In 2023, almost 5 billion people will have used social media. With an increasing number of users and social media content, businesses are struggling to cut through the noise. A lot of them miss valuable conversations with customers actively looking to buy their products. Or worst, ignore negative comments about their products on social media.
Remaining indifferent to social mentions about your brand, comment sentiment and missing on analyzing emerging trends related to your industry leads only one way — losing to competition who leverage social listening.
Social listening is no longer an optional practice, it’s a necessity to succeed as a brand online. So what is social listening, and how can it help with your social media strategy? In this article, you will learn everything you need to succeed with social listening and integrate it in your social media strategy.
Table of Contents:
- What is Social Listening?
- Social Listening vs Social Monitoring
- How to Leverage Social Listening for Social Media Marketing
- Top Strategies for Social Listening
- Tools to Amplifying Your Social Media Strategy
What is Social Listening?
Social listening is the process of keeping track of and analyzing online discussions to gain valuable insights into customer opinions, sentiments, and trends.
Unlike traditional monitoring and analytics, social listening focuses on understanding the context and emotions behind the conversations. It provides a holistic view of your target audience and helps you make data-driven decisions.
There are various ways social listening can help. Let’s quickly recap:
- Filter mentions to find out who talks bad about your brand (and let you react to negative comments on time)
- Get all mentions about your brand and understand their sentiment (positive or negative), their influence, and reach.
- Jump into a conversation when someone is looking to buy products like yours
- Analyze industry developments and catch trends (so you can make better decisions about product development and marketing strategy)
Social Listening v. Social Monitoring — How Are They Different?
Social listening and social monitoring are two different practices in the realm of social media management, each serving a unique purpose. While they are related and often used in conjunction, understanding their differences is crucial to help you succeed with your social media plan. Let’s delve into how social listening and social monitoring differ and the value they can bring to your brand.
| Social Listening | Social Monitoring |
| Social listening involves actively monitoring and analyzing social media platforms for insights and conversations related to specific keywords, topics, brands, or industries. It focuses on understanding the context, sentiment, and emotions behind social media discussions. | Social monitoring focuses on tracking and observing social media channels for specific mentions, keywords, or brand-related content. It primarily involves keeping a close eye on social media platforms to gather real-time information about your brand and industry. |
| Contextual understanding — aims to gain a holistic understanding of conversations by analyzing the underlying meaning, intent, and sentiment of social media posts. It goes beyond surface-level mentions to grasp the nuances and emotions behind them. | Real-time tracking — Social monitoring focuses on tracking and capturing immediate mentions, comments, or posts related to a brand, product, or specific keywords. It helps businesses stay up-to-date with ongoing conversations and respond quickly to customer queries or issues. |
| Audience-centric approach — focuses on capturing and analyzing data from various social media channels to gain insights into audience preferences, needs, and behaviors. It helps businesses understand their target groups better, their pain points, and what drives their engagement. | Performance metrics and KPIs — Social monitoring often involves tracking key performance indicators (KPIs) such as engagement metrics, reach, impressions, and brand mentions. It provides insights into the effectiveness of social media campaigns, content strategies, and audience response. |
| Brand reputation management — serves as an instrumental in managing brand reputation by monitoring and addressing customer feedback, complaints, and mentions. It enables businesses to respond promptly to customer concerns, manage crises effectively, and build positive brand sentiment. | Customer service and support — Social monitoring plays a crucial role in identifying customer inquiries, complaints, or issues on social media platforms. It helps you provide timely and personalized customer support, enhance customer satisfaction, and manage public perception. |
| Identifying opportunities and trends — helps identify emerging trends, topics, and discussions relevant to your industry. This insight helps adapt marketing strategies, create relevant content, and stay ahead of the competition. | Competitor analysis — helps you watch your competitors by tracking their social media activities, content strategies, and customer interactions. It provides valuable insights into competitors’ strengths, weaknesses, and customer perceptions. |
How to Leverage Social Listening for Social Media Marketing
While there are many ways social listening can help meet your business objectives, there are specific use cases for improving social media strategy. Let’s look at how you can use it to excel with your social media objectives.
Identify and Understand Your Target Audience
By actively listening to conversations and tracking relevant trends, social listening enables you to gain a deeper understanding of your target audience. For example, when analyzing positive comments, you can quickly catch why people like and use your products. As a result, you can validate your personas further and understand your customers better.
Enhance Brand Reputation and Customer Experience
Social listening allows you to address customer concerns, issues, and feedback promptly. You can keep track of mentions of your brand, products, or services and respond accordingly.
When customers are not happy, you can quickly jump into the conversation to resolve the issue, so users don’t churn or talk negatively about you both online and offline. Check this example of how you can handle negative mentions online.
On the other hand, positive feedback and testimonials can be amplified to enhance your brand reputation and improve the overall customer experience.
Identifying Industry Influencers and Partnerships
Social listening helps you discover influential voices within your industry. You can find relevant influencers and establish strategic collaborations and partnerships. These partnerships can amplify your brand’s reach and credibility, helping you deliver a message to a wider audience.
For example, you can do it from one unified dashboard with Mention.
Answer Your Customers’ Questions at Scale
Using social listening tools, can help you discover users’ frequently asked questions (FAQs) by analyzing customer queries and feedback. You can then compile these FAQs into a comprehensive document or knowledge base to provide scalable answers to customer inquiries.
