In this article, we will cover everything you need to know about social listening, how it can help businesses, various social media listening technologies, and who may benefit from it.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
→ 4 Reasons to Start Using Social Listening
→ How can a social listening strategy help your business?
→ Top Social Media Listening Tools that You Should have in Your Toolkit
→ How do I get started with social media listening?
→ Social Listening Best Practices And Tips
→ Social Listening vs Social Media Monitoring: Don’t Get Confused
What is Social Listening?
You must have heard the phrase “social listening” from various marketers.
but, What is Social Listening?
Social Listening is the process of monitoring internet discussions to see what people are saying about your brand, products, and services, as well as anything else that may be relevant to your business. It is a monitoring practice where you research and collect data on conversations and trends around your brand’s social media presence.
Social Listening has the potential to completely change your social media approach.
Social media listening or client listening lets you get a clear picture of how your brand is perceived and how it stacks up against your competitors.
Brands have been increasing their focus on client listening platforms as it gives them direct customer feedback on the brand image.
To harness the value of this information, it is imperative that you first listen, which is, naturally, the essence of social media listening.
Check out Konnect Insights Social Listening Tool
4 Reasons to Start Using Social Media Listening Today
Nowadays, you cannot post random content on your social media platform and hope that your followers will engage with it enthusiastically.
It is essential to understand what customers are discussing in real-time and create content, products, and services accordingly.
That’s where social listing can help!
Below are some reasons to start with social listening:
1. Customers love when brands respond.
Did you know that 30% of customers who have experienced a negative experience said they would discuss it on social media or leave an online review?
So, customers expect brands to be responsive and reply to them on social media in today’s digital age.
By actively listening to what customers are saying on social media and responding appropriately, brands can demonstrate their commitment to customers. This increases customer satisfaction and builds stronger relationships with the brand.
But how can brands listen and respond to their customers on social media?
- Social listening tools give a breakdown of positive and negative interactions.
- They allow brands to identify customer pain points and issues that need to be addressed.
- Social listening consumer insights help brands in understanding the needs and preferences of their customers.
- Social media listening dashboards allow brands to respond to customer inquiries and complaints promptly.
This can help them better serve their customers and improve their products and services.
2. You can keep track of your brand’s growth.
Social listening tools allow brands to keep track of their brand growth and reputation in real-time.
By monitoring social media platforms, brands can see how their audience perceives their products or services. These insights are helpful in identifying the areas for improvement.
Furthermore, it also allows brands to track the success of their marketing campaigns and see how they resonate with their target audience.
This information plays a critical role in refining content strategy, improving messaging, and redefining brand perception.
Overall, social listening helps brands stay connected with their audience and make informed decisions about their brand’s marketing strategy.
3. You can discover new opportunities.
Social listening consumer insights allow brands to discover new opportunities by monitoring and analyzing social media conversations and trends.
This enables brands to identify potential areas for growth such as new product or service ideas, and potential partnerships or collaborations.
For example, suppose a brand monitors social media and sees a trend or demand for a particular product or service.
In that case, they can quickly respond and develop a product or offer to meet that demand. This can help the brand stay ahead of the competition and position itself as a leader in the industry.
4. You can increase customer acquisition.
By actively engaging in social listening, brands can identify potential opportunities for customer acquisition.
For example, suppose a brand receives a lot of positive feedback about its product on social media.
In that case, they can use this information to target ads or promotions for those individuals. This increases the likelihood of converting them into customers.
Additionally, social listening companies can help brands identify and address negative consumer feedback or complaints. By quickly addressing these issues and showing a commitment to customer satisfaction, brands can improve their reputation and attract new customers.
How can a Brand listening strategy help your business?
If you are not using social media listening you are leaving a lot of opportunities on the table.
Real individuals actively discuss your business and industry online. It is to your best advantage to understand what they are saying.
This is where social listening comes into practice.
Here are the 8 ways by which social listening can help your business-
1. Understand your audience.
A social listening strategy can help you in understanding your audience by providing insights into their thoughts, feelings, and behaviors.
By monitoring social media channels and analyzing their interactions with your brand, you can learn more about your target audience.
