Although individuals are trained to understand the benefits of active listening and thoughtful communication, brands haven’t always been equipped to do it at scale. This is where social listening comes in.
You will not be able to connect with our audience if you don’t listen to what they want. It’s all too common to guess instead of to listen. Understanding who your target audience is, what their opinion is, and how to connect with them more effectively is key to making strategic decisions.
What are the reasons you should include social listening in your social media plan? You can gain knowledge about your audience, industry, competitors, and content through social listening. Let’s examine this in more detail.
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A Social Media Strategy: listen to your community to understand their needs
By using social listening, you can monitor keywords and mentions, identify top influencers and potential brand ambassadors, discover potential leads, engage with your audience to find out what they are talking about, and assess the effectiveness of your content based on what is and is not working.
The goal of social listening is to track overall brand health, develop valuable content, generate campaign ideas, and improve the customer experience as well as driving strategic product decisions.
Why is social listening important?
Social media listening is not just about media monitoring or tracking your company’s mentions and tags, but also about finding keywords that are relevant to your industry, which you should use on your website, blog posts and in your SEO articles. This will ultimately improve your ranking in Google and other search engines. Let’s look at some ways in which social listening can help your business grow:
1. Social media growth
It is important to create an effective social media strategy by listening to what people are saying about your brand or industry. This way, you can generate more social media leads.
With focused listening, you can discover which social networks your audience is most active on and analyze sentiment about your brand, products, competitors, or industry. You will save both time and money by using social listening to determine your social media strategy.
2. Performance measurement
Additionally, social listening helps you measure the success of short-term campaigns by evaluating your social media strategy. It is possible for you to analyze qualitative and quantitative metrics.
Measuring the number of times your brand or product is mentioned before, during, and after a campaign helps you understand which content performed well and which did not. Pay attention to the days with the most and the least amount of mentions. Furthermore, you should monitor the sentiment of conversation surrounding your brand or product and adapt your content accordingly.
3. Brand Reputation
A brand, product, or industry’s conversation is driven by its customers in the social era. Social media customer service practices are becoming increasingly common for brands.
The use of social listening can help your brand identify potentially harmful conversations and mitigate the effects before they have a detrimental impact on your brand. As an added benefit, social listening is also a powerful tool for preserving your social media reputation by developing a reputation management strategy and engaging customers through social media.
4. Product development
Customer feedback about your products, brand, or industry is one of the greatest benefits you can gain from social listening. Identify valuable insights from your consumers’ feedback and adjust your business strategies accordingly. Don’t be surprised if you receive honest feedback that may criticize some aspects of your business. You can use this criticism to improve your product, customer service, or more general business strategy.
You should pay attention to users who are giving you constructive criticism. Many of these users will be glad to provide valuable feedback if you engage with them. Additionally, if you cultivate these relationships, you may gain high quality leads for potential clients, revenue opportunities, or develop brand ambassadors.
5. Competitive Insights
Monitoring conversations about your business or specific competitors should not be the sole focus of your social media listening campaign. Consider allocating more resources to monitoring general discussions about your industry.
When you receive feedback on your industry, you may be surprised, and these insights are often the most valuable and interesting for establishing your overall business strategies. Take a look at topic areas related to customer satisfaction and dissatisfaction. Try to mimic any issues that the customer is happy with and determine solutions to address their dissatisfaction.
6. Key influencers
It’s natural for both online and offline influencers to discuss products, services, and customer service issues. With active social listening, you can identify influential users and gain valuable insight into your product, brand, or industry. In order to create an influencer management plan, you should identify your key influencers and develop these relationships.
What are the metrics for measuring social media listening?
You might be wondering: how exactly do I measure my media marketing success rate? Or how do I track the progress of my social media listening campaign? Here are a few factors to take into consideration.
1. The amount of conversation
Social media mentions measure how many times a brand or product is mentioned in the social sphere.
2. Engagement rate
Using social media platforms, you can determine your rate of engagement by looking at how many replies, mentions, retweets, favorites, and shares you receive. In addition to determining the likelihood that a post will go viral, you can also assess brand and messaging relatability. If the metric spikes quickly and dramatically, you may be alerted to potential social media crises.
3. Share of Voice
By measuring share of voice, you can compare your brand’s share of the total messages on social media related to your industry with the messages of your competitors. By comparing your brand-awareness campaign to others’, you will be able to determine how prominent your campaign will appear to potential customers.
4. Emotional analysis
Even if you have a high engagement rate, a large volume of conversation, and a high share of voice, if social media posts say nothing but negative things about your brand, you’re in trouble. Make sure you are monitoring your brand’s sentiment to ensure a positive image – and provide stellar customer service when it isn’t.
5. Metrics of the competitors
Your success can be measured by comparing your own social media presence to your competitors’. You should also compare the frequency of social media messaging, engagement on posts from different types of sites, and brand mentions / chatter along with share of voice. When you know how your competitors are performing better, you can adjust your own messages and techniques to suit your shared audiences.
Best social media listening and monitoring tools
There are dozens of great social media listening and media monitoring tools out there. Here are five of the best ones out there.
1. Sprout Social
Sprout Social’s social media management software includes monitoring and engagement tools, similar to Hootsuite. This software offers two separate tools for monitoring and engaging with social media. Social media mentions and messages will appear in your Smart Inbox. Users can access Discoveries by searching Twitter or Instagram for particular keywords, such as when people mention your brand without tagging you.
2. AgoraPulse
As an all-in-one tool for social media management, AgoraPulse offers scheduling, monitoring, engagement, and analytics functionality. You can easily search for keywords, URLs, and handles on Twitter using its inbox and listening features. In addition to monitoring comments on your Facebook and Instagram ads, AgoraPulse also allows you to track clicks on your website.
3. Mention
Mention goes beyond monitoring your brand on social media. It also monitors mentions of your brand on other sites including Yelp, Booking.com, Tripadvisor, and Amazon. You can gain in-depth insights and reports about your brand mentions on the custom company plan. You can reply to mentions directly within Mention if you connect your social media profiles. Adding a Buffer account also allows you to schedule social media posts.
4. Keyhole
Keyhole provides insights, trends, and analysis of your hashtags, keywords, and accounts, rather than finding individual mentions of your brand. Rather than replying to your social media mentions, you can gather data and report results. You can use it for free to track hashtags, keywords, and accounts.
5. Talkwalker
Media monitoring tools such as Talkwalker are among the most powerful. Furthermore, it can monitor print, television, and radio broadcasts in addition to social media platforms and websites. Even when your brand or product is not mentioned in the caption of a post, it has image recognition technology that helps you find it.
Social listening: some final words
You can get a sense of evolving customer trends through social media. Your brand will struggle to compete among the brands that respond to changes and roll with the punches. Keeping your brand fresh and interactive as well as providing your customers with products, services, and content that is genuinely useful and engaging is essential to retaining customers. Effective social media listening is just what you need to achieve that.
Do you need help achieving your business goals? Let’s discuss your strategy today – get in touch.
