Why Social Listening Strategy & Social Listening Tools Are Important for Your Business?

Without a social listening strategy in place, you’re losing out on some of the most important information that can help you grow your company. In fact, almost two-thirds of marketers concur that the value of social listening has grown over the past decade.

By examining what people are saying on social media channels, social media listening technologies enable you to develop a thorough picture of exactly how your current and future target audience feels about you.

You might also ask them their opinions about the competition. If you know how to obtain it, this amazing market research is readily available in real-time.

How does social listening work?

Social listening involves monitoring mentions as well as conversations about your business on social media platforms, then analysing them for information to identify opportunities to take action.

There are two steps to it:

1. Watch out for mentions of your brand, competitors’ brands, your products, and keywords connected to your sector on social media networks.
2. Examine the data to find practical applications for what you have learned.

It may be as straightforward as thanking a happy customer, or it might be more complicated, like fully shifting the positioning of your company.

What distinguishes social monitoring from social listening?

Although social listening and social media monitoring appear similar at first look, they actually differ significantly.

The main goal of social media monitoring is data gathering. It enables you to review previous events using metrics like:

• Mentions of the brand
• Suitable hashtags
• References to rivals
• Market trends

For tasks like tracking ROI or A/B testing ads, brand monitoring on social media is fantastic. The information is also excellent for demonstrating the worth of social media marketing when the time comes to establish the annual budget.

But numbers don’t give the whole story. It’s wonderful when a post generates a lot of positive comments. However, it’s not so wonderful if a post receives a lot of critical remarks and hostile responses.

Social listening considers the sentiment underlying the data in addition to the numbers. The term “social media sentiment” is frequently used to describe this “online attitude.”

Social media listening includes social media sentiment analysis, since it gives you insight into how individuals feel about you and your rivals.

Instead of focusing solely on the number of occasions your company is referenced, consider what you can discover from social media discussions to produce tangible business outcomes.

You can react swiftly to unforeseen events by being aware of shifts in societal sentiment. A log of prior events is essentially what social monitoring is.

Social listening is characterised by the capacity to look both in front of and behind oneself. It involves assessing the data you gather and using it to inform your strategy and regular operations.

What benefits might a social listening strategy offer your company?

Perhaps the interactions you have will highlight a need in the market that you can fill.

Online, actual people actively discuss your brand as well as your business. It is essential for you to educate yourself on their viewpoints. Simply said, you care about the social listening insights if you value your customers. The following are some benefits of social listening for your business.

Recognize your audience and engage them

You can have a clearer understanding of what your consumer wants from your brand if you use social media listening. A present customer, for example, might tweet regarding how much they enjoy your product.

Or you can overhear a conversation in which someone is seeking the kind of resolution your product or service can offer.

Competitive and industry knowledge

Social listening goes beyond simply listening to what others are saying about you. Find out their opinions about the competition in general as well as your rivals. This gives you important details about your place in the industry.

Social listening is characterised by the capacity to look both in front of and behind oneself. Are new items being introduced? Are they creating fresh marketing initiatives?

You are creating your business plan while ignoring reality if you are not utilizing social media listening. When you are aware of these fresh chances and dangers as they arise, you can prepare and act instantly.

Product knowledge

Monitoring talks in the sector also reveals a wealth of information about what appeals to both current and potential clients.

Your customer support, design and development, and marketing departments will find this information to be a goldmine.

Can you modify a current product or include a feature to address the issues customers are mentioning?

Maybe what you discover will inspire a fresh product concept. Additionally, you’ll discover the problems customers are having with your current products and those of your rivals.

Can you change anything to help with the issues? If you do, make sure to use a targeted marketing strategy to let people know about it.

Prevent crises before they occur.

You can monitor sentiment in real-time with social listening, so you can immediately detect any substantial changes in the volume of people talking about you or the tone of their remarks.

It serves as an early alert system, notifying you of changes in how the internet perceives your brand. Maybe the encounters you have may reveal a market need that you can satisfy.

Look for the causes if you’re receiving more engagement than normal. Lots of useful information about their preferences and dislikes is shared by your audience. These insights can aid in channel-specific strategy development.

Additionally, social listening enables you to rectify PR mishaps early on. Review the social input if there is a decline in sentiment and make an effort to pinpoint the cause.

While you are at it, search for insights that will help you avoid making the same mistake again. Finding the reason should be a top concern if sentiment is drastically low.

Pull a problematic post right away to make adjustments. You can express regret for a hurtful Tweet.

Fill up your funnel.

People like it when you offer to assist them with their problems in general. Online strangers, however, most definitely detest it when businesses interject a sales pitch into their social chats.

You can find queries and discussions on social media regarding your sector by using social listening.

All of these present potential chances for you to connect with people and share your expertise or introduce your company. However, they shouldn’t be viewed as opportunities to dive in straight away and try to sell.

Instead, see the conversation you enter through social listening as a chance to build connections with potential clients in your industry that you can then nurture into connections for social selling.

Try your best to interact with others and share knowledge. When it comes time for a customer to make a purchasing decision, this will help position your business as the best source.

Recognize possibilities for cooperation

You may identify the key creators and opinion leaders in your field by keeping an eye on social media debates about it.

Connecting with these people is crucial. They may greatly affect how other people view you.

Remember that communication is two-way. Supporting people in your field increases the likelihood that they will do the same for you.

Connect through partnerships with individuals who already have a significant voice in the debates you wish to join, rather than attempting to impose yourself on an already established group.

Using social listening, you can discover natural ways to integrate yourself into relevant online communities in a way that comes across as helpful rather than pushy.

Additionally, you’ll come across folks who already adore your company and are raving about you on social media.

