What is social media listening?

Social media listening is a practice of “overhearing” what people who interacted with a particular company talk about it in the social media space. It is not just listening to opinions. It includes an entire approach with an analysis of online conversations. There are many advantages the brands get thanks to this practice. The number of people who use the internet around the world is always growing, especially those who use it on phones.

One of the main reasons why people are always online is to share and learn opinions about things. What is a simple talk for a particular person on the social media page for the brands is important data. With the overall abundance of data – both unimportant and vital – companies can understand better why the audience behave one way or another.

One can ask clients to answers some questions, for the survey, for example, but the standardized form will never reveal the same truth like this that people can say on their social media pages. People share honest thoughts when it comes to posting something on social media. It might sound like you are trying to capture all the bad things people said about your brand or product. But it’s not.

In fact, social media listening includes praise mentions as well. But in general, it is not so much about good or bad things people say about you. It is more about getting a general picture. Social media listening vs. social media monitoring Some people confused these terms. There is a technical difference between them.

Social media monitoring is less insightful; it can’t bring you something more than pragmatic data. It’s a pure statistic, no more. There are plenty of tools designed to help you monitoring social media space for mentions of your business or brand name. But this is all you got. Social media monitoring brings you this information, and nothing more valuable that could help you improve as a brand. If you act upon the collected data, you might get something useful. But it is not a part of social media monitoring.

Social media listening is a way to figure out why people have such an impression of you and how to interact with them with respect to their assessments. Also, social media listening includes not just mentions of you in the posts, but on the comments as well. Your reaction here is required.

Social media listening includes mentions of your competitors. You can track what people talk about them and try to learn your audience better. The social listening tools allow you to listen to not only your brand name but your competitors, either. Explore what people talk about them – you could learn in such fashion on your competitors’ mistakes.

How to perform social media listening?

It is almost impossible to track brand mentions without using software designed for a wide range of things. People could write a brand’s name differently since online space feels safe enough to do this. It actually happens all the time.

Many respectful, giant brands already mentioned by a shorter name. Sometimes people would make simple mistakes – but it is not a big deal; everyone knows what it is about. To track it, you need excellent software that could “see” your name and its variations around social media.

This method of overhearing things about your brand is essential in order to understand what you can improve. Before some small problems turn into your big fail or major flaw, you can make it work as it supposed to. If you think about it, social media listening is the way of self-examining. You look at your mistakes and try to improve how your brand works. There are plenty of programs to use for social media listening.

Some tools designed to listen to social media conversations based on a hashtag or keyword. It is the most common way of tracking the brand mentions. Other tools provide you with information about your competitors as well, and can even give show you those who can be your prospect customer.

What are the reasons to use social media listening?

Social media is the most appropriate space for people to talk about everything and to express their opinions. For the brands, this is an excellent opportunity to gather opinions about themselves. After all, these people that talk about brands are the reason why brands start working in the first place.

When you look to opinions shared on social media, you reasonably expect to get sincere impressions of your brand than you could receive in comments on your social media brand pages. Without investing in big money, you can get extremely valuable information. This is why we call it “overhearing.”

Social media listening also a way to talk to your customers directly in case you see the reason for that. Some customers would be delighted with such care. If you want to make your brand more attractive to the target audience, you learn what they need to hear and what kind of content they want to explore. This is a great benefit you get from social media listening – to create content that your audience is looking for based on their direct comments on the subject.

Influencer marketing nowadays is an important direction, and no brand would refuse to use it. If you find those who admire your products and luckily, these people have many social media followers, you could collaborate with them. If you can identify these people and context, they talk about you, as a brand, you may get a great advantage.

What kind of information do you get from social media listening?

Besides mentions, this practice revealed something called social media sentiment. It has direct meaning – the feeling people express to your brand or its work. This is where you are actually trying to measure what kind of things people say about you – whether it’s good or bad.

Based on the prevailed sentiment, you could decide what type of action to take. Believe it or not, but to gather customer feedback, you do not always have to look at a particular section on your website. Social media listening perhaps even better for this goal. The insights you’ll get will be more open, honest, and less formal. This is precisely what you need.

How you measure the performance? Conversion rate, followers, likes, and so on. Right, this is an “official” way to understand how well you are doing. Social media listening will give you an understanding of your own performance. You can understand what is trendy today. By listening to conversations in social media, you can identify trends that are only going to appear and react to this information.

Conclusion

To understand how good your brand, you have to listen to those who you are making a product for. People who represent your target audience are those you supposed to listen to very carefully.

The practice of social media listening helps to understand different facets of relationships with the customers – in particular with yours and to get it generally. This is how you receive directions to become a better brand in every respect.