What is social listening?
Monitoring your brand’s social media channels for any customer feedback and direct mentions of your brand, as well as discussions about specific keywords, topics, competitors, or industries, followed by an analysis to gain insights and act on those opportunities, is what social listening is all about.
You can improve your customer experience by interacting directly with customers and continuously shifting your customer strategy to fit the current need by performing social listening.
At first glance, social listening may appear to be the same as social media monitoring, but the two concepts differ significantly.
Simply looking at metrics and collecting data about those metrics is what social media monitoring is all about. When you act in response to the data you’ve gathered, you’ve started the process of social listening.
Why is social listening important?
If you don’t use social media listening, you’re missing out on a lot of valuable information.
In fact, you could be overlooking a significant piece of information about your brand that people are actively discussing. You’re curious about what people are saying about you.
What your customers want from your brand is communicated to you. If you care about them, you should consider the insights you could gain from social listening.
5 social listening tips
Here is some of our best social listening advice. When you try it out, use it to get the most bang for your buck.
- Listen everywhere
Find out where, not just what, your audience is talking about you. That implies your social listening campaign should cast a wide net.
Conversations about your brand on LinkedIn are likely to differ significantly from those on Instagram. You may also discover that people talk about you a lot on Twitter but not on Facebook.
It’s just as vital to know where they talk about you as it is to know how they talk about you. It will show you how to join the conversation through organic interaction and paid advertising.
- Study your competition
Your competitors can always teach you something. What others say about them, in particular, can teach you a lot. Look at what they do well and what people like about them. Most importantly, observe where they err and where they get it wrong.
It is far less painful to learn a difficult lesson by watching your competitors make mistakes than it is to make it yourself.
- Work along with other teams
Social listening provides a wealth of information that is beneficial to your entire organisation. What you learn while listening on social media could benefit the customer service, content marketing, and product development teams. Make sure to share what you’ve learned. Also, solicit feedback from those teams. They may have specific questions that you can answer by adjusting your social listening setup.
- Adapt to the changes
As you begin to collect social data, you will gain an understanding of the regular conversation and sentiment surrounding your brand.
When you know how people feel about you on a regular basis, you’ll be able to detect changes.
Significant changes in engagement or sentiment can indicate that your brand’s overall perception has shifted. You must understand why so that you can adjust your strategy accordingly.
- Take action
Remember that if you don’t take action, you’re only monitoring social media, not listening to it.
Social listening is more than just tracking metrics. It is about learning what your customers and potential customers want from you and how you can provide it to them.
Make a point of looking at patterns and trends over time rather than just individual comments. These broad insights can have the most significant impact on your future strategy.
Social media can reveal new and changing customer trends. If you don’t pay attention and roll with the punches, your brand will suffer in comparison to those that do. Your customers want a brand that is new and interactive, and that offers products, services, support, and content that is truly useful and engaging.
Digital agencies can assist you in better understanding how customers react to the content you publish about your brand. Make the most of your digital marketing by contacting The Social Lions today.