Do you ever get the feeling people are talking about you? If so, then you’re probably right.
The thing is, not everyone who has a problem with you will say it to your face. These days, consumers are quick to say what they think about your brand, and they’re likely to say it on social media.
Bad customer experiences are costing businesses $3.7 trillion globally, but how do you know how your customers feel if they don’t share it with you?
By using social listening. What is it, and how does it help your business? That’s what I’m discussing today.
Key Takeaways
- Social listening means tracking social media mentions to see what customers are saying about you.
- It lets you understand your customers’ perceptions of your brand, and customer sentiment, and provides you with data you can use to market and connect with consumers more effectively.
- There are several tools you can use for social listening, including Hootsuite and AnswerThePublic.
- Monitoring customer mentions provides valuable insights into how consumers compare your products or services to your competitors.
- The benefits of social media listening include better customer engagement, finding ways to stand out from competitors, and discovering common pain points.
- Some best practices are monitoring sentiment shifts, looking into common customer issues, and using advanced search filters to refine your searches according to demographics like interests or age groups.
Table of Contents
- Key Takeaways
- What is Social Listening?
- Benefits of Social Listening
- The Social Listening Process
- Social Listening Tools
- Social Listening Best Practices
- FAQs
- Conclusion
What is Social Listening?
Social listening refers to tracking and analyzing social media content to pick up mentions of your business on social media platforms. By tracking this content with tools, you can turn the raw social media data into insights you can use in your marketing strategy.
With social listening, you’ll pick up on customer complaints, get to know your customers and their behavior, and get a feel for the overall sentiments around your company. But that’s not all.
Social listening covers a much broader scope than social monitoring as it involves tracking industry trends, untagged social mentions, and competitor analysis to see why consumers say what they do about your business.
Social monitoring is more about what people say because the main focus is identifying and responding to customer feedback, questions, or complaints in real-time.
Analyzing conversations with social listening enables you to make strategic decisions according to what your customers are saying. This helps you shape your marketing strategy and leverage social proof to enhance credibility.
Let’s look at some examples of the comments social listening might uncover. Here’s SEO expert Brodie Clark giving a shout-out to Semrush for adding his most requested feature. This public acknowledgment shows how Semrush is listening to the needs and desires of its audience:
When users express issues or concerns, Spotify responds promptly, offering solutions and support, which helps the brand maintain its positive reputation and demonstrates its commitment to user satisfaction.
Starbucks does a great job of fostering a sense of community by engaging with customers and using social listening to recognize trends in consumer conversations. In this example, it answers positive feedback with an equally positive response.
Benefits of Social Listening
Whether you want to see how your buyers perceive you, respond more quickly to feedback, assess brand awareness, or understand your customers and the buyer experience, social listening lets you do that. There are other benefits, too.
- Consumer engagement: Every brand knows the importance of engaging with customers, right? Well, social listening flags brand mentions so you can join the conversation. You can use it to answer a question, respond to positive or negative feedback, or solve a problem. This all helps to show the human side of your brand.
- It guides your content marketing strategy: Use social listening to measure which content hits home, and what falls flat. You can then deliver more of the type of content that your audience loves.
- Stand out from competitors: As Kayla Bautista, Social Media Manager, for NP Digital explains, “You can also monitor competitor mentions, which will help you track how people compare your service or products to competitors — this can reveal competitive advantages or areas needing improvement.”
- Finding influencers: Have you ever wondered who’s shouting the loudest about your brand on social platforms? You can find out through social listening. If you feel you could work together, send a personalized email to start relationship building. Sprout Social has some influencer email outreach templates to use.
- Discover industry trends: Analyzing online conversations and sentiments about your brand (and your competitors) enables you to identify emerging topics and consumer preferences quickly.
The Social Listening Process
Social listening helps you tap into conversations around your brand, competitors, and industry, but you’ll need a structured approach to harness the valuable insights it provides. Here’s how you can do that:
- Define your audience and platforms: Hopefully, you already know who your buyers are and the platforms they hang out on. If not, draw a customer persona of your typical buyer and decide if you want to niche down and segment your audience.
