The Ultimate Guide To Social Listening

Jan 7, 2022 13 min read

Social listening is the treasure house for forefront decision-making for brands and to gain data-based insights on the target market scenario and industry trends.

Social media platforms are the stockpile of data pertaining from user behavior to conversations. Irrespective of the social media platforms, social media is a community that shares content, ideas, and opinions. Brands must track those conversations to develop an effective marketing strategy for business growth.

Social media listening aids you to tap on the data-backed resources about users' activities and interactions, providing you the ability to track all social conversations. Investing in social listing aids your team to start optimizing customer service to campaigns; there's no more guessing or missing opportunities, as the social listening reports answer all your questions.

In this blog, we have enacted every aspect of social media listening. Drill deep to get in-depth insights into how to process your brand's social media listening and craft an impactful social media marketing strategy.

What Is Social Listening?

Social media listening aids you in assessing the social media conversation, industry trends, or brand mention. It is a practice that helps you gather insights about your brand across social media.

Social listening reports allow you to understand what your target audience says about your brand, how the industry is changing, or who's leading the market.

You can gather all this information by monitoring and analyzing social media messages, posts, comments, mentions, etc., about your brand. Brands must monitor online reputation and brand sentiment to keep themselves updated on the latest trends and gain ideas about market competitiveness.

The approach of social listing can be divided into two stages. In the first stage, you can gather data about diverse social channels. It may include prominent social media channels such as Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, or any other social channels your business is most active.

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The second stage assesses collecting data and analyzes the conversations, sentiment, and trends. It helps you get the traction of your target market and prospects' viewpoint and how they perceive your brand. Keeping that as a baseline, you can align your marketing efforts and start more effective campaigns.

The more precise data your social listening report includes, the more accurately you can measure your brands' marketing efforts and overall social media growth. And here, social media tools such as Statusbrew come into the scenario, as the unique features of the social media listening tool allow you to work smarter with your marketing strategies.

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Social listening is crucial for your brand growth. It shows you direction to develop your marketing blueprint. It also gives you the idea about your most compelling content and the best performing content that resonates most with your target audience.

It aids you in building functional, high-quality domains to outperform your competitors. Besides, the social listening reports provide you substantive knowledge about industry, thought leaders, and influencers, and leveraging those report; you can build an impactful brand partnership or collaboration.

Not implicating a social listening into your brand's social media plan results in missing out on valuable opportunities. You are hovering around the risk of misunderstanding your target market pain points, which can negatively impact your brand reputation.

Social Listening Vs. Social Monitoring

This is one point that brands often face confusion. The process of social media monitoring encompasses identifying the messages associated with your brand and responding to them or handling the queries appropriately. But social media listening is a more in-depth diagnosis of everything said, assessing the sentiment or what your prospects felt about the brand.

Social monitoring is a daily routine task of a brand, but social listening aids you to map out bigger pictures and helps to enriching the overall social media marketing strategy. To leverage social listening to most, you should adhere to deep listening. It denotes extracting as much data as you can and drilling deep in all social media channels, including forums, reviews, earned media, and more.

It’s generally an initial step in the listening process. It will produce a lot of unstructured data that will then be dissected and disseminated to provide an organization with a comprehensive view of trends and share of voice.

What Type Of Insights You Can Gain Through Social Listening

As mentioned above, social listening tools help you uncover many valuable insights. Following are a few broad categories of insights that you can gather from social media listening.

Brand Intelligence

Social listening allows you to monitor conversations about your brand and assess what people are saying about your brand.

  • Brand Mentions: You can figure out the prospects who have mentioned your brand on social and also understand the context. It is an effective way to identify the influencers who are already talking about your brand.

  • Brand Sentiment: Social listening data give you insight into brand sentiment whether it is positive or negative. It also allow you to examine the trend for different period; you can track how your brand sentiment has changed over time.

  • Marketing Campaign Performance: You can track your social media marketing campaign performance by listening to conversations related to them. The report helps you to track brand sentiment before and after a campaign.

  • Customer Feedback: Social media listening is an excellent way to collect customer feedback about your brand and products.

Industry Insights

You can leverage social media listening to track the latest industry trends and news. Following the specific types of insights you can gain through the process:

  • Industry trend assessment helps you identify the latest trends by focusing on social media conversations.

  • Furthermore, it also aids you in finding content and topic ideas based on what your target audience is interested in and talking about.

Competitor Benchmarking

Social media listening gives you an easy to spy on your competitors. You can stay updated about what your competitors are doing. It helps you in competitor benchmarking; you can gather insights of your competitors and find out how they’re performing. Furthermore, you can attain insights on which of your competitors’ campaigns are working and leverage those to plan your next marketing campaign.

Benefits Of Social Media Listening

Your audience can post about your brand or mention your brand on their post for several reasons. It could be a post to praise your services or express their gratitude, or it can be the other way around and posting something that could harm your brand image. It could be something else like looking for technical support or having a query about your product or service they are interested in.

