Social Listening: What is it and Why is it Important?

As a marketer, you must have come across the term ‘Social Listening’. If you’ve not explored it yet, now is the time. Social listening is an important skill that every marketer must know and add to their portfolio. Social listening helps you listen to what the audience says about your brand in the digital world.

Your brand on social media profiles has a large following across different networks; some might have negative reviews about your brand, while others will have positive thoughts. It is important to know these audience sentiments to cater to their needs.

Social listening helps you know these sentiments and alert you before any crisis. Moreover, with this skill, you can create a strong social media presence with more positive talks about your brand. With this guide, we have covered everything you need to know about social listening and its benefits. So without further ado, let’s explore what social listening is.

What is Social Listening?

Social listening, or social media listening, is a process of finding out the sentiments people have regarding you and your brand or your services on social media. By diving deep into the chatter of your audience and understanding their sentiments towards your brand or that of your competitors, you can shape better marketing strategies for the future.

Social listening helps you with –

• Understand the sentiments and wants of your audience.
• Learning the sentiments of customers towards your competitors.
• Improving the strategies to engage with customer queries effectively and on time.
• Identifying and staying updated with the trends.

Brands and content creators can benefit a lot from social listening, as it helps them understand where their profile is positioned in the digital landscape.

Social Listening v/s Social Monitoring

Most people get confused with these two terms and use them interchangeably. However, they are not the same and have different purposes in any social media marketing strategy.

Social Monitoring

Monitoring social media is primarily a reactionary strategy. The emphasis is on monitoring and instantly responding to social media discussions that are directly relevant to your brand. In short, social monitoring helps you with –

• Allows you to respond to messages or comments as they are received.
• Emphasizes numerical data (likes, shares, follows, etc.).
• Usually, keeping an eye on social media.
• Respond to the query, “What are people saying?”

Social Listening

In order to assist in building an organization’s strategy, social listening is a more proactive, strategic approach that seeks out larger context and trends as well as genuinely actionable suggestions. These insights come from examining discussions about your brand, industry, and any other issues that are pertinent to your business on a wide range of internet channels. Here are some elements of social listening –

• Allows you to recognize new problems or possibilities
• Provides qualitative insights (the feelings and context of the facts)
• Goes beyond keeping an eye on social media and exploring blogs, discussion boards, news websites, etc.
• Provides a response to the query, “Why are people talking, and what does it mean?”

Importance of Social Listening 

The key to successful social media marketing is social listening. Saying that you have to include it in your social media plan won’t be an overstatement. Here are some benefits of social listening –

1. Better Customer Understanding

You can participate in conversations taking place in real time by using social listening. This aids in identifying preferences, problems, and new needs. You may better and more quickly meet consumer expectations by incorporating these into your product roadmap, marketing, support, and sales.

2. Identify Trends

When done correctly, social listening can spot trends in the business before they become popular. You can listen to the appropriate conversations by sorting through the clutter of industry hashtags and debates. This helps you remain ahead of industry trends or modify your strategy.

In order to find influencers who are trend leaders in their own right, many brands also employ listening technologies. The creator economy’s growth is self-evident.

It takes a lot of research to discover a suitable fit because there are so many creators. You can locate influencers more quickly by listening to certain terms or discussions. This is preferable to sorting through many bits of content or social profiles.

3. Analyze Campaign Impact

Through campaign performance analysis, social listening can assess your marketing efforts. Additionally, it lets you examine how audiences respond to conferences, events, and promotions, which helps you determine what works and what doesn’t. You may improve your approach by using these insights regarding audience perception and campaign alignment with your objectives.

Social listening demonstrates the effectiveness of your advertising activities. Create listening topics first to record the discussions surrounding your campaign. Numerous indicators might be found by examining hashtags or handles. All of these insights can then be broken down by sentiment, network, content type, and message type.

4. Analyze Competition

There is competition on social media. Social listening is revolutionary for competitive analysis because of this. Social listening enables you to monitor conversations that are important to your brand, whether they are about new competitors and consumer markets or staying up to date with your immediate rivals.

Gaps in competition aren’t always evident. However, social listening makes them visible. This is helpful when you have to strategically position yourself over enormous budgets and are up against bigger competitors.

5. Crisis Prevention and Management

Building a brand’s reputation requires years of meticulous planning. However, in a time when cancel culture is easily sparked, brands must be acutely aware of the market and audience’s emotions to manage crises with tact. Early disaster detection is possible through social listening. You step in when they discover unfavorable sentiment in social media discussions about your brand.

You can better grasp people’s perspectives on a problem by listening to them online. In order to ensure that your response makes sense to the audience, this information helps you choose the tone and content of your response. You may monitor how the problem has impacted individuals and your company, as well as how your strategy to lessen it is functioning, by keeping an eye on social media. To manage the crisis lifecycle and prevent future harm to the health of your brand, you can monitor changes in sentiment and modify your actions accordingly.

Conclusion

Social listening is crucial for your brand and marketing campaign to achieve optimal results. For marketers, it is an important skill set to learn and apply to different marketing strategies. Monitoring your brand is only one aspect of social listening. It involves having a thorough grasp of your target market, anticipating their wants, and positioning your brand to successfully address those demands. Knowledge is power in the PR industry, and social listening provides you with that power.