Social Media Listening Guide
The overall number of individuals using social media worldwide as of January 2022 was 3.96 billion. A day-to-day social media trend specifies that 1.4 billion people go online on Facebook, and almost 95 million photographs are uploaded on Instagram. These statistics and data play a significant role in curating effective business decisions for companies using social media analytics to increase their customer base and engagement.
By applying social listening tools, businesses may uncover possibilities and hazards by identifying hidden trends and patterns amid the billions of online interactions. This aspect greatly assists the company masterminds in formulating better-informed business decisions.
This article will cover the basics of social listening to help you understand the concept better and apply it to your business.
Table of Contents
What is Social Listening?
Answering the following question is important to come up with the perfect business move to make the brand and its online image successful.
- How is the brand’s reputation, and how are people reacting to it?
- How is the market evolving?
- Who is dominating the industry?
Social listening has the power to answer these questions accurately. In fact, one of the most effective ways to grasp company sentiment and market trends is through a social listening analysis.
Why is social listening important?
Social listening involves monitoring and analyzing social media conversations to gain insights into your audience and industry. It is important for several reasons.
Social listening allows you to understand your customers better by gathering insights into their needs, preferences, and pain points.
It can also help you identify potential leads and business opportunities, as well as track your competition.
By monitoring social media in real-time, you can quickly respond to any negative sentiment and improve customer satisfaction.
Additionally,
- social listening can help you build stronger relationships with your audience
- Create more targeted content
- Identify and solve problems
- Identify brand ambassadors.
Overall, social listening is a valuable tool for businesses looking to better understand their market and improve their marketing and customer service efforts.
How does social listening work?
It’s easy to get lost in the spiral of the internet. Being able to navigate this abyss is a gift. Social Listening aids us in wading through the clutter with the help of keywords. Here, a keyword can be any word or phrase that a customer associates with a brand.
For example, a telecommunication company would rely on keywords like, “Mobile Data”, “Calling”, “Sim Cards”, etc. Keywords are used to filter tweets or posts. This makes it easy to reach customers & segregate posts into positive, neutral, and negative categories.
Associating keywords to terms important for your brand; such as product & brand names, tag lines, etc. enhances filtration further.
How does social listening help?
By using specialized software or tools, businesses and organizations can track and collect data from social media platforms, including blogs, forums, review sites, and social networks.
Once the data has been collected, it is analyzed to identify key themes, sentiment, and trends.
This process allows businesses to better understand and engage with their customers and stakeholders, and can be used for a variety of purposes such as customer service, marketing, product development, and reputation management.
Social listening Vs Social Monitoring
- Social Monitoring is observing a conversation & posting a reply without solution-oriented action. Social Listening is regular hearing and interpretation of information to gain valuable insights. These insights influence business decisions and improve customer experience
- Social Monitoring focuses on a specific company, brand, product, or campaign. Social Listening, on the contrary, tracks all online mentions based on the brand’s need. It helps understand how people are talking about you, competitors, and the overall market landscape.
- While Social Monitoring focuses on responding to customers online,
- Social Listening uses online chatter to meet customer needs. Brands turn unfiltered feedback into actionable insights.
- Social Monitoring is when customer care representatives or social media managers respond to queries, issues, and comments. Social Listening, on the other hand, is an overall bird’s-eye view of customers discussing your brand.
Benefits of Social listening
One of the main benefits of social listening is improved customer service.
By monitoring social media conversations, businesses can quickly identify and respond to customer complaints, questions, and feedback in real-time, which can improve customer satisfaction and loyalty.
This can also help to reduce the number of customer complaints and increase customer retention.
Another benefit of social listening is increased brand awareness.
By monitoring social media conversations, businesses can learn what people are saying about their brand, products, and industry.
This can help them to improve their marketing and communication strategies, increase brand awareness, and drive more traffic to their website.
Social listening can also be used for enhanced reputation management. It allows businesses to identify and address negative comments or reviews about their brand, which can help to protect and enhance their reputation.