Irrespective of what they post, engaging with the customer will put you in good books, and everyone else can see that you care for your customer’s satisfaction. Here are several benefits that you can enjoy with social media listening:

1. Better Relationship With Customers and Improved Brand Image

When your audience mentions you on social media or posts something related to your brand, engaging with them can benefit your relationship with the customer. According to a study, 83 percent of your audience wants your brand to respond to their questions, and 68 percent want the brands to engage with them in a conversation.

Moreover, it doesn’t need proof that a better relationship with your customers means better sales. However, you have to respond to different posts or mentions in different ways. Let’s see how it can be done:

Complains: When your audience complains about your service or product, social listening can help you minimize the negative impact on your brand and proactively address their issues. This will also be visible to other prospects, and they will consider you as a trustworthy brand and consider relying on your brand in the future. Listening to complaints and responding to them with appropriate actions makes your brand authentic.

Praise: When someone on the web praises your product, or services, appreciating and responding to those mentions or posts can be beneficial. When you reply to your prospects, they feel valued and get more connected with your brand. It improves the relationship with that particular customer, projects a good impression of your brand on them.

Questions: When your audience asks you a question about your service or a product, listening and responding to them will undoubtedly help you to get the pulse of their pain points. When a brand responds to its audience’s questions, it leaves a positive impact on them. It is also an opportunity to convert those audiences into customers.

Support: When someone is looking for support on a product or service, you can promptly offer support. It turns that customer into a returning customer and a lifelong advocate. It helps you to quality customer care as well.

2. Product And Service Improvement

The best way to get feedback on your product and service is through your buyers. Letting your customers know that you are listening to them on the will help you get insights into their experiences and improve your product or service.

Suppose you sell clothes, and there is a post on social media mentioning that an XL size shirt fits like a medium size shirt. So, the situation here is that your customers like your shirt, but it doesn’t work. You can respond to that post and let the customer know that you will replace the shirt with a larger size and that too free of cost.

Moreover, you can also look for a trend if your audience is constantly talking about the size of your shirts. If that is so, it would be a better idea to share a size chart on your product page or reconsider the sizing of your shirts.

3. Helps To Test Your Ideas

Testing your ideas before investing on a large scale to implement them is an intelligent business approach. This will help you minimize the risk while you scale your idea or launch a new product.

You can test your ideas by breaking them into smaller parts and creating paid social campaigns for each part. Listening to those campaigns and analyzing the responses and engagements will give you an idea of the risks you might face or the areas where you can make some adjustments for a successful product launch.

4. Build Better Marketing Strategy

Social media listening means acquiring a lot of data to provide essential insights about your audience and customers. With the data in hand, you can analyze and identify content, topics, keywords, interests, and products prevalent with your target audience.

Not only can you build a better social media marketing strategy, but you can create an overall marketing strategy based on those data and learnings.

The interests are likely to change over time, so constant social listening will help you get clues on the shift and stay ahead of the trends.

5. Get Real-Time Insights

Continuous social media listening helps you access real-time data about your product, services, and industry. It will help you see if there is a new competitor gaining attention in the market or a new trend building up in your industry that you can incorporate in your social media strategy, campaigns, and even on products.

You will also get to know about prominent social media influencers with social media listening. From there, you can select some influencers with whom you can collaborate in the future for different campaigns and promote your brand and products to a new set of audience.

6. Enriches Sales

Everything you do in marketing is to drive more sales and generate revenue. Social media listening with all the benefits mentioned above will help you identify and acquire high-quality leads that can be potentially turned into customers. This way, social media listening plays a vital role in driving sales and generating revenue for your company.

Steps To Conduct Social Media Listening

Social media listening involves setting appropriate goals and determining what you are planning to track, identifying the channels you can listen, and picking the right tools to analyze the data acquired from listening. Following are the steps that you can consider following to conduct a successful social media listening:

Step 1: Set Goals

Conducting social media listening without reasonable goals is like going on a journey without a destination. You might have all the tools and resources, but you don’t know where to go. Similarly, in social media listening, you might have access to all the data and conversations taking place on the social platforms, but without proper goals, you will have no idea what to do with those data and discussions.
So, what goals should you be trying to achieve in social media listening? Here are a few examples of the goals that you should be trying to achieve:

  • Gaining insight about a newly launched product or collecting essential data on a product you plan to launch soon.
  • Determine your position against your competitors. Identifying any new competitor which is gaining attention.
  • Getting to know about the most discussed product of yours.
  • Learning about your customer’s pain points related to your products.
  • Improvising your brand voice by listening to your customer’s voice.

If you are just beginning social listening, it would be better to make simple goals to find out what your audience perceives about your products and brand. Later you can break it down into smaller and more specific goals to acquire better insights.

Step 2: What To Listen?

