What is Social Listening? A Definitive Guide

It is well quoted by the co-founder of Intuit, Scott D. Cook that

A brand is no longer what we tell the consumer it is. It is what consumers tell each other it is.

People invest a great deal of time and energy in social media. They talk to each other. They talk about their issues, they complain about things; they cherish and they loathe. And of course, they talk about their most loved brands, give recommendations and reviews and ask brands questions. And brands ask them questions in return.

Let’s take an example of Wendy's. The restaurant chain had a few major setbacks due to a string of customers getting sick after eating greasy burgers at their restaurants. With each outbreak, it became obvious that the complaints were going to get viral on social media.

By then, Wendy's didn't require an answer to reveal to them the feeling around their image on social was negative. What they could do, however, was utilize social listening in to see exactly how impactful the hit was to their social media presence each time an incident happened. If they somehow managed to monitor the change in sentiment previously, amid and after the outbreak, they'd have some significant understanding and information into the amount they conceivably lost as a result.

But how do you begin with listening to what people are saying about you, your brand and your product? Overcome the misunderstandings? Identify perfect tools?

I have answered all these questions in this blog. You will be introduced to everything you need to know about Social Listening and the strategies that you need to inculcate it into your business.

The correspondence between a social audience and a brand is called Social Listening. Social listening is the way of observing social media channels for mentions of your brand, rivals, product, and any other ideas or subjects that are important to your business.

With Social Media Monitoring/Listening, you can:

Do customer engagement
Identify strategic wins or missteps in real time
Discover what people think about you and your competitors
Identify the key pain points of the prospects online
Identify influencers and brand advocates

Don’t worry – we’ll go into detail on each of these a little later. But for now, it’s important to have a thorough grasp of how social listening could help you.

The major reason why Social Listening is touching the sky is that it allows you to reach general public faster than any traditional marketing technique.

Essentially, social listening works because it is more like a tracking mechanism that helps in tracking conversations around specific topics, keywords, phrases, brands or industries, and leveraging your insights to discover opportunities or create content for those audiences.

1. Customer engagement: Social Listening ensures better Customer Engagement and offers Result-Driven Insights. Social listening can give you vital knowledge into what your clients anticipate from you, and how well you're conveying on those expectations.

It likewise highlights moments when an effort is required to engage in discussions that are already happening about your brand, regardless of whether that is a client singing your commendations, a customer service request, or somebody requesting suggestions for an item in your industry.

2. Identify strategic wins or missteps in real time: Which of your posts is getting the most astounding commitment joined with the best social sentiment? If that social assumption about your image unexpectedly transforms one way or the other, you can dive into individual posts to get a feeling of what you've done right or wrong. Social Listening enlightens you about concerning Wins/Missteps in Real Time through various social feedback and hence helps you make a required move in real time.

Don’t be afraid of a negative mention about your brand, you can always turn them into a positive one

For an instance, here is an example of how a famous brand Zara solved the problem faced by one of its customers! Big brands use Social Listening to improve their customer experience, which means that they work with all mentions, both positive and negative.

3. Discover what people think about you and your competitors: Helps you know what people think about you and your Competitors, plus, by using Social Listening, you can uncover different pain points in your industry before your competitors can address those. You’ll also get important real-time intelligence about what your competitors are up to, so you can determine how to respond to new threats and opportunities. Knowing what people are saying about your competitors you can discover where you stand in the industry in comparison to your customer.

4. Identify the key pain points of the prospects online: Social Listening encourages you to monitor important keywords related to your industry that enlighten you about the businesses similar to your business. You'll likewise discover individuals communicating dissatisfactions that your current items would already be able to address. That may give ideas for campaigns to highlight features that individuals may not think about.

5. Identify influencers and brand advocates: Social Listening guides you find leads that you can convert via Social Selling, in addition, you can use Social Listening for identifying influencers and advocates in your industry. Nielsen found that 83 percent of people trust online recommendations from friends and family, making recommendations from people we know and trust the most credible form of advertising in their study.

Humans trust Humans! The same thing holds true for opinion leaders - audiences trust them. That’s why it is essential for a brand to find top influencers and work with them.

Let's Break the Myth!

According to a huge number of individuals " They can find all the relevant conversations about their brand through 'Google Search.'

Well typing in your brand or product name on Google will surely provide you some conversations but that would be a very limited set; what about numerous deep conversations on various social media platforms where customers rant about varied products/services every day. So, it’s the right time now when you should truly consider reconsidering your choices. Through Google search, you may wind up jumbled in heaps of spam information which isn't required.

Social media listening is not only about tracking conversations; it’s also about finding the right tool which will most efficiently track them. Social Media listening tools provide you the flexibility of writing specific keyword search queries which solves your purpose. So, the key lies in finding the tool which suits your business requirements.

How To Listen to What People Are Saying About Your Business?

Finding and approaching the right audience and conversations for your business is a significant task because your decision can affect your overall marketing campaign's output.

It could impose a huge difference in the Word Of Mouth marketing of your brand. Now that you understand what social listening is, why you should implement it, let’s look at a tool that can help you listen to the brand relevant conversations.

Statusbrew

Statusbrew allows you to perform social monitoring/listening on Twitter. It has multiple features which are exceptionally efficient and helps you filter out conversations depending on the query you enter. It consists of:

A Social Inbox
Keeping up with Twitter comments might be the hardest thing to come back to if you’re away from your laptop. Ever have to do this after 30 minutes away from your Twitter feed?

That’s why having all your Twitter profiles in one place is so helpful. Tap through each profile to quickly like or retweet mentions. And if in case you have no more time you can assign the conversation to a teammate.

Social Listening / Monitoring
The Statusbrew application doesn’t just let you in on conversations happening with your brand. It also informs you of conversations that might be happening about your brand, or competitors. Find a tweet on Twitter that you don’t want to leave untouched? You can publicly interact with it by replying, retweeting, or liking it.

Statusbrew's engage inbox can be easily connected to the new listening feature. Use it as an all-in-one system to catch conversations about your topics, keywords, key phrases, and jump into an active conversation the moment it happens. The end goal of social media monitoring for customer service is to increase brand loyalty and visibility, as well as exceed customer expectations by creating delight.

Statusbrew is a unified and complete Social media management platform from where you can publish your content and monitor its behavior . A must try platform for businesses which focuses on 'Digital engagement, Social media management, and Influencer marketing together.'

Once you find the right listening tool that fits your need, all you have to do is monitor what is being said about your brand and who says it related to the following information:

Mentions of your company and your products.
Industry news.
Customers comments that include brand mentions.
Your competitor’s activities on social media.

On social media, people mark information with special signs: # and @, this allows you to easily find what you need.

Conclusion

According to Social Media Examiner,

90% of marketers say social media is important to their businesses.
68% analyze their social media activities.
Only 41% are able to measure their social activities.

The numbers indicate almost all businesses now rely on social media for marketing, but less than half can measure if it’s working.

This is where the role of social media monitoring tools come in. Social media monitoring is the act of using a tool to listen and measure what is being said about a business or key topic on the internet. This means monitoring media not just from traditional publishers, but on the great majority of social sites too. Many providers have created tools to facilitate analysis of social media channels. Your success in social listening depends on the type of tool you make use of, therefore choose wisely!

How do you listen to what people are saying about you? If you have any additional idea then please do share with me. I am eager to know from you.

Ritika Sharma

Ritika is a digital marketing specialist and a writer who works on putting together creative and useful content for Statusbrew. Other than this she's an adventure seeker and a photography enthusiast.