This information can help you in creating better marketing campaigns that resonate with your audience and address their needs and concerns.
Additionally, social listening’s consumer insights can help identify potential issues or challenges your audience may face, allowing you to address them proactively and improve customer satisfaction.
2. Product Intelligence
Monitoring industry-wide interactions using social media listening tools will reveal a wealth of information.
Social listening tools aid you in learning about existing and prospective customers’ problems with your products and those of your competitors.
They can give you knowledge about what works and what doesn’t for present and future consumers.
Tracking social media conversations related to your products might help you choose what future enhancements to include in your new products or service.
3. Crisis Identification & Management.
Brand listening tools will serve as an early warning system for a developing crisis. They assist in determining the problem’s scope and suggest the most effective solution.
Organizations may spot potential crises before they worsen by analyzing social media channels and online discussions.
This will assist them in taking proactive actions to solve the situation before it escalates into a full-blown catastrophe.
Additionally, you may use social listening solutions to generate alerts based on activity spikes or particular keywords. So, this will allow you to monitor your brand for sudden shifts in the sentiment of the masses.
Also, by monitoring social media discussions after a crisis has been resolved, organizations may evaluate the efficacy of their response.
So this may help them discover areas for development and help prepare them to manage similar scenarios in the future.
4. Increases Customer Loyalty and Acquisition.
Brand listening tools enable organizations to detect and fix consumer complaints swiftly. Companies can react promptly to client complaints or inquiries by monitoring social media. This helps in increasing customer happiness and loyalty.
For example, if a customer specifies that they are seeking a particular product or service, businesses can use this information from social listening insight tools to better target their marketing and sales efforts.
Social listening providers may also assist companies in identifying prospective new clients by monitoring discussions and conversations about their goods and services.
This will boost their chances of turning these prospective clients into paying customers by connecting with them actively, thus increasing customer acquisition.
5. Collaboration opportunities.
People are inherently more inclined to take the recommendations of someone they trust. This can be a friend, family member, or perhaps a blogger whose content they like today.
Monitoring social conversations relevant to your industry can inform you of your field’s key creators and influencers.
A social media listening tool may help you uncover prospective social influencers without spending numerous hours doing manual searches across different social platforms.
6. Competitor and industry trends.
Social media listening platforms involve more than just understanding what others say about you. Social media listening provides valuable information regarding your position in the market.
You can also gather information regarding what your competitors are doing in the market. Further, Brand listening reveals your rivals’ real-time activities, like the launch of new products, services, or any other important update.
7. Uncover market trends.
One way that social listening tools can help uncover market trends is by identifying patterns and changes in how people talk about your brand, industry, and competitors.
For example, suppose you notice a significant increase in mentions of a particular product or feature. In that case, it could indicate a growing market demand for that product or feature.
Social media listening can also help to forecast future trends by examining not just what individuals are now discussing but also the development of those discussions over time.
Further, this will lead to a sense of which issues are gaining traction and which are losing them.
So, your business can introduce a product that is better than your competitor’s or improve an existing one depending upon the insights from these tools.
8. Improve campaign targeting.
Social listening enhances campaign targeting by assisting marketers in finding conversations relevant to their products, solutions, and industry.
Marketers may acquire insight into their preferences, wants, and tastes by analyzing their target audience’s dialogue.
With this data, marketers may develop more personalized campaigns targeting the requirements and preferences of their target audience.
In addition, social listening may give marketers insights into their target audience’s sentiments, allowing them to tailor their campaigns and content to the tone of the discussion.
What are social listening tools?
Software that tracks and examines online conversations regarding your brand, subject, rivals, etc., pertinent to your business is called a social listening tool.
Functions of Social Listening Tools
- You can watch many social media channels from a single location using social listening technologies.
- You can monitor sponsored posts, pertinent keywords, and feedback with tags and DMs.
- You can also easily post to your social network accounts from the dashboard with several of these social listening solutions.
- Additionally, you can view all your metrics in one place after your numerous social media accounts are integrated.
- With a lot of mentions and information, social media listening platforms enable you to monitor the performance of your business and customer perceptions of your brand.
11 Top Social Media Listening Tools that You Should have in Your Toolkit
There are many social listening solutions available in the market and some of them are expensive while others are affordable.
