This blog post was originally published on April 14th, 2024 and updated on May 11th, 2024.
This blog post is enriched with insights from highly reputable industry sources, including the Content Marketing Institute, HubSpot, and Moz, renowned for their expertise and authority in social listening.
Everyone is a customer, and we all want to be treated with respect while maintaining our values. We appreciate a brand that actively listens to our concerns and strives to improve its processes by leveraging our knowledge. This helps create a strong connection between us and the brand and fosters a sense of community. This sense of community can turn us into brand ambassadors, advocating for the brand and its values.
Nowadays, brands have an online presence and seek to improve their engagement with compelling content. Social listening is monitoring a brand’s online presence for feedback, hashtags, and discussion through social media networks. This process differs from traditional marketing because it evaluates the audience's response after encountering the brand. This blog post explores the significance of active social listening, ways brands can improve their social skills, and the tools available to help brands implement their listening techniques.
Social Listening Vs. Social Monitoring
Social listening tracks social networks for brand mentions, customer feedback, trends, and other online activities. On the other hand, social monitoring focuses on what's being said about the brand, how it's being said, and how it's perceived.
4 Reasons to Start Using Social Listening
Whether it is a start-up brand or an already established brand in the industry, social listening is not just a tool but a necessity for businesses wanting to be in customers' hearts. It is a window into what the customers feel about the brand, providing invaluable insights that can help the brand connect or reconnect with its audience. Businesses should never forget that customers can express how they feel about the brands online, which may positively or negatively impact the brand.
Responsive to feedback
Per Sprout Social, 46% of customers believe that the most effective way for brands to engage with them is by actively listening and responding to their feedback. This research also reveals that when a brand prioritizes customer feedback, it can profoundly influence customer behavior and decision-making. Statistics show that 90% of customers are likelier to purchase a brand they follow on social media. This underscores the pivotal role of feedback, which can be gathered through various channels, such as email surveys, customer iterations, social media, and cross-team
collaboration, in shaping a brand's product or service.
Tracks brand growth
Social media can be helpful to brands, but brands can also face severe problems if they encounter a scandal that can ruin their situation. It is usual for an audience to criticize brands on social media; however, if the level of criticism increases from their online audience, then it would be an idea for the brand to identify the cause of the problem and take corrective action to resolve it. This can be done by analyzing comments and identifying trends to discover new opportunities.
Discover new opportunity
Social listening helps the brand analyze the product or service it renders for sale with its customers' help. Brands may not identify problems with their products or services, but with the help of their customers (end-users), it helps them to point out their weaknesses or areas where the brand needs to improve on their product or services. When this situation arises, the customer allows the brand to make a change by solving their problem or customer desire. For instance, if you have a food chain enterprise and customers have complained about the service delivery time after placing their order. This is an excellent opportunity for the brand to evaluate its production and delivery chain to minimize the wait time. When this is done, it helps the business to harness the process of feedback
Increase customer acquisition
A social media network is an invisible space that helps the brand reach its target. In most cases, brand audiences are customers who have decided to be with them and people who are interested in the content they create, as it provides a source of value. Brands should remember that this is why they (the audience) have willingly followed them, which is due to their interest in their content. It is much easier to influence a brand follower to a customer than a visitor with limited or no idea of your brand.
Best Social Listening Tips
Social listening can be done differently for the brand to gain a competitive advantage. In this blog, we have identified the best social listening tips that work for various businesses.
Identify pain points
The best way to succeed with the help of social listening is to understand your audience's needs or concerns in the industry. According to a marketing expert (Aleh Barysevich), Social monitoring and listening tools break down the sentiment, reach, demographics, and user behavior trends behind any phenomenon you want to research on social media. One of the best ways to know your audience's problem is by giving them a chance to voice it out, and social media is where they usually express their concern. This tip helps the brand monitor audience expression to improve their product or service.
