What Is Social Listening?

Get to know this marketing tool that will help your social media accounts grow

Perhaps you have recently heard the term “social listening”–it’s becoming more and more popular in the world of social media. It offers a valuable view of your audience as well as the direction of your brand.

Learn how to implement this practice in your digital marketing strategy to obtain positive results for your personal brand or your customers.

What is social listening?

It’s a resource that observes, monitors, and analyzes the interests of an audience in relation to a topic or, specifically, your brand.

If you develop a communication or marketing strategy without getting to know your audience first, you're unlikely to achieve effective results, or you’ll end up wasting resources. You’re probably going to get the wrong idea of what your audience is interested in. Therefore, the best way to get to know what they like and desire is by paying attention to what they're actually saying.

First: learn to listen

When it comes to social listening, it’s not enough to pay attention to conversations happening on social media. This is simply the first step, which is known as monitoring.

Typically, social monitoring involves analyzing hard data, while social listening requires a deeper level of analysis that explains why different things happen. Here’s a simple example:

Social monitoring: I received 15 mentions this week.

Social listening: This week, I received 5 mentions that were negative due to wait times and 10 mentions that were positive thanks to product quality. Three of these mentions were from influential users.

Social listening, on the other hand, consists in taking the time to understand the reasons for these conversations, using analysis. Imagine you have a takeaway coffee brand. A first step could be to monitor and analyze what people are saying about this topic in your city, and ask the following questions:

–Who are the consumers? (ages, geographic location, interests)

–What brands and experiences do they talk about?

–What brands do they like, and why? (In other words, who is your competition?)

–What type of experiences do they value, and what type do they avoid?

–What related or common topics do they mention?

From this analysis, you’ll be able to design a content campaign that fits with the specific interests of your audience. For example, you could conclude that your audience likes drinking coffee after going for a run in the morning; they love parks and sportswear. From here, you can build a campaign around their interests.

Some basic objectives

When thinking about how to build your social listening campaign, these could be some of your main objectives:

–Get a deeper understanding of who your audience is.

–Find out how your brand is currently being received by your audience.

–Find out more about your competitors and the general state of the industry.

–Learn about the latest trends as well as those that are disappearing.

–Find out what your customers don’t get about your brand, what they want, and why they are loyal.

–Find allies and influencers.

Social listening tools

First of all, you should discuss your objectives with your marketing and social media team and how to carry out this practice. Try to create your own template for registering metrics, which you can adjust whenever you need to.

There are lots of different social listening tools available with different payment plans. Some platforms and apps that might be helpful are:

–Social Sprout
–Hootsuite
–Audiense
–Hubspot
–Synthesio
–Brandwatch

English version by @eloiseedgington.

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