Let’s look at them one by one
The 11 social media listening tools listed below might assist you in providing social listening solutions for your business and tracking its progress.
HubSpot social media management software
Price: $45/month+
You can quickly monitor social media interactions, discussions, and followers with HubSpot. Through the use of contextual information from your contacts’ information in your free CRM, this social media listening software can assist you in targeting particular audiences.
You can manage all of your social media accounts with one social listening solution.
By allowing you to schedule posts on all your profiles weeks in advance, HubSpot can simplify your job and eliminate the need to log into your social media accounts to upload new content.
With HubSpot, you can plan posts for all your profile weeks to save critical time, and the way you post won’t ever impact your capacity to track the performance of your posts.
Buffer
Price: Free
Buffer delivers an experience across all channels for teams working in social media.
With the help of this social media listening software, it’s simple to locate the interactions you value the most, jump into an existing conversation, and impress your audience.
You can use the team-shared inbox to upload content and reply immediately to comments from a single central dashboard. Buffer’s publishing and scheduling tools let you create successful social media campaigns.
You may track audience behavior and the team’s performance by monitoring engagement with Buffer’s reports and analytics tools.
Social media sites, including Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, Pinterest, and Twitter, are supported by Buffer.
Konnect Insights
Price: $29/month
Konnect Insights is the widely used Indian Social Listening tool and is affordable as compared to other omnichannel customer experience software.
With Konnect Insights, you can interact with customers across social media, hear their opinions, and evaluate their data.
You can effortlessly publish or schedule content across various social media platforms and accounts on social media. Additionally, try them out on other gadgets.
You may obtain a thorough understanding of how your brand is perceived using social CRM and performing in client service management and promotion with the help of social media insights and agent performance reports.
TweetReach
Price: $49/month
The greatest tool to use if you want to assess Twitter’s reach is TweetReach.
It examines the reach of a certain word, person, or hashtag. This tool examines engagements, comments, and the moments when the Tweets most important to your company are shared.
To better target them with your message, TweetReach also enables you to identify which of your followers will most likely make an impression.
This tool can assist you in determining the potential reach, engagement, and volume of a tweet.
Additionally, reports can be generated on Twitter activity for any term, hashtag, or URL.
BuzzSumo
Price: Free +
BuzzSumo, a free social listening provider, makes it simple to evaluate your Facebook success by displaying the number of engagements and shares received by various posts.
This tool provides insight into Facebook content to determine what kinds of postings perform best across the audience on the network.
Even the perfect post length and the best times and days of the week to post are specified.
Keyhole
Price: $79/month
Keyhole is mostly used for brand assessments on Twitter and Instagram.
You can follow hashtags, mentions, usernames, and more with this tool on each social media site.
This application provides stunning heat maps that display references and engagement worldwide. This aids in your ability to comprehend your target market and communicate with them successfully.
This tool can forecast how the hashtag may work when combined with AI.
Mention
Price: $41/month
Mention is a fantastic tool to check brand mentions globally by tracking millions of pieces of content in 42 languages.
You can choose whatever information you want to ignore so that all you focus on providing social listening trends.
Using the competition analysis tool, you can assess how well your brand stands up to a wide range of rivals to distinguish your content from that of other market leaders and guarantee that it is constantly relevant to your brand.
By using the team feature, employers can collaborate on social media management tasks and notify one another when someone needs assistance.
With the Crisis Management function, you can handle any social media emergency issue that arises.
Oktopost
Price: Book a demo for pricing
Oktopost is social media management software that B2B marketers use to track and analyze all social media activity.
You can manage and comprehend social marketing, editorial calendars, development, and social media listening platforms thanks to the unique characteristics of this platform.
Oktopost serves three main purposes – social media promotions, staff advocacy on social networks, and social media management
Your social media ROI can be calculated using the advanced reporting tool of the platform.
How do I get started with social media listening?
Getting started with social listening is easy. Just follow these steps –
1. Determine your goals.
To develop the most effective social listening strategy for your business, you must determine the objectives you want to accomplish with the plan.
Because the tools you employ and the outcomes you assess may vary based on your objectives.