Strategic keywords and topic selection
A brand should always be aware of choosing keywords and topics that help monitor social networks. It becomes easier if they decide to select some keywords and topics related to their business or industry. This allows them to have relevant information that helps in decision-making over time. If a brand decides to monitor its mentions and brand name on social media, it has information based on the two categories, which helps navigate the brand for better prospects.
Use it to improve your customer feedback process
The aim of having a feedback process is to hear from the end-user's experience about your brand. Whether this feedback is positive or negative criticism, the business should analyze it for service improvement. For example, if you run a logistics company (like Amazon) that engages in the delivery of a variety of products, and the data from feedback from customers shows that there is an improper handling of items, which leads to the damage of goods, you can examine the reason for the damage and find an efficient way to transport products without it has been damaged. Or it is losing its quality.
According to a recent study by Social Intelligence Lab, 89% of respondents believe that online reviews and feedback are rated high or very high, which they consider before purchasing.
Generate leads by following recommendation posts in your industry
Social listening is just a way to engage with your audience. According to Barysevich, you can use social listening, competitor, and hashtag research to find accounts related to your niche and engage them in the comments. Then, offer your expertise or start conversations discussing relevant topics. Following some recommendations posted in your industry helps to bridge the gap between you and your audience while aiming to build a reputable relationship with them.
4 Social Listening Tools to Use
HubSpot
HubSpot's social management tool helps you connect with the right people while prioritizing your social networks using its software. As a simplified and well-detailed management tool, you can monitor your social interaction with the contacts in your brand’s database, create or customize your keywords monitoring streams, and set up an email alert for notification when you are mentioned online. This management tool also allows you to create marketing campaigns and schedule content that can be shared with your followers or audience.
Sprout Social
The Sprout Social Management tool also keeps your audience engaged in real-time. This tool includes an X (Twitter) listener dashboard that helps analyze your presence on the platform by tracking brand mentions and brand-relevant keywords that help unfold emerging trends in your industries.
Lately
An all-in-one software tool has been designed for professionals or marketing teams to help you write your social media posts. This content writing software tool lets you customize exciting audience content by reviewing, editing, approving, and scheduling your post. This software also gives you access to different media reports to listen to and monitor the performance of your content on each channel.
Hootsuite
Building a good relationship with your followers can be challenging and requires much effort. The Hootsuite social media marketing and management dashboard can help brands engage their audience and create a good relationship. The media tool helps a brand to track its messages, direct mentions, and comments on all its social networks, representing it in a dashboard. This analytic tool also helps to track what has been said about the brand, its competitors, and the industry.
Conclusion
Social listening may not prove which strategies will work for your business, but it can improve your chances of success. By leveraging social listening, you can gain valuable insights into the needs and wants of your target audience and monitor your competitors' activities.
Social listening is a powerful tool that brands can use to gain insight into their community, audience, and customers. Active listening and empathetic engagement while adapting to the changing trends can help your business to have audience research tactics. Social listening may not offer assurance for your business to succeed; however, it can give you a clue of what needs to be done, how it can be done, and in what manner it should be done. It also helps benchmark your competition activities.
Read Ali's post here to learn more about developing engaging and sharable social media posts.
Disclaimer
This blog post was crafted with the assistance of cutting-edge Artificial Intelligence technology. Rest assured, no AI was harmed or mistreated during the writing process, as I uphold ethical and legal standards. My use of AI resulted in a highly efficient and productive outcome, providing you with the best possible content.
Resources
Fi Shailes (September 20, 2021) How Social Listening Differentiates Brand Content. Content Marketing Institute. https://contentmarketinginstitute.com/articles/social-listening-differentiate-brands-content/
Swetha Amaresan (October 7, 2022): What is social listening & why is it important? [+Expert Tips on how to Implement a Strategy] HubSpot. https://blog.hubspot.com/service/social-listening
Meghan Pahinui (February 3, 2023) Harnessing the Power of Feedback. Moz. https://moz.com/blog/harnessing-power-of-feedback-whiteboard-friday
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