Improve Your Marketing Campaigns
You can uncover what your customers love about your brand by closely monitoring their feedback and sentiments. This lets you incorporate this valuable information into your campaigns and content strategy to enhance engagement and resonate with your target audience.
Identify and grow engaged audiences
Social listening helps identify your key social media customers who are highly engaged and influential. As a result, you can analyze their traits and behaviors to gain insights into your target audience. Utilize these findings to refine your social media strategy and target new social audiences effectively.
Top Strategies for Social Listening
You must be asking — how can I integrate social listening strategy into social media strategy? Review this guide to get a quick start.
Monitor Brand Mentions
Monitor mentions of your brand across social media platforms to gain insights into how your brand is perceived. Identify positive feedback, address customer concerns, and engage with your audience to build stronger relationships and brand loyalty.
Track Competitor Activity
Monitor your competitors’ social media presence. By monitoring their content, engagement, and customer interactions, you can identify their strategies, learn from their successes and failures, and find opportunities to differentiate your brand.
Identify Trending Topics
Stay informed about the latest trends and discussions relevant to your industry. Social listening allows you to identify trending topics, hashtags, and conversations, enabling you to create timely and engaging content.
Understand Customer Sentiment
Analyze the sentiment behind social media mentions related to your brand or industry. By understanding customer sentiment, you can gauge public opinion, address negative feedback, and highlight positive experiences to improve your brand perception.
Discover Influencers
Social listening helps identify influencers and thought leaders who are talking about your brand or industry. Engaging with these individuals can help amplify your message, expand your reach, and build credibility within your target audience.
Gather Customer Insights
Using social listening tools, you can gather direct feedback and insights from your customers. Respond to their comments, questions, and suggestions to understand their needs, pain points, and preferences. This information can guide your content creation and product improvements.
Identify Industry Insights
Monitor industry-related conversations and discussions to gain insights into market trends, emerging needs, and customer behaviors. Use this information to tailor your social media strategy, create relevant content, and position your brand as an industry leader.
Content Optimization
Analyze social media conversations and discussions to identify topics that resonate with your audience. Use these insights to optimize your content strategy by creating more relevant and engaging posts, articles, videos, or infographics. Tailoring your content to meet the interests and needs of your audience can boost engagement and drive conversions.
Campaign Tracking and Measurement
Implement social listening during your marketing campaigns to track their performance and gather real-time feedback. Monitor audience reactions, sentiment, and engagement levels to assess the effectiveness of your campaigns. Adjust your strategies and messaging based on the insights gained, ensuring continuous improvement and better results.
Tools to Amplifying Your Social Media Strategy
When implementing social listening and looking for ways to boost your social media strategy, equip yourself with the right tools. Firstly, you would need to build your social listening tool or use an off-the-shelf one such as Mention.
Next, when you extract social listening insights, consider using other software to help take the learnings into action. For example, if you have identified influencers who mention your brand, consider checking their credibility before you start working together more regularly.
Mention.com
Mention is a powerful social listening tool that allows brands to monitor online conversations, mentions, and trends across various social media platforms, blogs, news sites, and forums.
You can track keywords, hashtags, and phrases relevant to your industry or brand with Mention. As a result, you get valuable insights into customer sentiments, industry trends, and competitor activities.
By leveraging Mention’s real-time monitoring capabilities, you can promptly respond to customer feedback, address concerns, and engage with your audience.
Mention’s advanced analytics features provide in-depth data analysis, such as sentiment analysis and engagement metrics, helping you measure the impact of your content campaigns and make data-driven decisions.
Beyond social listening, Mention offers additional functionalities like competitor analysis, collaboration features, and customized alerts, making it a comprehensive tool for managing brand reputation, tracking industry trends, and maximizing social media marketing efforts.
Shoutcart.com
After you identify key influencers talking about your brand, it’s worth involving them in your influencer marketing campaigns and getting the ball rolling with more frequent mentions of your brand on their socials. Shoutcart provides a platform to connect with those influencers and utilize Instagram shoutouts as a means of expanding your brand’s visibility.
Fameswap.com
Growing a successful social media account often takes years, but most brands want to tip into existing audiences and increase the number of mentions about their products online. Fameswap is the tool that can support your social media marketing strategy and get traction with your PR effort faster.
By acquiring established profiles and building awareness about your products, you can quickly gain traction with social media mentions so more people learn about your products and start talking about them online.
Fameaudit.com
Using social listening tools can help spot top voices in your industry, but it’s important to perform some due diligence before you continue working with them on a paid basis. Fameaudit.com can be a valuable tool to ensure the authenticity and credibility of those influencers.
By checking for fake followers and engagement, you can make more informed decisions when selecting influencers to collaborate with. This verification process aligns with the overall goal of social listening, which is to build genuine connections with your audience. By incorporating Fameaudit into your influencer selection process, you can enhance the effectiveness of your social media marketing efforts.
Wrapping up
You have to start utilizing social listening tools to outperform your competition on social media. There are lots of ways you can use social listening for the benefit of your social marketing strategy. You can identify influencers with whom you can engage in promotion campaigns or pick industry trends faster to write more engaging content. On top of that — you can always stay updated with what customers tell about your brand online and respond on time. It’s up to you how you approach the execution fast. But remember — if you are consistent with your social listening strategy, the result won’t wait!