The following departments and functions may benefit from social media listening platforms’ assistance:
- Product development.
- Content marketing.
- Customer support.
- Event management.
- Crisis and standing.
- Sales enablement.
- Lead generation.
- Competitive intelligence.
- Audience research.
Further, you can also discuss their objectives with other departments to determine your goals.
Some brands intend to focus on boosting audience engagement. In contrast, others concentrate on creating better content for their clients and prospects.
Another objective may be to increase the number of leads and followers on brand platforms.
There are several advantages for businesses that implement an effective social listening approach, so determining your objectives will help guide most of your plan and strategy.
2. Choose a social listening tool.
After you have established your goals, choosing a tool that will handle most of the work for you is important.
Typically, you may sign up for a trial before purchasing a tool.
3. Choose the keywords you want to monitor.
Keywords allow you to collect relevant conversations about your business, industry, or competitors.
Social media tracking tools can track brand mentions, hashtags, particular keywords, and phrases.
Hence, define now what you intend to monitor. Choose keywords that align with your objectives.
People will frequently mention your company, a product you offer, or a hashtag campaign you’re doing without explicitly mentioning your brand.
You may overlook crucial conversations if you do not actively seek these communications.
4. Build your topics and themes.
You must build specific queries to begin identifying and extracting important data, including the topics you do and do not wish to listen for.
By selecting topics and themes related to your company or brand, you can guarantee that the data you gather is relevant and useful for your company.
This will assist you in gaining a deeper understanding of your consumers, rivals, and industry trends.
Developing topics and themes may offer context for the collected social media data.
5. Work with social listening data.
Social listening data may give insights into consumer sentiment and preferences, allowing firms to better adjust their marketing campaigns to their target audience’s requirements and preferences.
Further, social listening enables organizations to remain ahead of their rivals by monitoring industry developments and customer preferences.
6. Cut, continue, and expand.
After spending time listening, implementing that data into your plan, and executing your analytics, you must understand what works and what does not.
Remember that if a certain technique does not provide the desired results, it is neither a failure nor a waste of effort. You will never develop if you don’t take chances and try new ideas.
Who can use social listening?
Social listening can be used by a wide range of individuals and organizations, including:
B2C
If your business is a B2C one, social listening might help you learn how your clients feel about your brand.
Do they promote your brand favorably or make any unfavorable remarks?
Additionally, you can gather comments, discover more about your customer demographics, and observe which goods are most frequently mentioned.
You can utilize it to do research for corporate strategy.
Also, you can check out what customers say about it and determine whether your current clients will be interested in this new offering.
B2B
Social listening is a fantastic tool for B2B organizations to use for competitive benchmarking. You can determine which of your rivals is speaking with the most volume.
Example: Even though you sell to companies, you must establish relationships with people to achieve that.
You may identify the CEOs who will be your main decision-makers, and then utilize social listening to learn more about their interests, geography, and how to communicate with them.
Charities
Charities can use social listening tools to understand their supporters’ opinions, preferences, and behaviors. This information can be used to develop targeted fundraising campaigns, improve donor retention, and create more engaging content.
Example:
In cooperation with Brandwatch, the international youth organization ditches the Label released a ground-breaking analysis in November 2022 that examined over 263 million online discussions about hateful speech to determine how it has altered since the pandemic began.
Financial services sector
It’s more complicated to acquire practical and helpful insights about financial choices with the correct technology.
Example: Historically, closing private equity contracts has taken a long time due to the labor-intensive and expensive nature of the potential investment opportunity investigation processes.
For investors who want to quickly obtain knowledge while boosting the assurance of their investment recommendations, social listening insights can be useful.
Government
Social listening is something in which government agencies can participate.
There are many approaches, including learning about demographics, hearing complaints, and getting input on new plans or regulations.
Example: The Abu Dhabi Department of Culture and Tourism aims to promote and expand the tourism sector in Abu Dhabi.
It uses social listening to track social media conversations and determine the material users want to see on each platform.
Social Listening Best Practices And Tips
As a beginner, managing a social listening strategy might seem daunting.
You might have an overwhelming amount of unstructured data but are not sure how to go about analyzing it.
