Social Listening

What is Social Listening?

Social Listening is the process of supervising social media channels and finding mentions about your business, competitors, or topics that are relevant to your brand.

People spend a great deal of time on social media where they chat and interact with other users. In these conversations, users complain, talk about their problems, express what they like and don’t like, and even make recommendations. Some of these comments can be replied by brands. Therefore, social listening is the communication between a social community and a brand.

After gathering all the information through social listening, it’s time to analyze it and apply it to your social strategy and improve the ranking of your brand.

This practice brings many potential benefits for your company since it helps you to contact new customers, offer a different buying experience or even manage your online reputation on social media.

Differences between Social Listening and Social Media Tracking 

The next question is:

What’s the difference between social listening and social media tracking?

These are the main differences:

✅ When they are performed

Tracking collects past data to understand how your strategy has worked. Social listening monitors what users are saying about your company in that moment and then transforms that information so you can take the necessary actions in the future.

✅ The use of data and information collected

The data collected by social media tracking is normally used to analyze and compare campaigns on social media. The information gathered by social listening is used to reconsider a general or branding strategy.

✅ Qualitative and quantitative data

Social media tracking is focused on metrics, like tracking the number of likes or interactions. Social listening, on the other hand, is focused on collecting qualitative information to understand the perception and idea that users have towards your company.

Why Social Listening is Important for You

If you didn’t use social listening yet you might not know, but there is plenty of data out there that you can process and analyze about your brand.

With this process, you can learn what customers or prospective clients think and say about your business so you can satisfy their needs, improve your reputation, or find new ideas for your new lines of business.

If this is not enough to show how relevant social listening can be for your business, find below some other advantages that will convince you to apply it to your brand’s strategy:

Identify your triumphs and errors

You can review your posts on social media and check what your followers think about them. This way, you will know what followers like or not. It will provide you with very valuable information about what succeeded and what didn’t.

When you discover that something about your strategy has worked very well, it will give you the green light to apply it again on future campaigns. Also, you can stop making ad campaigns that didn’t have the expected result.

Discover the weaknesses of your sector

You can discover a niche in your sector and cover them with your business. You can also find what doesn’t work well and solve these problems before they get worse.

Get information about your customers

You can gather very valuable information about people through social media. Social Listening lets you discover what customers share on social channels. You will know what they think about your social media accounts, what other tools they use, their needs, etc.

You can collect crucial information to develop your business and future actions.

Gain new customers

Users often ask for recommendations on social media. If you are paying attention, you can suggest your products or services to cover their needs.

Being quick in your answers can help you to get new customers.

Manage your online reputation

You can know how many times your brand has been mentioned on social media and analyze the nature of these mentions, whether they were positive or negative. If the mentions are negative, you can even turn them around by for example adding a bit of humor.

Find influencers

Word of mouth is a good marketing strategy. People rely on what other people have to say more than what they get from an ad.

You can discover influencers who talk about your brand or competitors and analyze them. You might be interested in collaborating with them in the future.

With Metricool, you can analyze your competitors and get information about the accounts of the influencers you want and learn about their metrics.

How to Put Social Listening Into Action

The best way to use social listening is through tools that save you time and help you get all the information at once.

✅ Research the keywords related to your business

With listening tools track keywords related to your company:

• The name of your business and products
• Name of competitors and their products
• Company’s hashtags
• Terms related to your products or sector

Tips to configure your Social Listening

Keep in mind that people sometimes write quick and dirty on social media and they don’t review it afterwards. So, it’s a good idea to also monitor words with errors and abbreviations.

✅ Determine which social networks to use social listening

There is an increasing number of social platforms at our disposal, and we can end up with too much information if we use them all, having trouble managing it, especially at the beginning.

The first thing to consider is the social media channel that your customers or prospective clients normally use. The most popular platforms are Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook.

✅ Learn from your competitors

You can learn about your market, discover new strategies and even find what users think by tracking your competitors.

✅ Reply to customers that talk about your business

If you read comments referring to your business, you should answer them. You will establish a direct relationship with users and improve your image on the market and social networks.

✅ Find keywords related to your company

Find keywords and hashtags that are related to your content, business, products or market. It’s an effective way to learn about people’s opinion, what they are talking about and what they like and dislike. This information will be useful when you go to create content, and for your business development.

Social Listening Tools

Metricool

You can use Metricool’s Hashtag Tracker to monitor keywords, hashtags or personal accounts on Twitter or Instagram.

It’s a way to know what people say on social media about a specific topic, your brand or event. With Metricool’s hashtag you can learn about:

• The accounts that talk more about that specific topic
• Who has more interactions on their publications
• Ranking of publications
• Geolocalization: where they are talking about the topic
• Cloud of words related to the topic you are monitoring.

Google Alerts

A Google tool that will help you with social listening a lot. Google Alerts allows you to monitor the Internet to find mentions about your brand, or phrases and keyworks that you previously selected. If you are a beginner at social listening, this tool is very easy to use.

Answer The Public

From top marketer Neil Patel, Answer The Public is a free social listening tool where you can search topics, brands, and products across different countries and language, to understand what users are searching for and what issues they are running into. Plus it can serve as a source to find more content ideas.

Now that you know how social listening works, use these tools to assist your monitoring, so you can continue to improve your strategy.

Have any questions? Leave them in the comments!

Sara Martín , 21 August 2023