Social listening allows you to track, analyze, and respond to conversations about your brand and industry online. First, you monitor social media channels for mentions of your brand, competitors, product, and any keywords relevant to your business. Taking action is what makes social listening different from social media monitoring. Understanding how people feel about your brand helps you keep your marketing and product development efforts on track. You want to listen to them, right? Customer engagement Social media listening helps you identify opportunities to engage in conversations about your brand. Tweak your strategy in real time Remember, engagement is great, but only if comes with positive social sentiment. You will also learn what your competitors are up to in real-time. You will also find people who already love your brand and are saying great things about you on social media. How to get set up for social media listening Before you dig into the nitty-gritty work of social media listening, you need to decide what you want to listen for.
Social listening allows you to track, analyze, and respond to conversations about your brand and industry online. It’s a key component of audience research.
If you don’t have a social listening strategy in place, you’re missing out on valuable insights. What do your customers think about your brand? What are they saying about your competitors?
This guide will show you how to uncover those insights and more. And then we’ll tell you what to do with them.
But first…
Table of Contents
What is social listening?
Social listening is a two-step process.
First, you monitor social media channels for mentions of your brand, competitors, product, and any keywords relevant to your business.
Next, you analyze that information and look for ways to put what you learn into action. Taking action might mean something as simple as responding to a happy customer or something as huge as shifting your overall brand positioning.
Taking action is what makes social listening different from social media monitoring. Social media monitoring is all about collecting data. It allows you to look back at what has already happened.
For instance, you can use the information you gather through social media monitoring to test one campaign against another or monitor ROI. It’s also great information to help prove the value of social when it comes time to set the yearly budget.
Social media monitoring is based on metrics like engagement rate and number of mentions. Social listening looks beyond the numbers to consider the mood behind those social media posts. This helps you understand how people actually feel about you and your competitors, rather than simply counting the number of times your name comes up.
This “online mood” is also called social media sentiment. Keeping tabs on social media sentiment is a key part of social media listening. Understanding how people feel about your brand helps you keep your marketing and product development efforts on track. It also allows you to respond right away to positive or negative posts.
The main thing to understand is that social listening looks forward rather than backward. It’s about analyzing the information you collect and using it to guide your strategy and day-to-day actions.
Why social listening matters
If you’re not using social media listening, your marketing strategy has significant blind spots. Real people are talking about you and your industry online. You want to listen to them, right?
Simply put, if you care about your customers, you care about the insights you can get from social listening. Here are some of the ways social listening can benefit your brand.
Customer engagement
Social media listening helps you identify opportunities to engage in conversations about your brand. This could be anything from someone saying how much they love your product to a customer service request.
For example, on its annual Purdue Day of Giving, Purdue University uses social listening to identify donors. They then to respond personally to everyone who mentions on social media that they donated.
This creates donor engagement and excitement, increasing the odds that people will donate again the next year. It also helps the university keep the momentum going on this critically important fundraising day.
Elizabeth Holmes thank you for your suPURDUEper donation on #PurdueDayOfGiving to Purdue Swimming & Diving! @purduesports @elizabethann29 pic.twitter.com/LdpdRCqnIJ
The online fundraising event is growing each year, with more than $37 million raised during the 2018 event.
Tweak your strategy in real time
Remember, engagement is great, but only if comes with positive social sentiment. Social listening allows you to spot changes in sentiment in real time, so you can get a sense of what triggered the change. Look at your recent posts to get a sense of what has gone so right—or so wrong.
If you’re getting a lot of positive engagement, look for the reasons behind it. Your customers share a ton of useful information about what they like and what they don’t. Those lessons can help guide your strategy across channels.
For example, Penguin Random House used social listening to guide its publicity strategy for Leah Remini’s book “Troublemaker.” The book was getting good reviews, but they wanted to understand why. What exactly did readers like?
Using social listening, the publisher learned that people most liked Leah’s personal storytelling and authentic voice.
Based on that finding, Penguin Random House focused promotional attention on Leah herself, rather than on Scientology—the subject of the book. When they hosted an author Q&A on Goodreads, they specifically focused on questions about Leah’s own life.
Social listening also helps you address PR disasters before they get out of hand. If sentiment is down, review the social feedback for lessons that could prevent a similar misstep in the future. If sentiment is way down, look for the cause and make changes right away, by pulling a problem post, or apologizing for an insensitive Tweet.
Maybe you’re not getting much social engagement at all. Social listening can help you adjust your strategy to get your engagement numbers up.
For example, Oslo Metropolitan University was not seeing much social engagement. Using social listening, the university was able to determine which topics its audience wanted to talk about.
They started by monitoring and analyzing keywords. They learned that alumni stories, student life, lab work, and job vacancies created the most engagement. By focusing on those subjects, they were able to engage students, potential students, and potential job applicants on their social channels.
The university also uses social listening to discover relevant conversations. They can then get attention from valuable contacts who might not otherwise…
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