These people are logical brand supporters. Make contact with them and explore opportunities to collaborate in positive ways with these current customers of your business.

Six social listening pointers

1. Pay attention to the correct subjects and words.

The key to effective social listening is picking the terms that are most pertinent to your brand. The terms and areas you watch are probably going to change over time. With the aid of social listening tools, you may discover the common vocabulary people use while discussing your company and its sector.

You’ll also get a feel of what types of insights are most beneficial to you. That being said, here’s a list of critical terms and subjects to keep an eye on straight away:

• Your company’s name and handles
• Your company’s name (s)
• The brand names, product information, and handles of your rivals
• Industry metaphors
• Your slogan, as well as those of your competing brands
• Names of significant personnel in your firm and those of your rivals (your CEO, spokesperson, etc.)
• Keywords or campaign names
• Your own branded hashtags as well as those of your rivals
• Hashtags unbranded to your sector

For all the above, you should also keep an eye out for frequent misspellings and abbreviations.

2. Listening to the correct social media platforms

Learning where your audience conducts their chats is an important part of determining what they have to say about you. That implies your social listening programme will need to cast a wide net.

Conversations about your business or sector on LinkedIn are likely to differ significantly from those on Twitter, Instagram, or Facebook. And you may discover that people are talking about you a lot on Twitter and not at all on Facebook.

You must understand where individuals are speaking about you and your industry, as well as how those conversations differ across networks.

This will drive your approach to entering the debate, both organically and through paid promotion.

3. Refine your search

Once you’ve determined which phrases and networks are critical for you to watch, employ more advanced search strategies to narrow down your findings.

Depending on your market, you may want to restrict your social listening efforts by region. You might not be bothered about the discourse in Italy if you manage a small business in New York.

Boolean search logic may also be used to produce more focused search streams for social listening.

4. Study the competition

You should never try to imitate someone else’s strategy. However, you may always learn something by paying close attention to your competition and what others say about them online.

Most notably, you can observe where they make mistakes and get it wrong, as well as when they face scrutiny in the public or on social media.

It’s far easier to learn a harsh lesson by seeing your rivals make errors than it is to do them yourself.

5. Disseminate what you discover

Social listening delivers a plethora of data that is beneficial to your entire organisation. Perhaps it’s a customer post that requires an immediate reaction. Perhaps that would make an excellent blog entry. Perhaps it’s a new product concept or a modification of an existing product.

What you discover when listening on social media might aid the customer support, digital marketing, and business development teams.

Make sure to share your discoveries.

Also, solicit feedback from those teams. They may have particular queries that you can address by adjusting your social listening setup.

6. Be on the lookout for changes.

As you begin to collect social data, you will gain an understanding of the frequent discourse and emotion around your business.

You’ll be able to detect change once you understand how much people communicate about you on a regular basis and what the overall sentiment level is.

Substantial improvements in engagement or sentiment might indicate that your brand’s general impression has shifted. You must understand why so that you may adjust your plan accordingly.

That might involve riding a positive wave or fixing a blunder to get back on track. Remember that if you don’t take action, you’re merely monitoring social media, not listening to it.

The most effective social listening tools

Social listening tool will greatly simplify the implementation of an efficient social listening strategy. Here are our recommendations for the top social listening tools.

Crimson Hexagon ForSight

The Crimson Hexagon ForSight platform is intended to give sophisticated social media analytics to businesses of all sizes and sectors.

It’s also cost-effective because consumers just pay for insights rather than data. You may filter your social listening streams in Crimson Hexagon ForSight by emotion, thought category, gender, region, and influence score.

It allows you to connect with a big audience in real-time by providing access to a data collection of over 400 billion social media postings.

Audiense

Audiense enables you to recognize any audience, no matter how large. The programme generates reports that show you what they’re talking about, what they enjoy, and even the way they think and act.

Its audience manager also assists you in locating and comprehending extremely specialised consumers to ensure you have the ideal fit for your business.

Synthesio

Synthesio records talk in finely segmented groups about extremely precise themes.

It enables you to segment your social listening data based on language, geography, demographics, emotion, gender, impact, and other factors. The reports also provide a useful social reputation score.

Hootsuite

Hootsuite is one of the most effective free social listening tools available. Hootsuite may be used to create social media streams that monitor discussions, keywords, mentions, and hashtags.

Instead of logging in and out of numerous social sites, you can watch and reply to discussions or mentions from a single dashboard.

Hootsuite also helps you keep an ear to the ground in your business by analyzing the competition and establishing relationships with social media content producers (also known as influencers) and promising brand ambassadors.

Talkwalker

Talkwalker’s social listening tools are powerful, analysing forums, blogs, videos, review and news sites, and social networking sites all in one dashboard. They collect information from around 1.5 billion sources.

You’ll be able to monitor brand-related discussions while measuring interaction, exposure, responses, and sentiments.

Mentionlytics

Keep a close watch on mentions, phrases, and sentiment in several languages. You may also simply locate influencers on social media and other internet channels.

Mentionlytics social media monitoring tool searches social platforms, blogs, and news sites for mentions. You’ll be able to simply monitor them on your dashboard because it’s connected with Hootsuite.

Adview

Adview, unlike other social listening solutions, is only used for social listening on Facebook and Instagram advertisements.

It allows you to monitor up to three Facebook Ad Accounts across an infinite number of pages.

When you integrate Adview into your Hootsuite dashboard, you will be able to respond to comments on all of your Facebook and Instagram advertising in one spot.

Conclusion

Social listening is more than just collecting metrics. It’s about learning what your consumers and future customers want from you and how to better meet their demands.

Make a point of looking at patterns and trends over time rather than simply individual remarks. These broad findings might have the most impact on your future strategy.