Additionally, social listening can lead to increased sales, by identifying patterns and trends in social media conversations, businesses can gain insights into the needs and preferences of their target audience, which can help them to develop more effective marketing and sales strategies.
Furthermore, social listening can be used for competitive intelligence, by monitoring competitors and staying informed about industry trends, businesses can gain a competitive advantage and make more informed decisions.
Finally, social listening can increase customer engagement by responding to customer comments and feedback in a timely and effective manner, businesses can increase customer engagement and build stronger relationships with their target audience.
Who can use social listening
Social listening can be used by a wide variety of businesses, organizations, and individuals. Some examples include:
- Companies of all sizes and industries, such as retail, healthcare, finance, and technology, can use social listening to gain insights into their customers, competitors, and industry trends.
- Marketing and public relations professionals can use social listening to inform their campaigns, create more effective messaging, and measure the success of their efforts
- Sales professionals can use social listening to identify leads and opportunities, and to connect with potential customers.
- Customer service professionals can use social listening to respond to customer complaints and feedback, and to improve customer satisfaction.
- Researchers, such as market researchers and academics, can use social listening to gather data and insights for their studies and research projects.
- Non-profit organizations can use social listening to track and respond to conversations about their cause and to gauge the impact of their campaigns.
- Government agencies can use social listening to track public opinion and to monitor for potential threats to public safety.
- Individuals can also use social listening to track their own personal brand, monitor mentions of their name, and keep an eye on the industries they are interested in.
4 Reasons to Start Using Social Listening
1. Gain a deeper understanding of your target audience
Social listening allows businesses to track conversations and mentions of their brand, products, and industry on social media.
This can help them to gain a better understanding of their target audience, including their pain points, preferences, and behavior patterns.
2. Identify and address customer complaints
Social listening enables businesses to quickly identify and respond to customer complaints and feedback on social media.
This can help to improve customer satisfaction and loyalty, and prevent negative reviews from spreading.
3. Monitor your competitors
Social listening can help businesses to keep an eye on their competitors, track their strategies, and stay informed about industry trends.
This can give them a competitive advantage and help them to make more informed decisions.
4. Improve your marketing and communication strategies
By tracking conversations on social media, businesses can gain insights into what resonates with their target audience and what doesn’t.
This can help them to improve their marketing and communication strategies, and increase their reach and engagement.
4 Social Listening Tools to Use
Locobuzz
Locobuzz is the highest-rated social listening platform today because of its Engaging, Conversive, and Immersive Brand-User Experience. With Locobuzz, you have the most impactful understanding of what your customers want, need, and require. It provides a meticulous understanding of the impact your brand’s Social Media performance is having on clients and users. Understanding Brand Performance is key, and that’s what Locobuzz strives for making it one of the best social listening tools out there in the market.
Locobuzz implements social monitoring to provide a brand’s Social Mentions from across Social Media on a Single View Platform. It gives real-time insights to understand customer behavior & social conversations about the brand helping the business take instant action.
This AI-Powered tool has advanced Machine Learning capabilities that present Social Mentions in a categorized fashion so you strategically handle that data. Locobuzz has the benefit of Investment Efficiency – it limits your expenses on Customer Experience (CX) and gives returns on investment making it a 360-degree digital brand, CX, and marketing suite.
Features
- Social listening: Locobuzz offers real-time understanding of customers, competitors, campaigns, and influencers through the power of modern social listening.
- Insights and actionable data: It captures trends, market shifts, and critical social data to derive actionable insights that improve brand health, strategies, and overall digital presence.
- Workflow management: Easy-to-use workflows help manage customers with increased responsiveness and effective engagement.
- Seamless data-inflow: The Locobuzz CX platform streamlines data-inflow, assigns cases, and manage tasks seamlessly while focusing on increasing engagement productivity.
