for feedback about the changes they would like to see.
- Provide exceptional customer service and respond to PR issues
- Look for potential customers
- For potential collaboration, make connections with others in your industry
How social listening works
How does one practice social listening? There are three steps to social listening.
1. Monitor
Social listening begins with monitoring conversations using social listening tools. Start by selecting keywords to track such as your brand, product names, and relevant terms in your industry. You can search for keywords in conversations using your social monitoring tool. It can be set up to notify you whenever a keyword is mentioned. This will allow you to access a lot of information. Some of it will be extremely valuable and some you will have to ignore.
2. Analyze
Next, analyze this data for trends and other useful insights. All of this data can provide valuable insights and trends. You can understand what people think about your brand by reading their comments and understanding why. You might also find problems by reading what people say about your brand on Twitter. You can also look at conversations in your niche to find valuable information, like problems that people may have or trends that are relevant to your brand.
3. Respond
The insights you gather from social listening can be utilized in a number of ways for the benefit of your business: Here is some stuff you can accomplish:
- Use hashtags that are new and relevant to your message to reach people who might be interested.
- Finding new trends and creating content that is thought-provoking
- Find influencers to work with
- How to choose the right audience for your paid ads
- Responding to social media users to address their concerns or answer questions.
- Ideas for videos that your audience will enjoy
Social Listening Tips & Tools
Here are some valuable tips and tools to help you implement your social listening strategy.
Tips
But social listening is only effective if done strategically and with thought. You might get overwhelmed by the noise and confusion. These tips will help you make the most of social listening.
Define your goals. It is crucial to know what your goals are for your social listening strategy. You won't be able to use the information you collect if you don't. You could choose to pursue the following goals:
- Learn what your customers and potential customers think about your brand
- Monitor your industry for news and trends
- Learn about your competitors and their activities
- To make better videos and content, identify the right audience to target via social media
Find out what you are looking for. The next tip is to know your goals. This will help you narrow down the information you are looking for. There is so much information available, it can be overwhelming. It would be best if you had a direction in order to navigate this sea of information. You might want to pay attention to:
- Your brand name
- Your product name
- Your social media handles
- Names of competitors, social media handles, and product names
- Use buzzwords in your niche
- Your slogan
- Names of key employees in your company
- Your brand hashtags
- Hashtags that relate to your industry
You must be ready to quickly respond. Social listening, among other things, helps you identify trends and expose potential PR crises. These items require that you respond quickly to ensure you are on the right track. A social listening strategy that works must be flexible and fast.
Measuring results. Are you able to measure the effectiveness of your social listening strategy? There's no way of knowing if you don't measure the results. After defining your goals, consider how you will track and measure data to determine success. If your goal is competitor analysis, then you might want to track your market share. You might also want to measure how many videos you view.
Tools you can employ for Social Listening
Monitoring social listening's monitoring stage would be difficult to do manually. This means that you will need to spend a lot of time looking through social media. This is why tools have been created specifically to automate the process. These are some of our favorite tools:
- Google Alerts – Google Alerts is a free tool that allows you to be notified when certain keywords are used on new pages, newspaper articles, blogs, or scientific research.
- Hootsuite – Hootsuite is a social media management platform that offers many social listening features, including monitoring conversations, keywords, and mentions, as well as responding to discussions from your Hootsuite dashboard.
- Sprout – Sprout's social listening instruments include keyword monitoring, conversation tracking, trend reports, and industry insights.
- Awario – Awario is a social listening tool designed to build brand awareness. The tool tracks keywords in several languages. Using this solution, companies can grow their international customer base through social media engagement.
Conclusion
The more information you have about your small business marketing, the better. Social listening can be a great tool to help you reach your goals. You will be able to make better strategic decisions and publish more content on social media to increase your marketing ROI.