What is social listening?
Social listening is the process of tracking and analyzing information on social media channels. Businesses use social listening to monitor social media for mentions and conversations about their brands, products, and services. By tracking these conversations and analyzing their content, organizations are able to extract in-depth insights about their audiences and understand what customers are feeling and saying about a brand or even the industry as a whole.
The easiest way to engage in social listening is with tools like social media monitoring software. Social media monitoring tools allow businesses to track conversations across a variety of social networks like Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram. With the information collected through social monitoring, businesses are empowered to discover brand advocates and influencers, identify trends, respond to negative feedback, track competitors, and analyze customer sentiment.
Types of social listening strategies
Due to the vast amount of information shared on social media, it becomes necessary to set different goals and tactics for social listening. Depending on a company’s industry, size, and audience, one or more of the following social listening strategies may be used:
- Brand or campaign analysis: Social listening helps businesses understand how their audience feels not only about their brand, but about new products, services, and marketing strategies. When a business launches a new product or invests in a high-profile advertising campaign, social listening allows them to capture customer feedback in real time.
- Community management: Social media grants businesses a direct line to their customers and prospects. Community managers use social listening to monitor conversations about their company’s brand and engage proactively with customers. Social listening can also be used to complement a business’s customer service strategy by enabling support teams to publicly respond to customer questions or concerns.
- Influencer discovery: Social listening is an important process for businesses that want to improve their influencer marketing strategy. By listening to conversations about their brand on social networks, businesses are able to discover who’s talking about them on these channels. This can help marketing teams identify and reach out to their most influential customers and brand advocates.
- Competitive intelligence: Since most of the information on social media is publicly available, social listening provides organizations with data about their own company as well as their competitors. Competitor tracking is a common social listening tactic that can inform businesses of their competitor’s marketing strategies, brand perception, and audience.
- Audience analysis: For many industries, social media platforms provide businesses with a treasure trove of information about their audience. While most social listening strategies are mainly concerned with what people are saying--and how they are saying it--social listening can also tell a business who their audience is. Social listening tools can help brands learn more about their target audience, including demographics like location, age, and gender, as well as psychographic data like interests, beliefs, and behaviors.
Benefits of social listening
Regardless of industry, there are many different benefits that social listening can provide. Some of these benefits include:
- Monitoring brand mentions across multiple social media platforms
- Improving customer loyalty and engagement
- Managing and improving brand reputation
- Understanding how customers feel about a brand, product, or service
- Discovering brand advocates, influencers, and thought leaders
- Receiving early warnings to negative comments or potential crises
- Collecting customer feedback and insights in real time
- Measuring the success of marketing campaigns
- Identifying trending topics in a market or industry
- Generating new ideas for product development or content marketing
Social listening best practices
Social listening is a complex process that requires businesses to make several considerations and investments. To implement social listening successfully, companies should follow these best practices:
- Establish a clear goal: The social media landscape is vast and the possibilities of social listening are endless. As a result, it’s important to set clear goals and desired outcomes to ensure the company’s resources are well-spent.
- Define a brand voice: Social listening inevitably leads to interactions and engagement with customers on social media. Whether it’s a response to a customer or commentary on a trending topic, it’s important to stick to a unique brand voice that will appeal to the target audience and allow the business to foster a stronger dialogue with customers.
- Collaborate across the organization: The goals and strategies involved in social listening are relevant to multiple teams within an organization, from marketing and sales to customer service. Businesses can set up these teams for success by enabling them to communicate and collaborate on the company’s social listening practices.
- Decide when to engage (or not): There are billions of conversations happening on social media every day. The trick to social listening is deciding which conversations to engage in, and which ones to ignore. Additionally, businesses should be prepared to face criticism from their customers--it’s equally important to know when to engage with negative comments and when to simply apologize.
- Purchase a social listening tool: Due to the huge volume of data on social media platforms, social listening would not be possible without the aid of software. Social media monitoring software includes many of the features required for social listening, including keyword monitoring, trend identification, influencer discovery, sentiment analysis, and competitor tracking.
Social listening vs. social monitoring
What is the difference between social listening and social monitoring? Although these terms are often used interchangeably, in practice, there are some important differences. Social media monitoring is the process of gathering, tracking, and responding to mentions of a brand on social media. Social monitoring is closely related to social customer service, as customer support agents monitor social channels and respond to comments or queries from customers.
Social media listening includes social monitoring but takes it a step further by incorporating different analyses and insights. Social listening means analyzing all the data that was collected via social monitoring and using it to inform business decisions and strategies. In other words, social monitoring is gathering the data and responding to mentions, while social listening is analyzing the data and taking action on it.
Stephanie Graham
Stephanie is a Market Research Manager and Senior Research Analyst at G2 concentrating on marketing and digital advertising software. Prior to joining G2, Stephanie spent four years in B2B marketing and event management at an independent publishing company. This experience nurtured her passion for understanding how technology can help solve the unique challenges small businesses face today. Stephanie’s areas of interest include brand perception, customer experience, SEO, and local marketing. She received her BA in journalism and Spanish from Marquette University and in her spare time enjoys reading, gaming, and trying new vegetarian restaurants.
