Listening before speaking is always a wise decision; social listening tools make this extremely easy. It is crucial for any brand, large or small, to listen to social media. Tracking relevant online conversations for our brand or industry allows us to develop new marketing campaigns, respond to customer feedback, or improve our products using this information. The best way to start social listening is to use a social listening tool, which is a software program that helps us monitor hashtags, keywords, mentions, and other brand information on the web.

A social media marketer’s ability to listen to social media can prove invaluable. In this whitepaper, we will examine the power of social listening in marketing campaigns and businesses. With insightful illustrations and implementation, we will discuss social listening and attempt to learn how to analyze listening reports on marketing campaigns.

What Is Social Listening?

To understand the value of social listening, we need to know what, why, where, and how discussions are happening so we can totally respond to them in our marketing efforts. To develop a 360-degree picture of the landscape in which we operate, we must monitor keywords, themes, brands, industries, and topics, including our competitors.

Listening to social media conversations about the brand is an essential component of any marketing strategy, as it helps understand the reasons for these conversations. Listening to social media conversations about our industry, media, and target audience is an aspect of social insight. In this concept, we analyze the conversations and trends about the brand and the industry and use that data to make better marketing decisions.

In addition to forming future media campaigns, we can improve our content strategy and messaging by listening to social media. If we know how to listen to what our customers say, it’s easy to market on social media. Additionally, people aren’t just tagging us or our brand when they talk about us on social media; they are also discussing our industry and where these conversations occur. We will learn how to outpace our competition, develop effective and robust influencer programs, and forge more valuable brand partnerships through it.

A stand-out social media campaign can only be developed by knowing what people think. Additionally, social listening enables us to create powerful influencer partnerships and build effective campaigns.

How Does Social Listening Work?

Social insight through social media listening works in a three-step process, starting with monitoring, then analyzing, and finishing with decision-making. Explore the details of each step of social listening below.

Monitoring

Social listening begins by monitoring social media sites, hashtags, pages, and handles to learn from the audience’s posts. Track the brand in any manner we can to look at the leaders, the online material, and any brand references. One should also track the competitors, examining their social media activity and the types of content they post. Through monitoring, we can identify the type of content that the followers respond to the most eagerly and discover why they want it.

Do you know: 14 Social Media Monitoring Tools for Marketing Teams

Analyzing

After monitoring, we can analyze the data and gain insights into customer sentiments, service gaps, and other important details. We can compare our performance against our competitors and learn more about how people talk about our brand and its products and services.

Decision making

Monitoring and analyzing information on our social channels can give us insight into how people feel about our industry, specific industry topics, and industry brands. We can use a social listening tool to identify behavioral patterns or brand engagement in our target audience, connect with them on a more personal level, and sort them based on our chosen data ports. This can help us make important decisions, such as product or service improvements, enhancing customer service, revamping marketing campaigns, and more.  

What Are The Best Social Listening Tools?

More social media listening technologies are available than ever because of the industry’s rapid growth over the past ten years. More specialized products that address particular concerns, such as cultural insights, brand tone of voice, or reputation management, have recently replaced more general social listening tools in the market. This change indicates a shift from descriptive intelligence to predictive and prescriptive social intelligence.

Social listening reports are a great way to understand brand sentiment and industry trends. It is possible to break down the social listening process into two steps. It is the first step in the process of collecting data through several social media channels. Don’t just pull data from Facebook and Twitter; make sure to pull data from places where our brand is most active. 

In step two, the collected data is analyzed, and trends, sentiments, and conversations are interpreted. Making smarter marketing decisions and building more effective campaigns requires an understanding of the consumer’s viewpoint and the industry as a whole.

Konnect Insights is one such solution that offers a wide range of features and tools to help businesses improve their customer relationships. With social listening, social analytics, social publishing, social CRM, surveys and feedback, BI tools and dashboards, and crisis management, Konnect Insights provides a complete solution that can meet all your social media needs. By using Konnect Insights, businesses can save time and resources that would otherwise be spent on multiple tools and platforms. This allows them to focus on what matters most: building better customer relationships.

Read about: 10 Important Factors For Selecting the Best Social Listening Tool For Your Business

How To Do Social Listening For A Successful Campaign

To effectively implement social listening, it is necessary to have the appropriate brand monitoring equipment, as manual tracking can be time-consuming and less productive. Here are six steps to set up a social listening strategy:

1. Plan the objectives and build and maintain social media profiles: Clearly define our goals and create social media profiles where our target audience can be found. Interact with them by posting engaging content to establish a solid online presence.

1. Select a tool for social listening: Manual tracking can be ineffective and time-consuming. Automated tools can efficiently monitor and analyze social media mentions. Consider factors such as the number of sources analyzed, features, pricing, and reviews when choosing a tool.

1. Select the keywords intended to be tracked: Choose brand names, hashtags, keywords, and phrases that support our objectives.

1. Create a project for monitoring: Set up a monitoring project with our chosen keywords and additional settings for advanced users.

1. Use data from social listening: Respond to mentions, prioritize significant mentions, and verify each mention’s tone to address negative comments promptly.

