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Social listening refers to the process of proactively monitoring social media channels to identify brand mentions, competitor brand mentions, and any other content related to designated keyword. Social listening enables companies to review every mention of their brand in real time, providing valuable insights into customer sentiment and brand position.
These insights positively influence sales, marketing, product, and customer service strategies leading to more informed decision making.
Social listening has a wide range of applications with a myriad of associated benefits.
Here’s some of the advantages to social listening:
Social listening facilitates a much deeper understanding of target audiences. Many customers take to social media channels to express their opinions on different products and services. For example, customers may engage in a discourse in LinkedIn about additional solutions a product or service could provide. These organic online discussions are often a more accurate measure of customers opinions. Regularly monitoring brand discussions and mentions online provides a more comprehensive understanding of customer needs, sentiments, and overall satisfaction.
Social listening enables companies to monitor conversations about their industry. This can unveil salient frustrations with products/services, customer service, and value propositions. Leveraging these insights to enhance customer service, marketing, and product/service development is an effective method of extending competitive differentiation.
Social listening is a critical process in crisis management. Monitoring customer sentiment as it changes in real-time facilitates earlier and more accurate detection of potential crises. This enables companies to identify the issues negatively impacting sentiment and address them proactively before they develop into a crisis.
Monitoring industry discussions online presents the opportunity to provide value to them. Social listening can be used to identify industry trends and initiate conversations about them online or engage with existing ones. This allows companies to develop relationships with prospective customers online, ultimately leading to new customer acquisition. Similarly, companies can nurture relationships with existing customers online through social listening, leading to increased loyalty and customer advocacy.
Using social listening to monitor industry conversations helps companies to identify industry influencers and thought leaders. These individuals are often open to collaboration upon connecting and developing a positive relationship with a company. Similarly, social listening can aid in identifying existing brand advocates who can then be engaged with to create meaningful collaborations.
A key element to any social media campaign is accurate personalization. Effective campaigns need to illicit resonation or they present as generic to audiences. Utilising social listening to first determine what subjects they’re passionate about and what resonates them is an effective method of enhancing targeting accuracy. For example, if a retail outlet identifies customers in a target area complaining about the recent weather, they could offer a short-term sale of climate appropriate clothing.
Social listening is most effective when used within an established strategy which has clearly defined performance indicators and outlined goals. Below are some steps which can be taken to optimise a social listening strategy:
1. Increased brand awareness
2. Measurement of brand sentiment
3. Competitor benchmarking and differentiation
4. Product/service feature awareness
5. Identification of market positioning
6. Monitoring of industry trends and discussions
1. Brand and industry keywords
2. Competitors
3. Keywords associated with a product or service.
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