What Is Social Media Listening? Your Ultimate Guide

 

Mastering Social Media Listening: A Game-Changing Guide


Admit it: The first thing you possibly do after waking up is check your social media. But who doesn’t? Social media has been a fundamental part of our lives for some time. Social media has a captivating hold on all users that makes them more drawn to it over time. Therefore, it has become a very powerful place not only for individuals but for organizations as well. Currently, all businesses have allocated a great deal of resources to boost social media marketing. This is due to the great impact that social media has had on many businesses. In this article, we will discuss one of the social media marketing strategies, social media listening, and the extraordinary influence it has on businesses and applications.

What is Social Media Listening?

The term social media listening is not familiar to nearly everyone. This is because, despite being important, it is not as widely used as other social media strategies. Social media listening is exactly what the name implies. It is the process of gathering and analyzing data like conversations and trends about your application, organization, and brand. This includes finding posts, comments, and any form of interaction and feedback that includes your brand or application. But why is that important? That is because it helps you get a glimpse of what users are saying about your application based on their interactions. This way, you can also get a grasp on users’ behaviors, needs, and preferences, which will help you apply necessary modifications to your marketing strategies and plan.

In addition to forming a complete picture of your products or application, you will also get one about your competitors. You will get to know their strengths, advantages, and drawbacks, which will help you stay ahead of the game and make informed decisions.

What makes social media listening special is that the outcomes don’t only benefit your marketing efforts. They actually go beyond that by informing business owners of new perspectives and suggestions that can make their products better. Therefore, it affects the business as a whole.

Listening vs. Monitoring: The Difference Between the Two Social Media Marketing Methods

Social media listening might get fixed up with another term that somewhat has the same purpose, which is social media monitoring. But what is the difference? Let me tell you! As we mentioned before, social media listening is concerned with all the data found on social media channels and analyzing it. All data in this case is considered and analyzed for the most fruitful outcome. On the other hand, social media monitoring is an entirely different process. Social media monitoring is the process of finding specific feedback from users. This includes mentions of the organization directly. The next step in social media monitoring is actually responding to these mentions and conversations and addressing issues if any are mentioned. Unlike listening, monitoring stops only at addressing and responding and doesn’t go beyond that.

That is why we can say that social media listening is more broad and comprehensive in comparison with social media monitoring.

Importance of Social Media Listening

There are many advantages that social media listening offers to businesses, whether for the marketing process or for the products themselves. So, here are seven pros of social media listening.

Customer Insights

Listening to client feedback on social media can help you better understand how they feel about your business and its services and products. You can learn about customers' perspectives, likes, dislikes, and recommendations. Products, services, and consumer experiences can all benefit from this data and process of analysis.

Competitive Analysis

Competitive Analysis (2)

With the help of social media listening, you can monitor your competitors' online activity and campaigns. You may learn how they're using social media, how they're responding to client feedback, and where they stand in the market, all of which can help you enhance and strengthen your own tactics.

Product Development

Ideas for new products or services can be derived from listening to customer input and mentions and keeping an eye on conversations about industry trends. The results can serve as a road map for future product development, boosting creativity along the way.

Audience Segmentation

Audience Segmentation

Social media listening is a great tool for learning about your target market. I mean, if you ever want to learn, listen. Marketers can more precisely target their advertisements to a particular target audience once they have been identified based on their shared characteristics, preferences, and behaviors.

Market Research

Market Research (1)  

For market researchers, social media may be a gold mine of information. Data on consumer habits, trends, sentiment, and new market prospects can be gathered through the conversation and data analysis that social media listening offers.

Content Optimization

Listening to your audience on social media might help you figure out what kind of content they enjoy and what they don't. Which is a major factor in effective content optimization. You may use this data to improve your content strategy and increase your audience's engagement and exposure.

Trend Identification

There is no better place to find out about what's popular and what's going viral than on one of the many social media platforms. In order to keep up with the ever-changing digital scene and industries, it's important to monitor these trends so that you can incorporate them into your marketing strategies.

How to Start with Social Media Listening for Your App

So how could you start with the social media listening process? As much as it may appear to be easy since it is all data analysis from social media platforms. Social media listening is actually a rich process that may vary from one industry and organization to another. However, there are also some standards in the process that stay the same. Without further ado, let us explore the process of social media listening and how you can start with it to boost your app’s visibility and marketing strategy.

Choose a Suitable Tool

Your first step is choosing a suitable social media listening tool. If you don’t know this, there are a lot of tools that can help you have a more effortless process. These tools vary significantly in price, and you may find that they offer services for free or at affordable prices. And some might come with an experience price tag. Additionally, they also vary in features, as some may offer automation and natural language processing in this process.

Set Your Goals 

The second step is setting objectives and goals that you need to accomplish throughout the process. For instance, some people may conduct social media listening in order to get insights about a particular competitor; others might need it for the product development process, and so on. Therefore, make sure to set a definite objective for the process to make it more effortless.

Look for Relevant Social Media Platforms

Your third step is choosing the suitable platforms and sources from which you will get your data. Keep in mind that there are a large number of social media platforms with millions of daily input from users. Thus, it is important to choose ones that are relevant to your app to avoid wasting time on others that would lead to nothing.

Identify the Conversation and Topics That Will Benefit You

The last step is identifying the topics and conversations that you want to analyze. Among all the conversations and data about your application, you will find plenty that are completely irrelevant. That is why you need to determine certain keywords, hashtags, and topics that will help narrow down your search and reach a fruitful outcome soon.

Best Social Media Listening Tools To Use

As we stated before, choosing the right tool is an essential step in the social media listening process. And since you can find thousands of useful tools, let us guide you to the best ones on the market at the moment.

The first tool is Hootsuite. Hootsuite is a renowned software program known for offering a plethora of tools specializing in social media. Through the comprehensive social media dashboard in Hootsuite, you can easily monitor all the conversations concerning your product or application. You can access and analyze the data from different social media platforms all at once in one place.

Talkwalker is also another powerful software solution that you need to consider. In addition to all the capabilities and features, Talkwalker is not limited to only social media platforms, it also includes collecting and analyzing data from forms, videos, articles, etc.

Lastly, Brandwatch is a powerful social listening and analytics platform relied on by many of the world's largest companies and advertising agencies. Deep analysis of conversations, sentiment analysis, and live data visualization are all features it offers. Brandwatch is a complete solution for keeping tabs on online conversations and monitoring brand reputation by covering a wide variety of online platforms.

En Fin

Social media is now the ultimate shield for every organization and business. Applications and businesses that fail to take advantage of social media’s powerful impacts miss a lot of opportunities to prosper. As we all concluded, social media strategies’ benefits are not limited to attracting more customers and enhancing promotion. In addition, they help provide development teams with different and novel perspectives from which they can improve their applications. Social media listening is one of many strategies that can ensure ultimate success and flourishing. I mean, everybody talks, so make sure to make use of this talk.