Why You Should Invest in Social Listening Now
Social media has practically transformed the way we communicate and perceive information.
Are you curious of what your audiences have to say about your brand?
With a massive amount of information circulating on the internet, it’s extremely challenging for brands to generate meaningful engagement with their audiences. So how do you keep track of all the information and differentiate which one is valuable for the growth of your business?
Social listening might be what you are looking for.
What is Social Listening?
Social listening, also referred to as social media listening, is the act of analyzing conversations and trends around your brand and the industry in real time. It is particularly effective to gain insights of what your customers have to say about you and thus allowing you to plan and act based on the information.
Marketers often mistake social listening as social monitoring. While there are similarities between the two, however, social monitoring simply keeps track of social media mentions and conversations. Social listening, meanwhile, works in alignment with social monitoring to provide an overall baseline for your brand to develop an appropriate and effective long-term strategy.
Simply put, monitoring tells you what, listening tells you why.
Why is it important?
Not only it helps you to find out what’s being said about your brand, but social listening also promotes a customer-centric culture in your company.
Customer engagement
Everyone loves to be heard, especially your customers. Sprout Social reported that 48% of customers make a purchase with a brand who is responsive. Social listening can help brands craft responses that provide value to improve brand loyalty and increase customer retention rates.
Brand reputation
When you listen to your customers, it makes your brand approachable and gives them a sense of community. By putting out real time notifications, social listening increases your opportunities to engage in conversations with your customers in real time, therefore leading to stronger brand reputation.
Crisis management
Social listening is especially important for you to prevent unwanted complaints or any negative comments related to your brand to go viral on social media. Moreover, it helps you analyze these complaints to help you determine the necessary measures you need to take next to avoid similar case from happening again.
Influencer marketing
Since social listening allows you to monitor your industry closely, it is especially effective if you’re taking on influencer marketing. With it, you can easily discover the influencers that matter and how to approach them. This way, you can plan a strategy to shape them as your brand advocates.
Social Listening Tools
We all know that the key to successful social media campaign is listening to what your audience has to say about you, your competitors, and the market. Understandably, trying to investigate every mention across the internet is just too much. Fortunately, the internet is also home to a variety of useful tools that you can leverage to make your social listening venture easier.
Check out some of the social listening tools that we think might help you.
Mention
The good thing about Mention is it combines social media monitoring, analytics, as well as competitor espionage! You can easily monitor all your brand mentions on social media networks, news websites, forums, blogs, even web pages. Are you a social media manager? Well, Mention also lets you keep track of your team’s actions. You can share alerts to remind them of important meetings, assign tasks efficiently, and also help you generate reports!
Hootsuite
You must have heard about it. Hootsuite not only covers multiple social networks, including Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, LinkedIn, WordPress, Foursquare and Google+, but it also boasts a complete social media management function. Basically, you can monitor specific search terms in real time, generate weekly report, delegate tasks and send messages to your team members with this tool.
If This Then That (IFTTT)
Want something that is more flexible? IFTTT is particularly known for its easy customization and a wide rage of integrated apps. You can connect different platforms with it, so that when something happens on one, it triggers an action in another. For example, IFTTT can send you an email every time your brand is mentioned on Facebook or a text message whenever a term related to your brand is tweeted. The choice is yours!
HowSociable
Every social media channel has their own characteristics. If you’re an HR manager looking for new recruits, you’ll go to LinkedIn. If you’re an e-commerce manager, Instagram probably is more suitable for you to advertise your new product lines. But how do you know which one is the best for you? HowSociable allows you to track social media sites and break down scores for each platform. Based on the data, you can determine which platforms work best for you.
Brandwatch Analytics
Want a complete solution in your social listening approach? Brandwatch Analytics has a huge range of features and applications to track everything from your own channels to hashtags to specific phrases and keywords. It draws data from various sources such as Twitter, Reddit, forums, and blogs. Not enough to impress you? How about this. It also has very powerful analytical features that look at the sentiment, emotions, and demographics of your audience!
The value of listening
Why do you listen to your audience?
Among the vast numbers of social media users are your targeted audiences that can eventually convert into paid customers after considerable amount of engagements and efforts from your side. Social listening can help you get a better insight of what these audiences are thinking, so you can deliver what they need, when they need it.
That said, social listening is simply a tool, a source of information that can help you accomplish your business goals.
Remember, social listening is all about taking action. Want to improve your social media efforts? Learn more here.