- Automated reporting and publishing: Versatile, flexible and automated reports, DIY Analytics Reports, Comparison Benchmarking and CSD ID etc, which helps to measure, compare, and study the brand’s ecosystem and crafting a powerful marketing roadmap for the future. The platform also allows the user to schedule, preview, and publish communications across all social channels from a single interface.
In a single-view, Locobuzz helps brands acutely measure brand insights, customer behaviour, competitor insights and performance analytics across all key digital channels to give empowering business insights on a unified CX management platform. Explore the platform
NetBase
NetBase is one of the few social listening tools using Natural Language Processing (NLP) to assist you in focusing your social listening to the most important conversations. It gathers information from millions of social media posts daily plus over 100 billion historical posts across the social web.
With Netbase’s AI, you get real-time insights into customer conversations while it monitors Hashtags, Competitor Brand Conversations, Social Media Posts, Emotions, Attributes, & Behaviours. Processing millions of posts daily gives instant updates for any Social Mentions concerning your brand. NetBase also uses Non-Social Data to analyze user experience through Surveys, Focus Groups, Ratings, and Reviews which helps in a proper competitive analysis.
Have a look at some of our most-read topics:
Brand24
Brand24 has a statistical analysis based approach to social monitoring. As a social listening tool, it offers social monitoring through hashtag tracking and sentiment analysis. Sentiment Analysis tracks categorical positive, negative, and neutral mentions through suggested keywords. They also provide the context in which your website is discussed by keyword tracking and data analysis. Brand24 is one of the top social listening tools available in the market.
Features:
- It displays the mentions feed, where you can see the opinions of others about your company and act in real-time. You can participate with discussions directly from Brand24.
- It displays you a Discussion Volume Chart that is visually illustrating the mentions of your brand and allows you to detect any spikes in the number of mentions for your brand and find out if there’s any issue.
- Brand24 has created their own Influencer Score to assist you in identifying your industry’s influencers so that you can start making contacts with the key people within your field.
- Social listening tools also provide sentiment analysis. Not only will you be able to discover mentions of your company, it also gives some indications of whether those mentions were negative, positive or neutral in their tone.
AgoraPulse
AgoraPulse is a great 2 in 1 option, offering both scheduling and monitoring functions. It will track mentions of your accounts, comments on social media posts as well as allow you to search for keywords of your choice across Twitter. This social listening tool can also help you find influencers in your social media followers and assign conversations to the team with a just a click.
Merits:
The ability to tag and label important mentions and being able to delegate conversations to team members.
The insights of your audience can help you discover influential people and Brand ambassadors.
- An integrated CRM allows you to make lists of prospects and influencers.
AgoraPulse also segregates fans and followers into Fans-Engaged, Ambassadors, and Influencers (depending on social standing, popularity as a creator or fan, and engagement). This provides an opportunity to balance Brand Highlights for the maintenance of a good social outlook.
Why is social listening important for brands?
Social listening is important for brands because it allows them to gain a deeper understanding of their target audience and track conversations and mentions of their brand, products, and industry on social media.
By monitoring social media, brands can identify customer complaints, feedback, and preferences in real-time, which can be used to improve customer satisfaction and loyalty.
How can a social listening strategy help your business?
Social listening allows businesses to understand their customers, track the competition, improve their marketing strategy, identify new opportunities and make informed decisions.
By monitoring social media conversations, businesses can quickly identify and respond to customer complaints, questions, and feedback in real-time, which can improve customer satisfaction and loyalty.
This can also help to reduce the number of customer complaints and increase customer retention. Social listening also helps businesses to monitor their competitors, track their strategies, and stay informed about industry trends. This can give them a competitive advantage and help them to make more informed decisions.
Additionally, by tracking conversations on social media, businesses can gain insights into what resonates with their target audience and what doesn’t. This can help them to improve their marketing and communication strategies, and increase their reach and engagement.
Furthermore, social listening can help businesses to identify new opportunities, such as potential partnerships or collaborations, and to gather data and insights that can be used to inform their overall business strategy.
