What is social listening? Why do brands care about it? How to get started with social listening for your business?
Social media marketing is a must for every business. Marketers are leveraging social media marketing tools to improve brand presence on social media networks.
Businesses focus on website optimization and content creation, but social media is where small businesses are facing challenges.
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| Social Listening: What is it? And How to Use it?: eAskme |
Social media is the home of a massive audience. With social media listening strategies, you can ensure that your brand gains momentum and popularity on social media platforms. You will better understand what your target audience is interested in and why they need it.
With Social listening, you will have a better understanding of your customer's needs. You will discover what your target audience is talking about and find the areas of improvement and influence.
It is the time when you should learn:
- What is social listening?
- Social Listening and Social Monitoring: Difference
- Why Social Listening is Crucial for Your Business?
- How do you use different tools to get started with social listening?
- How to Build a Social Listening Strategy?
Let's find out the answers!
What is Social Listening?
As the term suggests, social listening is about listening to your target audience's behavior on social media networks with tracking tools.
You can track conversations to get deeper insights, analyze them, and find the relation with your brand.
It will help you form better marketing strategies on social media platforms.
Audience conversations will include:
- Brand mentions
- Competitors
- Keywords
- Relevant topics
The reason why you should use social listening practices is to know your audience better than your competitors. You will learn the interests, customer behavior, and what makes them love the brands.
Collect this data and analyze it. With this data, you can generate new content ideas or better product ideas for your customers.
What You Can Do with Social Listening?
- Track brand mentions
- Spot popular trends
- Evaluate public perception
- Understand your target audience
You can not only use social listening to create marketing strategies but also use it to improve your products, services, and even customer engagement.
Social Listening and Social Monitoring: Difference
You may have heard about social listening and social monitoring.
Don't get confused. Both are different terms. Even though people use each of these terms in the place of others. The use of these terms depends upon the objectives and scopes.
Social monitoring is strictly related to your brand, but social listening is about collecting data to gain insight.
Social monitoring is about what your target audience is saying. Social listening is about why your target audience is saying such things.
Social monitoring monitors brand mentions, queries, questions, solutions, trending topics, etc. It is about knowing what is happening to your brand on social media. Social listening does more than this. You can also understand content strategy, decision-making, and branding.
Social monitoring is related to brand mentions, but social listening focuses on the latest trends, user behavior, and conversations.
Social monitoring and social listening are both essential parts of your marketing strategy.
Yet, today, we are covering everything about social listening.
Why is Social Listening Important?
Social listening can help you understand customers and their needs. With this, you can improve your customer support, products, and services.
Here are the reasons why social listening is essential for your business.
Reputation Management:
With social listening practices, you will learn what your audience expects from your products, services, brand, or messaging.
You will go through the positive and negative mentions of your brand and work on fixing issues to improve your online reputation.
Understand the Target Audience:
If yes, then you need social listening.
With social listening, you will learn what your target customer wants, desires, pinpoints, and opinions. With this information, you can optimize your content strategies and improve products.
Market Analysis:
Social listening gives you deeper insight into your industry, such as opportunities, trends, and consumer behavior. You should use this information to improve customer service and outrank your competitors.
Insights:
Social listening will open deeper insight that will help you track competitors' behavior, their failures, and successes.
You will find out how your competitors target customers and what you should do.
Crisis Management:
In online business, you can face a crisis at any point in time. With active social listening, you can understand the upcoming issues and fix them before it is too late.
Engaging Content Strategy:
You will find different content formats and types that best suit your audience. With social listening insights, you can create engaging content.
Lead Generation:
Social listening is also essential for lead generation.
You can discover a target audience already interested in your products, services, topics, or niche.
Combining social listening with your brand and content strategy will help you generate more leads.
5 Social Listening Tools:
With social media listening, you will collect essential data from social media sites.
Here are the social listening tools that you can use.
1. Hootsuite:
Hootsuite is a popular social media management tool. You can also use it for social media listening.