Below are some of the best practices that most successful brands follow.
✅ When starting your search, add different spelling variations of your brand name, competitor’s name, and other relevant words.
✅ Identify all the social mentions of your brand and note the context of each mention.
✅ Analyze the reigning sentiment to detect a potential crisis; if the number of negative comments is high, you might have to kick in a damage control plan.
✅ Social listening isn’t a one-way track, so ensure that you respond to every comment and participate in every interaction around your brand.
✅ Derive the differences in audience profiles of you and your competitors to find your niche. You can compare the geolocation, gender, mentioned sources, and related factors of the audience.
✅ Ensure that your content strategy is based on your audience’s preferences, as they are the ones to engage and promote it.
✅ Use social proof and user-generated content as a part of your social media marketing to highlight your brand’s market impact.
✅ Open direct communication with active users to generate transactional opportunities.
✅ When looking for an influencer, ensure that their target audience and reach are relevant to your brand positioning and social listening results.
✅ Actively evaluate the trends and data sources your audience engages in to build a common ground for enhanced customer relationships.
Social Listening vs Social Media Monitoring: Don’t Get Confused
Social listening and social monitoring are often used interchangeably, but there are some fundamental differences between the two.
Social monitoring is essentially tracking, observing, and recording conversations about your brand, campaign, or product. It focuses solely on registering metrics like mentions and hashtags. On the other hand, social listening involves interpreting organic and unstructured data to improve the overall social media strategy and monitoring. In short, social monitoring tells you “what” and social listening helps you understand “why.”
A vital monitoring aspect of a social listening strategy will enable you to derive maximum value from your marketing investment and cognizance of customer opinions.
You can even get real-time market intelligence to analyze customer data from anywhere on the web and on social media. Fine-tune your strategies and make valuable business decisions.
You can learn from your customers, and understand their sentiments, share of voice, media type, classification, influence, demographics, and campaign insights.
With great dashboards and smart suggestions (KISS) reports you can even perform competitor’s/industry analysis benchmarking.
Konnect Insights is an omnichannel customer experience management platform that helps brands and businesses better understand their customers, potential customers, competitors, and more with its amazing features such as social listening, social analytics, social CRM, social publishing, online reputation management, crisis management and much more…
About Konnect Insights
Konnect Insights is a social listening tool that helps businesses and organizations track and analyze online conversations about their brand, competitors, and industry.
With Konnect Insights, users can track mentions of their brand or specific keywords across social media platforms, news websites, blogs, and other online sources.
One key benefit of Konnect Insights is its ability to track real-time conversations, allowing users to respond quickly to any issues or opportunities that may arise.
This can be particularly useful for customer service, as it allows businesses to promptly address customer complaints or inquiries.
This social media listening software offers a range of features for analyzing and understanding online conversations, including sentiment analysis, influencer identification, and topic modeling.
It also provides insights into the demographics of the people talking about a brand, such as their age, gender, and location.
It is based on horizontally scalable big-data technologies that explore billions of online sources, so you never miss a web-based discussion.
Every brand conversation that takes place on the Internet and on social media is significant.
Using big-data technologies, Konnect Insights guarantees you don’t miss any discussion.
Listening is the initial stage, but what you do with what you hear is crucial! Konnect Insights Dashboards and Business Intelligence tools are driven by AI, ML, and NLP to provide meaningful insights into this complicated data. Process the data efficiently, regardless of the amount or language of the data. With powerful tools, you can sort data according to your needs.
With unparalleled coverage across millions of websites and social media discussions, experience stability, and scalability with real-time data retrieval and rapid data processing to provide you with the insights you need to improve your efforts.
Also, Konnect Insights is a comprehensive tool for businesses looking to track and analyze online conversations, improve their customer service, and optimize their social media marketing efforts.
Conclusion
Every day, social media trends and consumer behavior evolve swiftly. Long-term competition with other companies will be difficult if you do not keep up with the newest trends. In addition, consumers choose companies that contact them often, provide practical help, and continually deliver value. These objectives can only be accomplished with an efficient social listening approach.
Examining conversations regarding your brand, company, or sector is crucial. These insights will assist you in enhancing your company and social media strategies.