Decoding Risk Management Using Social Listening Tools
Today, social media listening is facilitated by a variety of tools and software that make things simpler. However, it is an art in itself. There is a level of risk involved with social media management and listening which must be accounted for. Let’s understand how you can manage risks with social listening tools.
Managing Risks with Social Listening Tools
For the active social listening practitioners out there, one of the biggest challenges in social media listening is access to quality data. It is a relatively newer discipline and is still undergoing evolution to enable brands to learn more about their consumers in a better way. The fact that actively scanning social media for potential risks to your business has opened up new avenues of risk management for a company. Let’s look into that in more detail.
Crisis Alerts in Real Time
If you think about it, the first point-of-contact where you get your daily news happens to be social media. Whether it is Twitter talking about an earthquake, or news forums discussing a socio-economic meltdown, social media has become a huge crisis monitor. The ecosystem of risk management in any business can get access to real-time crisis alerts through active social networking and keeping tabs on relevant hashtags.
Analytics, Reporting, Forecasting, Predictions
The social listening tools today have become “intelligent” by gaining processing and computing power throttled by AI/ML technologies. This has made it easier for businesses to make sense of a high volume of unstructured data by synthesizing insights that provide a better view of:
- Brand image among the target audience
- Demand forecasting based on customer response on social media
- Predictions for a possible risk based on the customer’s voice
Knowing this information beforehand helps with preparedness.
Managing Risks with Social Listening Tools
For the active social listening practitioners out there, one of the biggest challenges in social media listening is access to quality data.
It is a relatively newer discipline and is still undergoing evolution to enable brands to learn more about their consumers in a better way.
The fact that actively scanning social media for potential risks to your business has opened up new avenues of risk management for a company.
Let’s look into that in more detail.
Crisis Alerts in Real Time
If you think about it, the first point of contact where you get your daily news happens to be social media. Whether it is Twitter talking about an earthquake, or news forums discussing a socio-economic meltdown, social media has become a huge crisis monitor.
The ecosystem of risk management in any business can get access to real-time crisis alerts through active social networking and keeping tabs on relevant hashtags.
Analytics, Reporting, Forecasting, Predictions
The social listening tools today have become “intelligent” by gaining processing and computing power throttled by AI/ML technologies.
This has made it easier for businesses to make sense of a high volume of unstructured data by synthesizing insights that provide a better view of:
- Brand image among the target audience
- Demand forecasting based on customer response on social media
- Predictions for a possible risk based on the customer’s voice
Identifying “Negatives” That Impact Brand Image
Creating a brand image and bettering it over time is pivotal to increasing customer loyalty and gaining advocacy. Social listening tools enable brands to identify the “negative” brand voices that could potentially risk brand image. This is the first step to understanding ways to improve customer satisfaction that can potentially impact your brand positioning in the market.
Quick Response
73% of the customers will abandon their carts if the waiting time is longer than 5 minutes.
One of the most important aspects of managing risks is to keep the consumers engaged and happy with your products and services. Social listening tools don’t just help manage the risk to your brand image, but also of long waiting times that consumers may face trying to contact you through traditional channels. Social networking helps your brand be prompt and cut the risk of customer churn and cart abandonment in the bud.
Consumer Satisfaction
A business exists because it has customers and clients. The customer-first approach is necessary today to ensure the sustainability of higher sales and business furtherance. The risk of losing customers to lower CSAT scores is too high to ignore.
Through social listening tools, this risk can be managed by assessing what your customers are saying about your brand to other people.
5 Ways to make use of Social Content
Monitoring brand health and growth
Social listening helps in deconstructing the general perception of your brand and product/service. It serves as a feedback loop that helps you track the brand’s current position, growth potential, and progress.
Based on such data-driven insights, it is easier for businesses to mold public opinion and manage their online reputation. There are brand monitoring tools and social media management tools that continuously carry out these actions.
Engaging with customers
Studies indicate that nearly 46% of consumers believe that engaging with customers through social media elevates a brand to the “best in class” position.
