What is social listening?

Unless you shout out your brand name and promote its services on social media, no one will know that you exist. While brand reputation is vital, you must gain prominence for good reasons. No one would ever want to develop a negative reputation, and this can be avoided only if you keep a close watch on your brand’s social media channels.

Social listening is keeping your brand’s social media accounts under close observation for feedback, mentions, or opinions regarding a specific topic, keyword, or industry and performing an analysis to understand and use these opportunities for improvising.

Social listening allows you to gain better insights into your brand’s popularity among customers. This way, you can understand your customers’ requirements and develop new content and promotion ideas to use on social media.

Social Listening Vs. Social Monitoring

Aren’t these two the same processes? No! Though both these processes are related to analyzing social media, the scope or opportunities they offer are different. Social monitoring allows you to track conversations and social media mentions and focuses on just specific keywords or campaigns. On the other hand, social listening involves tracking mentions, feedback, current industry trends, etc… and further analyzing this data to create better strategies that meet customer requirements. So, the scope that social listening offers is much broader than social monitoring.

Why Do We Need Social Listening?

Knowing concrete reasons for your customers’ affinity towards your brand is essential if you want to continue giving them the same (or better than before) quality of service.

1. Increase Brand Loyalty

To make a solid online presence, you must first be able to win the hearts of your customers. The easiest way to gain their respect is by responding to them. If you find a customer talking about your service on social media channels, respond to them with at least a “Thank You.” Customers would know that their opinion matters and they are being heard, resulting in increased brand loyalty.

2. Keep Track of Brand’s Growth

Social Media is a place where you will get to hear both negative as well as positive comments. If your brand gains recognition for all the good reasons, then you are on a perfect track. But if you are receiving negative comments, you need to analyze the reason behind their behavior and make improvisations accordingly. Social listening allows you to observe, measure, and decide whether the negative reputation needs an immediate response or a temporary phase that would pass off quite soon.

3. Discover Opportunities

Customer comments allow you to get an idea about the impact your service is creating in the market. If you have been receiving a lot of negative comments lately, you must take it as an opportunity to understand what you are lacking and how it can be resolved.

4. Improve Customer Acquisition

Through social listening, you can analyze your customer’s likes, the types of content they like to engage with, and the pictures they like to follow. By understanding and offering them the content they want, you will gain their loyalty, and they will automatically get drawn to your brand.

Social Listening Tools

A few social media listening tools you can use to monitor your social media channels for brand mentions, competitors, products, and more.

1. Hootsuite

This tool lets you view all critical customer and brand information in one dashboard. Based on the analysis, the tool also offers 3 automatically generated social media plans that you can choose to use.

2. Sprout Social

Besides the management and analysis of social media channels, this tool also helps you have an in-depth idea about the emerging trends and influencers in your niche.

3. Lately

It has posting and analyzing features like all other Social listening tools. However, one exciting feature about “Lately” is that it has A.I. content writing functionalities that help you write social media posts for you.

Social media is the most happening place now, and make your presence felt. If you do not pay heed to the signal, your brand is sure to take a beating. Raise high to be noticed!