Social Listening- Unveiling its impact on business success!
Shabina Dhother
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Social listening is not just a trendy term; it is a potent instrument that has completely changed how companies, brands, and people interact with their audiences and comprehend the always changing dynamics of the digital world.
This blog will go deeply into the area of social listening, examining what it is, why it matters, and how you can use it to your advantage in the digital age to gain a competitive edge, forge stronger bonds with others, and make more wise decisions.
What Is Social Listening?
From the term, you might think it’s about having a check on different Social Media platforms to see what’s been happening or what the different trends are and many other things.
Well, you are not entirely correct if that’s what you thought when you first read the term ‘social listening’. Yes, it is keeping a track of social media but not in a generic sense but from a business, its product and industry as a whole sense.
It is a process where you keep a tab on conversions for your product from different social media platforms. The process of social listening helps you analyse and generate insights from the different social media conversions and related actions. Not only this, it also helps you in forming a generic idea as to what people actually think about your product, brand or service.
It can be a very effective way in formulating strategies and building a strong brand image for your product and business. There are different ways in which one can track and monitor their brand’s social media channels.
For instance, you can look at any direct feedback or comments from the customers or can track the places where your brand or product has been tagged or can keep a tab on different discussions around your brand or product or anything related to it. These are just a few ways of social listening but in a real sense it’s a vast sea that will keep on giving you needful insights as you go into further depth of it.
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Importance Of Social Listening
We know that today most of the world’s population is using some or the other social media platform. The impact of social media is such that many budding brands initiate their product promotion through social media.
Now with an understanding of social listening and being aware of the impact of social media, you can imagine how beneficial it can turn out to be for your brand, product, service or business. In this section, we will highlight some of the many benefits that you can achieve from social listening.
Helps In Improving Customer Service
Every business provides customer support to help their customers with the different issues they might be facing with the product but not every customer finds that customer support an easy activity and not all customers look out for help. Sometimes, customers just want to give a review or make you aware of the bad experience they had with the product.
Social media is the easiest way they do it. And as we know that almost everyone is on social media and so such bad experiences can reflect badly on your product and brand image. Therefore, it becomes very crucial to assist such kinds of comments and remarks. In this manner, it comes in very handy in improving customer service.
Helps In Building Social Media Presence
Almost everyone in today’s generation is using some or the other social media platforms. Being on social media is the best way to be among people, promoting your brand and product. Social listening, apart from providing additional benefits, helps you in building your brand’s and product’s presence on social media, helping you stay among the people while generating different insights all at the same time!
Strong Competitor Research
With social listening, it’s always like you are among your target audience all the time. This means that it’s not just about your brand and product that you will get to know about but will also get to know about the performance of rival brands and products. In this way social listening can be really helpful in understanding the performance of rival brands and can generate useful inner insights that you might not find anywhere else over the internet.
Helps In Tracking Your Brand’s Success
When you know what people are talking about your brand, their views and opinions, then you can easily estimate your brand’s success with the help of social listening.
SWOT Analysis For Your Business
Social listening helps you in understanding people’s perspective for your product, the performance of other competitors and helps you in analysing the performance of the industry as a whole.
This can be really helpful for your product and business in running a SWOT analysis and identifying the strong points about your product (Strength), knowing the areas where your product is lagging behind and needs improvement (Weakness), figuring out any opportunity that your business can grab on and be an early bird (Opportunity) and to check if your product and business might face any kind of threat in the near future (Threat).
Helps In Decision Making
Social listening gives you the picture of industry’s performance, your product’s performance and the performance of your rival business’s product, all in one frame. This can be really helpful in decision making in different areas of your business.
For instance, if due to some reason the overall performance of the industry is lagging then you might want to change your financing strategies, say, you might prefer cost cutting in such a scenario. In this way, social listening helps you in decision making in various aspects of your business.
Helps In Formulating Different Marketing Strategies
There are so many different social media platforms and each of them is unique in its functionality. Being a business or a product owner, you know that not all marketing strategies work all the time. For instance, the marketing strategies you follow in instagram, might not work in twitter.
Not only this, even on the same social media platform, there can be multiple marketing strategies that are live among people. Social listening helps you in keeping a check on which marketing strategies are giving better results, which ones need improvement and which marketing strategies need to be stopped. In this way, social listening helps you in formulating different marketing strategies.
Better Audience And Industry Understanding
Social listening helps you understand more about your customers. You get to know what people are talking about your product, their views, or suggestions. Not only this, it also helps you in understanding the needs and demands of the people. There can be multiple reasons for which these needs and demands can shift and change the outlook of an industry as a whole.
Social listening is the way where you will get to know about any change, big or small the earliest and in the most raw form as it’s like being with the people and keeping a tab on them and everything related to your product.
Customer Acquisition
Social media is one of the best cost effective ways to acquire more customers for your business. This can come in many different benefits we get for social listening.
For instance, people leaving good comments about your product or talking about it might motivate others to use your product or you can choose to work on the areas your rival brand and products are lagging behind.
