What is Social Listening and Why is it Important?

People are talking, are you listening...?  Social listening has become an integral part of many businesses marketing strategies because it allows them to track, analyze and respond to the conversations that are being held about them on social media. It is a crucial aspect of audience research and can give your brand ideas for content and product or service improvements.  

The marketing team at Charisma Communications discusses why social listening is important for your business and how you can take advantage of it!  

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Social Listening 101

Generally, social listening is a two-step process:  

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‍Step 1: Monitor social channels for mentions of your brand, your competitors, products, or related business keywords.  

‍Step 2: Analyze the information and react. This can be as small as responding to the customer or even rebranding.   Social listening gives businesses the chance to create campaigns that specifically address the ideas that their customers have.  

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For your best advocates, take notice of what else they are talking about. It could be books, a TV show, podcast, etc., then create content that shows you and your brand are “on-trend”.  Businesses can use social listening to:  

• Come up with new product or service ideas
• Validate new products
• Design timely marketing campaigns
• Apologize

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Social Listening Vs. Social Media Monitoring

While you may think that social listening is social media monitoring, these two concepts differ in many ways. Social media monitoring involves metrics and testing for ROI and A/B campaigns, but when you act in response to the data that was collected, that is social listening.    

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Social media monitoring considers engagement rates and mentions while social listening looks beyond the numbers to study the emotions behind the data.

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The Social Mood

These customer emotions or “moods” are called social media sentiment and are key to social media listening. Understanding consumer perceptions of your brand helps you design effective marketing campaigns and products/services. Additionally, it enables you to engage with clients and respond to their positive or negative social media posts. 

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Why Social Listening Matters

If you are not using social media listening, you are leaving a lot of valuable customer insights on the table. You want to know what people are saying about you and your product.   Let’s look at how social listening helps your brand...  

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Engaging with Customers

Social listening allows you to engage and interact with your customers. For example, a customer may have posted on Instagram about how much they like your brand or reach out on Twitter or Facebook for a customer service request.   Here is a great example of social listening in action:

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Interacting with your customers creates goodwill with your followers and boosts engagement. How could your business do the same?  

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Managing Complaints or Issues

Engagement is good when it comes to positive social sentiment. Social listening allows you to track sentiment in real-time so you can see how people are interacting with your brand.  

Your customers share what they like and what they do not about you and your competitors on social media. These lessons can help guide your marketing strategy across all channels!  Social listening also helps address customer complaints before they get out of hand.

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Track Competitors

Social listening is more than just checking in on what people are saying about you—it also gives you valuable insight into what they are saying about your competitors.   Are your competitors launching new products? Developing new and exciting marketing campaigns? Taking a beating for something they did in the news?  

Social listening allows you to find out all this and more about your competitors and plan your marketing accordingly.  

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Social Listening Quick Tips

Listen Everywhere

Cast a wide net for your social listening and find out where your audience is posting about you, not just what they are saying. The conversation about your brand on LinkedIn is likely to be different than on Twitter or Instagram. And you might find that people talk about your brand a lot on Instagram, but not on Facebook.  

Knowing where people are talking about you gives you a clear strategy on how to market your brand—organically and through paid advertising.  When you start, here are some things to keep your eye on:

• Your brand name and social handles
• Your product name, including common misspellings
• Your competitors’ brand names, product names, and social handles
• Industry buzzwords
• Your slogan and those of your competitors
• Campaign names or keywords
• Branded hashtags and hashtags of your competitors
• Unbranded hashtags related to your industry

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Take Action

If you do not act, you are only monitoring your social media, not listening. No one likes a one-sided relationship. Act! Then analyze patterns and trends over time, rather than homing in on individual comments.  Trust us, these insights can have a powerful impact on your future marketing strategy.  

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Build a Powerful Social Media Strategy

Take advantage of the conversations that are being held about your brand on social media and create a marketing strategy that will turn customers into devoted brand ambassadors!   We will help you tap into the connection that you have with buyers and clients. Communicate with Charisma! Contact us today for a marketing consultation!