1. Optimize, expand, and continue: Schedule regular meetings with crucial departments to evaluate social listening reports and develop action plans to enhance online sentiment and win new customers’ loyalty.

Do you know: What are Social Listening Metrics? Use These Important Social Listening Metrics to Measure Your Campaign

The Best Social Listening Strategies For Campaigns

Social listening information will be most valuable if one has a specific goal in mind. When it comes to social listening reports, there can be a lot of information, so it’s important to know what’s useful and where to begin. These social listening strategies will strengthen our online presence and enhance our overall marketing strategy if we can’t make sense of our social listening report. 

Measure Campaigns

Putting together the perfect campaign can take months for many brands. A campaign’s results should not be calculated nearly as much as our team does. Real-time monitoring of our campaign’s success is possible with social listening tools. Social listening can determine its overall effectiveness by analyzing impressions, engagements, sentiments, and mentions generated by a campaign. We can further understand what resonated with our audience by using social listening to gather information surrounding the campaign.

While marketing is not always straightforward, using social listening can help us identify where improvements can be made and how to build upon them. 

Identify Influencers

A brand looking to expand its reach and audience should consider investing in influencers in the age of social media. As influential thought leaders and notable influencers have become more visible on social media, social listening has become a highly effective method for identifying them. Social listening can make our lives easier by helping us sort through follower counts and like-to-comment ratios. The social listening report will explain exactly which accounts are leading the way. Learn how to discover the best influencers for our industry and confirm their quality before analyzing their results. 

Industry Trends 

Social listening reports allow us to stay on top of social media trends before they become obvious. We can identify market trends by keeping an eye on industry hashtags and keeping up with important discussions through social listening. It is possible to identify gaps in the market and uncover unique opportunities by analyzing industry trends. The tool can also help us identify political and social issues that may impact our brand and detect potential disruptions in the industry. Being aware of social media not only keeps us in touch with the market but also allows us to learn from other industries’ successes. For instance, finding industry leaders and establishing a similar online presence for our brand. 

Competitive Analysis 

The next step is to focus on our competitors after we’ve checked all our bases, analyzed brand health, and assessed the industry. In what ways do they outperform us? With the help of social listening, we’re able to quickly identify where our brand is booming and which areas could use some improvement. It’s easier than ever to directly compare our audience, customers, satisfaction rates, and strategies to those of our competitors. Social listening allows our brand to quickly identify where our business stands within the industry and pinpoint where competitors are falling short. Ultimately, with every piece of competitor data, our brand will be able to gain a competitive advantage online and with product development.

Brand Sentiment 

Online reviews are one of the most important things our marketing team should monitor. Is it a hit with them? Does anyone have a complaint? What could our brand do better? As a result, brand sentiment, perception trends, and content performance often need to be examined closely. Focusing on improving the health of our online brand is a great way to turn social listening insights into results. Our team can keep up with customer questions, comments, complaints, and demographics by tracking social media conversations. It’s a simple way to boost customer engagement and build a more positive brand image.

Read more: 13 Tips To Improve Your Social Listening Strategy

Reminders to Move | Successful Campaign Example

Social media monitoring is likened to a Fitbit-style device, which offers data to work with and allows us to keep tabs on what’s happening with our health or our brand. Perhaps that comparison was known to Fitbit’s digital marketers. Fitbit aggressively employs social media in its promotion, and it’s effective.

According to Allison Leahy, a former Fitbit community director who is currently employed by Spotify, “Fitbit is trying to be everywhere you are and more” in the internet world. A social listening tool must be present virtually wherever we go. To find “emerging issues and to troubleshoot and gather information from customers who may be experiencing a certain type of issue,” Fitbit uses social listening. Since many Fitbit users possess specialized knowledge, the business also gathers suggestions from these communities. The engineering teams are then presented with the best concepts.

To “resolve all customer issues, provide customers with a little bit more delight from the brand, and give customers an extremely fast support experience,” Fitbit prioritizes social media listening. The “Reminders to Move” function, which buzzes at the user to get up and walk about a little, is a wonderful illustration of how the business employs social listening for product development. 

Fitbit users themselves introduced this very helpful function, which I should know about because I never leave the computer without a reminder. As a former blogger, Leahy was aware of the importance of user involvement, consumer feedback, and the strength of an online community—a community that knows the company values its opinions.

Social Listening for Campaigns

In conclusion, social listening is a crucial component of any successful marketing campaign. Social listening tools make monitoring and tracking conversations about our brand, industry, and competitors easy. The Konnect Insights platform has an intuitive and user-friendly interface, making it easy to use for businesses of all sizes. By listening to social media conversations, we can gain valuable insights into consumer sentiment and industry trends, which can be used to develop new marketing campaigns, improve products and services, and respond to customer feedback. The three stages of social listening include monitoring, analyzing, and decision-making. 

Social listening tools can help marketing professionals effectively track relevant online conversations, develop influencer partnerships, and build effective campaigns. To implement social listening successfully, it is necessary to use appropriate brand monitoring tools, and the process can be broken down into two steps: data collection and data analysis. In short, social listening is an invaluable tool for any brand looking to succeed in social media marketing.