Benefits of Social Listening

Social Listening is the process of tracking mentions of certain words, phrases, or even complex queries across social media and the web, followed by an analysis of the data.

A typical word to track would be a brand name, but the possibilities of social media monitoring go away with that: you can monitor mentions of your competitor, industry, campaign hashtags. Despite its name, social listening isn’t just about social media: many listening tools also monitor news websites, blogs, forums, and the rest of the web. But that’s not the only reason why the concept can be confusing. Social listening goes by many different names: buzz analysis, social media measurement, brand monitoring, social media intelligence… and, last but not least, social media monitoring. In this article, I will further discuss about Benefits of social Listening and How brands can make use of it.

Reputation Management – This is one of the most common reasons companies use social listening. Businesses monitor mentions of their brand and products to track brand health and react to changes in volumes of mentions and sentiment early to prevent reputation crises.

Competitor Analysis – Social Media monitoring tools empower you with an ability to track what’s being said about your competition on social networks, in the media, on forums and discussion boards, etc. This kind of intelligence is useful at every step of competitor analysis: from measuring share of voice and brand health metrics to benchmark them against your own, to learning what your rivals customers love and hate about their products, to discovering the influencers and publishers they partner with and the list goes on.

Product Feedback – By tracking what your customers are saying about your product online and monitoring key topics and sentiment, you can learn how they reach to product changes, what they love about your product, and what they believe is missing from it. As a side perk, this kind of consumer intelligence will also let you learn more about your audience. By understanding their needs better and learning to speak their language, you’ll be able to improve your ad and website copy and enhance your messaging so that it resonates with your customers.

Customer Service – Let’s talk some numbers here. Fewer than 30% of social media mentions of brands include their handle – that means by not using a social listening tool you’re ignoring 70% of the conversations about your business. Given that consumers expect brands to respond within an hour and leave a company because of its unhelpful customer service, not reacting to those conversations can cost your business actual money.

Lead Generation – While lead generation isn’t the primary use case for most social listening apps, some offer social selling add-ons that let you find potential customers on social media. Boolean search is an extremely flexible way to search for prospects, it’s an advanced way to search for mentions that uses Boolean logic to let you create complex queries for any use case.

PR – Social listening can help PR teams in more than one way. First, it lets you monitor when press releases and articles mentioning your company get published. Second, PR professionals can track mentions of competitors and industry keywords across the online media to find new platforms to get coverage on and journalists to partner with.

Influencer Marketing - Most social media monitoring tools will show you the impact, or reach, of your brand mentions. From there, you can find who your most influential brand advocates are. If you’re looking to find new influencers to partner with, all you need to do is create a social listening alert for your industry and see who the most influential people in your niche are. Lastly, make sure to take note of your competitors’ influencers — they will likely turn out to be a good fit for your brand as well.

Research - Social listening isn’t just for brands — it also lets you monitor what people are saying about any phenomenon online. Whether you’re a journalist writing an article on Brexit, a charity looking to evaluate the volume of conversations around a social cause, or an entrepreneur looking to start a business and doing market research, social listening software can help. 

Social media is an invaluable source of insights and trends in consumer behavior but remember social listening doesn’t end with the insights. It’s a continuous learning process – the end goal of which should be serving the customer better.