In this way, you can attract unsatisfied customers from your rival brand and can make them use your product. These are just a few instances as to how it can help in customer acquisition but there can be multiple ways in which social listening can help.
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Usage Of Social Listening
Great! We thoroughly know and understand what social listening is and the benefits it can provide to your brand and product. We know that it is actually having a social media presence which gives multiple benefits but social media is very active.
This means that there is always something or the other that keeps happening on social media all the time. Then arises the question do we need someone to keep a tab on different social media accounts 24*7? No, we don’t!
Yes, that’s right that social media is a very happening place to be but there are certain specific reasons or usage for which one can use it and bring it to the benefit of your business. In this section we will look at some of the usage where social listening can come very handy.
Customer Engagement
It is the one of the most efficient ways to engage with your customers. There can be multiple ways in which you can do this. For instance, you can keep posting quizzes from time to time for your customers and can have a prize for the winner. This was just an example but in this way your business can run different marketing campaigns to promote as well as engage customers with your brand.
Competitor Analysis
Yes there is different data published by businesses highlighting their performance throughout but that’s not it! We all know that at the end it’s the customers that play a vital role. Therefore, to generate a deeper insight on the performance of the rival brands and customer’s view on their product, you can use social listening.
Reputation Management
It is very useful in keeping a tab on your brand’s sentiment which acts as a major indicator for your brand’s reputation. Brand reputation management is all about having no experience gap.
This means that the experience that your brand is providing must be inline with the reputation they have among the people. Any disruption or any experience gap for a longer period of time can badly damage the reputation, so much so that business might come to a verge of shutting down!
These are just a few of the many usages that it can have but the list is indefinite. To name a few more usages –
- Identifying and leveraging influencers
- Finding and fixing experience gap
- Crisis management
- Customer service and satisfaction
- Performance of marketing campaigns
- Trends and demographic insights
- Business pitch research
- Content creation
- Brand health
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Metrics To Track Social Listening
We have talked so much about the importance and usage of social listening but how to track all of the different areas of social listening? In this section, we will look at the different metrics that we can use to keep a tab on social listening.
Voice Sharing
Voice sharing or share of voice is simply tracking what the audience has to say about your product on different social media platforms. Not only your product, you will also get to know people’s view of rival brands and products. This metric will help you analyse your share of conversions and your relevance or position in your industry as compared to your competitors.
Conversion Rate
Conversion rate is a good metrics to track the needs of customers and what steps you are taking to fulfil those needs. For instance, if you are getting more traffic on the website, this indicates that people are convinced that your product and business can fulfil their needs.
Engagement Rate
Engagement rate is the rate that tracks how much people are engaging with your brand on different social media platforms. This metrics covers multiple actions taken by the user on different social media platforms.
The action covered might be the number of retweets, likes, shares, comments, follow on your page and many other things. This is a crucial metric for social listening and a higher engagement rate is an indicator of trust, enthusiasm, and interest of people in your brand and product.
Sentiment Analysis
Sentiment analysis as the name suggests is a metric that tracks the sentiment associated with your brand and product. This broadly tracks whether a larger section of the population is talking positively about your product or talking negatively or are very neutral to it.
The above metrics are few of the many metrics used to track different aspects of social listening.
Based on your goals there are other metrics like social media reach, non-social reach, presence score, reputation score, earned media value and many more which you can use for social listening.
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Social Listening Tools
We looked at the different metrics in the previous section and developed a thorough understanding of them. But we can clearly see that the metric to analyse social listening is not some normal metric.
Rather, they can be understood as customised metrics to measure different aspects of social listening. There are, however, some special tools designed to track the different metrics of social listening. In this section, we will look at some of the tools that can be used to track it for your brand and product performance.
- Clarabridge is an AI tool built specially to track social listening. The tool is a CX management AI platform.
- HubSpot is another tool that is designed to specifically provide marketing, sales, customer service and CRM software.
- Lately is one more AI based platform that specialises in social AI content and social media software.
- Sprout is another platform which provides a complete social media management software and services to its clients.
- Hootsuite is a platform which provides different dashboards to keep a tab on marketing and social media management.
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Conclusion
Congratulations! You now have a thorough understanding of social listening, sufficient enough to get started with it and fill out all the gaps in the data that you were missing out earlier.
Before you actually get to it, let me give you a head start – social listening is a vast area for businesses to cover all at once and therefore, you must have a clear understanding of what you want to achieve for your business. Once you have that clear in your mind, you can efficiently use it and focus on that one aspect that you want to track.
There are some free tools out there like google alerts and TweetDeck that you can use at the beginning to track different social listening aspects.
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FAQs
What’s the difference between social listening and social monitoring?
Social media monitoring and social listening, both are forms of reputation management but social media monitoring is more passive than social listening and focuses on identifying and responding to the mentions of the individuals.
What are some useful tips to follow for social listening?
Some useful tips that one can keep in mind for social listening are –
- Understanding the audience needs, demands and emotions
- Develop an appropriate strategy
- Use keywords to look for data
- Use social listening tools
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