What is Social Listening and Why is it Important?

Social listening is your business’s key to understanding public sentiments to make informed decisions. Every single day there is a lot of conversation on social media. This conversation produces unstructured data. When an organization wants a systematic collection and analysis of data about their company, they need insights that help them know how the public perceives them. 

Here comes social listening which is an important customer intelligence tool. You can use it to monitor social media platforms. It helps you to understand the conversations about your organization. It offers you valuable data and with the help of this data, you can make informed decisions that align with your consumer’s expectations. 

Importance of Social Media Listening for Brands

The participation of customers on social media has increased the importance of social listening. It provides businesses and organizations with an effective way to gain valuable insight into public sentiments. If the conversation about the organization is positive then it reflects the positive behavior of that organization.  

• Social media listening is essential to track conversations that mention your brand or relevant industry topics. Although businesses do not engage with every mention of the product, they do develop a strategy to improve their customers sentiments in future. 
• This strategy helps your business to find potential new customers who are discussing their needs and desires. By engaging in these discussions businesses can position themselves as problem solvers. 
• By monitoring social media listening brands can identify key influencers whose discussions resonate with their targeted audiences. By engaging with influencers even smaller brands can gain recognition and success. 
• Social media is a platform where the audience shares compliments. Recognizing their appreciation and thanking happy customers strengthens brand loyalty and improves your brand reputation.
• Brands can also develop relevant and shareable content that resonates with your audience desires and the discussion will keep them engaged.
• Finally addressing the concerns of unhappy customers engages them directly and by resolving their issues businesses can improve their customer satisfaction and loyalty.

How do Social Listening Tools Work?

The social listening tools utilize machine learning and natural language processing to gain insights and understand social media interactions through a set of criteria such as keywords and hashtags. These tools gather data, filter it, and perform subsequent analysis.

Implementation Steps for Social Listening Tools

Here are the tools that carry out the multi-step process of social listening. These tools help you to set clear goals, choose relevant social media channels, set up queries, and analyze actionable insights. 

Dash Hudson’s AI-powered Social Listening Tool

This tool surpasses traditional methods by incorporating visual insights and addressing the evolving ways through which users communicate on social media platforms. Its Vision AI offers clear and instant insights with content predictions. Using this tool helps brands to significantly increase their content effectiveness and brand engagement.

Icon Square

Icon Square allows users to benchmark their brand against competitors and offers sentiment analysis, comment management, and automated reporting. This tool focuses on social listening and competitor analysis to help brands understand their market position.

Sprout Social 

This is a leading social listening tool. It can process up to 50,000 posts per second and monitors 600 million messages daily. It comes with a query builder that tracks keywords and hashtags. These features also do a comprehensive analysis, crisis management alerts, and competitor analysis. If you integrate this tool with Salesforce and Google My Business you can enhance the usability for businesses that are looking to optimize their social strategies. 

Brand24

This AI-powered tool is known and trusted by brands for its real-time sentiment analysis and offering metrics like reach and impressions. It also allows users to track their brand mentions across multiple platforms including blogs and podcasts.

Brand Mentions

It is a tool designed to keep businesses updated on their online presence. This tool tracks mentions and sentiments in real-time and allows users to set customized notifications for important discussions. This feature of Brand Mentions enables detailed reporting for strategic insights and helps businesses monitor competitor activity.

Semrush Social 

It comprises a suite of tools to manage social media, analytics, and competitor insights. It also allows users to schedule and publish posts while tracking engagement metrics and analyzing competitors’ activity.

What is the Social Listening Strategy a Brand Must Go For?

Social listening is more that just gathering the information, monitoring insight, and adapting strategies, its about creating a trustworthy relationship with your customers. Therefore to stay aware of your consumer’s pain point through the dynamic nature of social media you need to focus on your social listening criteria and the way you are going to create and implement your strategy.

Create Content Based on Audience’s Interests

Social media conversations are your way to identify what your audience is craving for. After gathering the insights and identifying trends, create content strategy to better align with your audience preferences.

Competitive Analysis

Social listening tools allow brands to assess their position relative to competitors by capturing audience sentiments. This knowledge can drive product development and highlight gaps in the market. You can go for the tools to observe your competitors’ weaknesses and respond accordingly by enhancing their product offerings.

Understanding Customer Needs

We have already discussed how using social listening can reveal underlying customer pain points. This proactive approach helps brands to create content that addresses the industry gap. Hence by meeting audience demands effectively they can position themselves as experts.

Identifying Influencers and Brand Advocates

Social listening tools are a brand’s key to identify their most vocal supporters and influencers. This knowledge is specificaly crucial to form partnership that can extend and win the trust of their targeted community.

Conclusion

Social listening is not like social monitoring. Its a one step ahead that helps your organization is better understanding of what your consumers love and hate about. The goal of social listneing is to monitor relevant conversation on social media platforms and understand the consumers sentiments.