Social media has emerged as a tool for businesses to stay responsive and relevant to enhance customer experience. However, such an approach is possible when you use social listening tools to understand customer sentiments and craft high-value, engaging content.
Discovering new market opportunities
If you are looking to break into a new market vertical, you can leverage social listening and let the target audience do all the legwork for you.
Social listening offers a unique customer’s perspective on their pain points, using which you can innovate and capitalize on various windows of opportunities to diversify your product or services.
Increasing customer acquisition and retention
As customers wield the ultimate power of dictating the dos and don’ts of businesses, listening to them can help improve products/services.
Further, it sets the tone for customer expectations that you can use as the benchmark for delighting your customers. Aligning business strategies with customer expectations will help businesses acquire new customers and retain old ones.
Analyzing competition
Social media platforms are a level playing field for various brands. It acts as a pivoting point for both – young startups and established enterprises to charm their customers. And as everyone battles it out on the same platform, brands can track and analyze the performance of their competition.
You can use social listening tools to understand why your customers prefer your competition, what are the various marketing strategies that yield success, how are their offerings distinct from that of your own – and so on.
The Various Applications of Social Listening
- Social listening helps to keep track of a brand’s overall growth and market value.
- It aids in enhancing the customer base along with maintaining customer retention.
- It helps to find new market prospects.
- It assists businesses to stay responsive to their customers.
A Step-by-Step Guide to Start Your Social Listening Process
Plan Your Objectives
Before you start the social listening process and apply social media management tools, make sure to define your goals first to achieve the best results. Ask the following questions and define your purpose:
- What results are you hoping to receive from the tool?
- Are you seeking to discover more about your customers?
- Do you want to maintain an edge over your rivals?
- Want to preserve your brand image from a crisis?
Decide on Channels to Monitor
Any effective social media monitoring tool will be capable of displaying the channels that your audience is using for communication. So, decide on the channels first on the basis of the analysis to drive traffic to your business.
Pick the Appropriate Tools
Choosing the appropriate tools to carry on the social listening process is important. Go for a tool that provides not only a smooth working experience but also effective customer service to guide you whenever needed.
Create Alerts
If you want to increase customer engagement with your brand, it is important to be responsive to their messages, social mentions, and online reviews. Setting up alerts with a proper social monitoring tool is important to ensure that you never overlook customer feedback or social mentions of your business.
Comparing and Assessing the Company’s Social Media Analytics
Utilizing social media dashboards, you can quickly view all of your key social media analytics to assess the online expansion of your company. A wide variety of measures, such as trending topics, media attention, sentiment analysis, or share of voice, can be examined via the dashboard.
Create a Strategy of Action
Social media monitoring is just one aspect of social media listening; the other one includes taking action. Some tools make it simple and quick to create an effective action plan since they give in-depth research and useful insights.
Examples of Social Listening
1. A retail company is using social listening to monitor mentions of their brand and products on social media. They use social listening tools to track keywords such as their brand name, product names, and common misspellings.
They also track hashtags used by their competitors. This allows them to see what customers are saying about their products and how they compare to the competition. The retail company uses the insights gained from social listening to inform their marketing strategy, identify product issues and improve their customer service.
2. A fast-food chain is using social listening to track and respond to customer complaints. They monitor social media platforms such as Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram for mentions of their brand and specific keywords such as “bad service”, “cold food”, etc.
They also track hashtags such as #badservice. When a customer complaints is detected, they quickly respond to the customer and offer a solution or an apology. This helps the fast-food chain to improve customer satisfaction and maintain a positive reputation. Additionally, by identifying common issues, the fast-food chain can take steps to prevent similar complaints in the future.
Conclusion
According to surveys, about 46% of users think that interacting with clients via social media puts a company in the “market-leading” category. So, employing the right kind of social listening approach is mandatory to grow your business and connect with customers.
Visit Locobuzz, a unified platform to help you with your business’s social media monitoring activities.