In social media listening, you can track certain things like topics, keywords, hashtags, pages, people, and many more to achieve your set goals. The things you can track largely depend on the tools you use for social listening. However, generally, the following are the things that you should be monitoring:

  • Mentions
  • Your brand name without tagging you.
  • Hashtags related to your brand.
  • Your product names.
  • Your brand keywords, even if they are misspelled.
  • Campaign names, brand words, or topics.
  • Competitor’s products, mentions, hashtags, names, etc.
  • Profiles and names of brands and figures associated with your brands, such as your CEO, brand partner, or any influencer or celebrity associated with your brand.
  • Hashtags related to your industry.

You can determine more things to track by talking to other teams and employees in your company. Ask and discuss with them what data they want to have or what challenges they are facing. If that can be learned through social media, track it.

Step 3: Where To Listen?

Deterring which channels you should listen to comes down to determining where your customers generally hang out and talk about your brand and products on the web. You can include major social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, etc. Do not forget to include tracking channels like online forums and review platforms.

For this, first, conduct an audit to identify the channels where your brand has its presence. After this, conduct market research to determine where your customers hang out and talk about your brand and products. Include all these channels in your tracking list.

The main objective here is to gather as much data as possible from many sources. This will help you to acquire accurate information.

Step 4: Look For Trends

Social media listening might overwhelm you with a lot of data; however, you will get more specific with time. Try to look for trends that are building up over time. Trends will help you to shape your campaigns.

Step 5: Optimize And Engage

With the data in your hand and identifying any trends, optimize and improvise your marketing strategy according to it. Try to stay ahead of the trends. Remember, things change quickly in digital platforms, so keep up your pace.

Social media users are more aware than they ever have been. Most of your audience know that you listen to them even if they do not mention your brand or product directly. Brands that engage with their customers are perceived positively, and there is a high probability that your prospects will buy your service or products.

Following these steps will ensure a successful social media listening for your brand and ultimately achieving your organizational goals.

Social Media Listening Tools

Now let's check out how to gather social media insights. Social media management tools such as Statusbrew are an excellent way to track the social conversations and mentions in one single place.

It aids you in gaining more in-depth insights on social with its specialized social media listening features. Statusbrew allows you to discover new posts through social listening, look beyond your feed, and engage with new audiences.

Statusbrew Engage

Statusbrew's engage acts as your social inbox that tracks every social conversation and speeds up your response process. It gathers all your social profiles in one unified inbox.

  • Your overall social portfolio is delivered right into a single inbox. You can assign conversations to your teammates or track team activity and can share internal notes.

  • Furthermore, its collision detection feature helps you refrain from sending duplicate replies. The Engage inbox offers you a clear picture of social media engagement.

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  • With its automated moderation workflow, you can hide, delete or report both organic and ad comments and also can assign the conversation to your team. The custom rules for automation in your inbox can be set based on network, keywords, sentiments, which soothe the social listening process.

  • You can assess the sentiments of the brand loyalist and can gain access to the most critical engagement KPIs. The Report Lab in Statusbrew offers more than 180+ metrics, and live reports can be shared with non-Statusbrew users. You can drill down every piece of data and customize reports as per your requirements.

Statusbrew CRM

Statusbrew, built-in customer management service, aid you in achieving your social media goals. It assists you in segmenting inbound leads, completing your social media marketing funnel, and getting the most out of your campaigns.

It makes social listening easy as whenever you receive any social conversation to your social profiles, Statusbrew syncs it, and you can monitor it in your unified inbox in Engage.

  • Statusbrew's social CRM helps you get contextual information about your customers, and you can get the correct details to convert your prospects to loyal clients.

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  • It extracts all your social contact & profile details of the particular audience and displays them in the contact sidebar. The CRM feature logs all the contact information in a directory, and using the features; you can track the list of people who have interacted with your social media profiles.

  • It offers contact information and more. The 'Conversation History' allows you to monitor the history of conversation between you and your customer.

  • Contact Notes provides you a dedicated space to add notes and mention users and user groups. The Contact Tags make it smoother to segment contacts based on their current sales or marketing funnel stage. You can add relevant details for your communications, such as name, email, and phone number.

Sentiment Analysis

Statusbrew offers sentiment analysis, and you can filter conversations by sentiment for all your social conversations. The advance features in Statusbrew instantly marks each conversation as positive, negative, or neutral.

The sentiments analysis tool supports wide range of languages, including German, English, Spanish, Italian, Japanese, Hindi, French, etc. You can leverage insightful reporting, which includes insights into the sentiment of the conversations.

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Wrapping Up!!

Social listening is a routine process. It should be an integral part of your marketing strategy and, based on your business goal; you should monitor it. The approach capitalizes on every trend and aids your brand in getting updated information of all the conversations going around your brand or industry.

Statusbrew's listening tools can be your reliable companion in strategy making. It aids you in driving new prospects or industries, assisting you in finding relevant topics, and finding new target audiences to outperform your competitors.

You can track your competitors and can develop complex search queries, quickly target more focussed conversations. Statusbrew integrates with your existing workflows.

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Rajashree Goswami

Rajashree is a content creator & researcher at Statusbrew. She loves to create content that is expressive & communicative.

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