Social media listening

Social listening, or social media listening, is the monitoring of your brand's online presence for consumer feedback, brand mentions, and conversations that include your chosen keywords, competitors, and industry. To find emerging trends, potential crises, and consumer sentiment towards your brand, products, and your competitors. Analysis of the insights identified will then give you data-backed actions to increase brand awareness, drive consumer loyalty, and protect your brand’s reputation. Read our Social Listening Guide for more details.

To truly understand consumers, what they want, you need to listen to what they're saying. Where they’re saying it, and the sentiment behind. Listening to the voice of the consumer will help you improve your customer service and marketing campaigns, with targeted and personalized communication. Leading to an increase in engagement.

Insights will reveal consumer behaviour and the reasons behind buying decisions, which will enable your brand to develop the products that satisfy customer demands.

Social listening will also help you find the best influencers to promote your brand. Influencers that talk about your brand, have followers that match your target audience, and have a strong share of voice in your industry.

Protecting your brand reputation is an essential use case for social listening. Our Blue Silk™ AI-enabled sentiment analysis will spot an emerging crisis, so you can respond in real time.

Read our Social Listening Guide for more details.

Your social listening strategy should include the following...

• Monitor and analyse sentiment and brand perception to understand what consumers think about your brand. Today's consumers are watching how brands perform on all levels - societal issues, DEI, the environment, personalization. Capture the positive and negative mentions, to identify a failing campaign, a product launch badly received, and positive user-generated content that can be used in your marketing messaging.
• Follow industry trends and jump into the conversations to increase consumer engagement.
• Conduct competitor analysis to understand which of your competitors' posts are trending and why. What user-generated feedback they're receiving, so you can target your messaging to their consumers.
• Monitor influencers’ activities and engagement levels on all their social media channels to ensure they're still on brand.
• Identify crises and fluctuations in the volume of consumer conversation surrounding your brand. Monitor increases in positive and negative engagement. Is it a PR crisis? Is it UGC that you can use? An increase in negative sentiment is an early warning sign of an issue. Find the cause and react quickly to avoid reputational damage.

Read our Social Listening Guide for more details.

Once you've chosen a social listening tool that meets your needs, set your business goals…

• Improve your customer service
• Understand consumer sentiment around your brand and products
• Keep up to date on your industry and trending topics
• Benchmark against your competitors - products, audience, marketing strategy
• Analyse your audience so you can create targeted messaging

Choose which terms to monitor across websites, blogs, news sites, reviews, Q&A forums, podcasts, and social media...

• Products and brand mentions, to understand the sentiment towards your business - include brand name, hashtags, product names, common misspellings
• Product and brand mentions combined with service-related words, such as 'not working', 'failed', 'help'
• Events related to your company - product release, industry terms and topics, PR crisis

Choose data sources to track. Collect data from relevant sources only. Too much and your team will be overwhelmed. Go for the big networks - Twitter, Facebook, Weibo, etc. - and the channels where your target audience talks.

Use the social listening data you identify to drive...

• Brand experience- how you're perceived by consumers
• Customer experience - what customers enjoy about your products
• Crisis management - spot crises and react in real time before they damage your reputation
• Competitive analysis - monitor your competition to identify challenges and opportunities for growth
• Content strategy - identify trending topics that can be used in future messaging and content
• Influencer marketing - find influencers with followers relevant to your products, and build relationships

Read our Social Listening Guide for more details.

True. Social listening can help you find leads for your business. By listening to the conversations your consumers are having online, you can identify who needs your busines, and just where they are in the buying cycle.

Discover how social listening can help you find leads in this blog.

Social media monitoring is where you track your brand conversations online, to see what people are saying about your brand. This can reveal conversations such as:

• Product issues. Social monitoring can find when people talk about your brand or product negatively, allowing you to either resolve the issue directly, or feedback to improve products over time.
• Product requests. You can find consumer suggestions for new products, new use cases, innovations, or other areas to meet your consumer expectations.
• Product shares. You can also find when consumers recommend your products, to help you identify new opportunities, and to help grow your community of fans.

Social listening takes this brand monitoring further. It incorporates a wider range of sources, and doesn’t just monitor your own brand, but also listens for mentions of your competitors, your industry, your brand purpose, and other relevant topics.

This provides you with a deeper understanding of the true voice of your consumer.

This blog on social media monitoring versus social listening dives into the topic deeper.

Social listening can be used by any industry at any time. If your consumers are online and talking about your brand, you can tune in and listen.

Not only can you monitor brand mentions, but you can track specific industry topics, to really understand the pains and priorities consumers are having. Here are some examples of what you could use social listening for in your industry.

• CPG. Monitor conversations around the demand for goods and services within your category. This will allow you to pre-empt increased demand, allowing you to manage your supply chain more efficiently.
• Financial services. Track regulatory changes, and understand what consumers think about them. This will allow you to adapt your messaging quickly, to create more relevant social media marketing campaigns.
• Pharma. Monitor consumer perceptions about your products, and track if there are any related increases in mentioned side effects. This will help you respond to any issues before they reach crisis point.
• Sports & entertainment. Monitor for images and videos that misuse your IP. This will enable you to find fake products or pirated shows, and take legal measures to stop them being shared.

There’s more examples of social listening by industry in this blog.

Social media listening tools are designed to help your complete your social listening more effectively. Although many social media platforms, such as Twitter, have searches built in, a social listening platform helps you monitor all channels at the same time.

This is critical to provide a true voice of the consumer. Each social channel has its own audience, with differing demographics and opinions. To avoid data bias, and get a broad picture of your consumers, you want to integrate as much data as possible into one platform.

This will also make your social listening strategy faster and more efficient.

We’ve listed some of the best social listening tools in this blog.