With Hootsuite, you can track brand mentions, hashtags, and keywords. With this, you can follow conversations to engage.
You can easily integrate the Hootsuite tool to track Reddit conversations, brand mentions, consumer behavior, etc.
Price: $99/month or 30-day free trial.
2. Sprout Social:
Sprout Social is also a popular social media tool for social listening.
You can use Sprout Social Smart Inbox to track DMs, mentions, and comments. You will get all the essential data in the content feed. It will be easy for you to find out what is happening.
With Sprout Social, you can also do the following:
- Sentiment Research
- Audience Analysis
- Influencer recognition
- Crisis management
- Competitor comparison
Price: 30-day free trial or $249/month
3. Brandwatch:
Brandwatch is also a popular social listening tool to analyze and track social media conversations. You will get the result from 100 million sources.
Brandwatch will track brand mentions to track perception and sentiment.
Brandwatch AI also displays historical data, conversation translation, and brand mention.
Price: You need to book a meeting with the Brandwatch company.
4. Meltwater:
Meltwater is also a tool that you can use for social media monitoring as well as social media listening.
Meltwater collects data from social media feeds from sites like YouTube, Facebook, Reddit, Instagram, Twitch, etc. It can even track podcast mentions.
With Meltwater, you can also track conversations, topics, report building, behavior, crisis management, and consumer segmentation.
Price: Set a Meeting with the Meltwater team.
5. Talkwalker:
Talkwalker is a premium social listening tool. It can track brand mentions on 10+ social media networks and 150 million websites.
Talkwalker AI tools will analyze data from 127+ languages, including conversation clustering, typical activity, and issue detection.
Price: Set a Meeting with the Talkwalker team.
How to Build a Social Listening Strategy?
Now you know what social listening is, its importance, and its tools. Now, it is the time to build a perfect strategy for a social listening program.
6 Ways to Create the Social Listening Strategy:
1. Set Goals:
You should clearly define your goals and objectives.
Make sure that you match your goals with your objectives and write down to ensure that you are not missing anything.
You may want to achieve the following:
- Track brand emotion and improve presence.
- Improve customer support.
- Learn from insight to improve products or services.
- Follow industry trends and events.
- Understand how your competitors are working on social media.
- Setting your goals is the first step to success.
2. Harness the Tools:
You can work on social media networks manually. But, it is best to use social media management tools to make the job easy and effective.
With the help of social media listening tools, you will have access to the data retrieved from millions of websites and social media networks. You can use it to analyze trends, activity, and sentiment.
Always use premium social listening tools to get maximum benefits.
Choose the tool that aligns with your goals and objectives.
A professional social listening tool will cover every important aspect of social listening that can impact your business.
3. Identify Topics and Keywords:
Not only define topics but also list topics and related keywords. You should also include hashtags. Hashtags work great at social listening.
Track themes and keywords that are important for your business. Remove unnecessary keywords from your list.
Keep updating your list. This way, you will keep your keyword and topic list updated to create content that can grab maximum engagement.
4. Workflow:
A clear workflow is needed to define jobs and distribute them. Social listening covers different parts and who will work on which part is necessary to explain.
Hire someone who can monitor your social listening regularly and engage with the content—also, track alerts.
5. Adapt and Evolve:
Learn from the data and improve your social listening strategies. Listen to what data tells and improve your content, products, or services.
Use the result to improve customer services, content strategies, and marketing.
6. Social Media Measurement:
It is essential to measure the success of your social listening strategies.
Evaluate the results and how it can impact your business.
Track social media engagement metrics to learn what type of content performs better on social media.
Conclusion:
Social media is the house of conversation. Billions of users are spending hours on social media channels. Social listening is the best strategy to listen to these conversations and grab every opportunity to brand your business or sell more.
Listening to your target audience will give you the bigger picture of what you should do, how you should improve your products, and how you can outrank the competition.
Follow these tips and start your journey to success with social listening.
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