- Choose a social listening tool: I’ve put together a short list later in this piece to make this part easier. Think about your specific needs. For instance, do you want a tool that does a little bit of everything, or are you after something specific, like finding influencers?
- Find out what your audience is asking: Kayla Bautista, Social Media Manager, for NP Digital, says: “If you notice a significant change in your overall sentiment or the number of brand mentions month-over-month, look into what is causing it — this can indicate emerging issues or opportunities. For example, if there are common questions people are asking about your product or service on social, you can use them to guide or enhance customer support and your social content and strategy.”
- Determine what you will use social listening for: Are you looking for common pain points, ways to separate yourself from other businesses in your niche, or just curious about which content gets people talking and sharing?
- Collect data: Use your chosen social listening tool to collect data, such as brand mentions, trends, sentiment, and other brands in your space.
- Measure and review results: KPIs to focus on include click-throughs, engagement, and engagement rate.
Social Listening Tools
If you want a comprehensive idea of what people are saying on social media, there are lots of choices out there. Many of these aren’t free social listening tools, but they do offer free trials.
AnswerThePublic
This is for you if you need cost-free social media listening tools.
Although there is an affordable subscription option, the free version gathers data from search engines, providing a more accurate reflection of what people are genuinely interested in. Enter keywords to see what consumers are asking, discover common concerns, and find out what topics are hot in your industry.
Mention
Mention’s all-in-one tool combines social monitoring, analytics, response features, and competitor analysis.
It’s a paid service, but when you maximize its resources, you can be sure you’ll get every penny’s worth.
Hootsuite
Ready to do some eavesdropping on social media? That’s where Hootsuite comes into play.
A Hootsuite plan allows you to find trending topics with the quick search feature, uses AI for sentiment analysis, and shortens data and chat into digestible summaries. This means you can spot hot trends and topics before they go viral and get data-backed insights for content that will resonate with your audience.
Hootsuite has some tutorials to get you started, and a 30-day free trial is available.
Keyhole
Tracking your brand, name, and product mentions is only one part of social listening. Tracking specific industry keywords is every bit as important because you want to contribute when the topic is still hot.
You can do that with Keyhole.
It’s an enterprise-level social media listening tool that is great for monitoring keywords, predicting viral posts, decoding sentiments, and monitoring multiple influencer-led campaigns.
Social Listening Best Practices
Ready to put your social media listening plan into action? Here’s some more advice from Kayla Bautista, Social Media Manager, NP Digital, to get you started:
“We recommend monitoring sentiment shifts, brand mention volume spikes, and recurring pain points while social listening. Your goal should be to have more positive sentiment than negative sentiment. If your brand has a large percentage of negative sentiment, look into the common issues consumers frequently mention—these are areas of opportunity for you to improve or problem-solve.”
Additionally:
- Track your competition: Use social listening to learn what your competitors are doing. This can help you spot product gaps and see how others view your competition, giving you a fresh way to stand out.
- Follow trending information and act on feedback: For example, when McDonald’s saw social media users comment that they couldn’t get the Grimace shake in Canada, they were quick to launch it there.
- Don’t go too broad with your searches. Use advanced search filters to narrow your searches into demographics, like age groups, interests, or geographic areas.
FAQs
What is social listening?
Social listening refers to tracking and analyzing social media conversations to understand what consumers are saying about your business.
What’s the difference between social listening and social monitoring?
Social listening involves a broad analysis of conversations and trends to gain insights into consumer sentiment and industry dynamics. Social monitoring focuses more on tracking specific brand mentions and interactions for real-time responses and customer service.
What are social listening tools?
They’re software that lets you find and analyze mentions about your brand on social media platforms. You can use the various features to track brand mentions, understand customer sentiment, respond to feedback, and discover keywords.
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Conclusion
There are few better ways to understand what consumers say about you than social media. But you can’t be everywhere at once, right?
That’s why you may want to use social listening tools. You can pick up on growing trends and customer sentiment, respond to negative and positive feedback, and get a fuller picture of your overall brand perception.
All the tools detailed have different features, enabling you to create a complete social listening strategy, like accessing real-time social media mentions and finding influencers.
And then go beyond “social listening.” Interact and become a part of the conversation to enhance your brand’s presence, build community and connection, and inform your marketing strategies moving forward.
