Social Listening: Stay Ahead of Your Competitors

Without a social listening plan, you’re passing up some of the most important information to help you grow your company.

In fact, almost two-thirds of marketers concur that the value of social listening has grown over the past year.

By examining what people are saying on social media, social media listening technologies enable you to develop a thorough picture of exactly how current and future customers feel about you. Also, you may find out what they think about the contest. If you know how to obtain it, this amazing market research is readily available in real-time.

What is Social Listening?

Monitoring social media channels for mentions of your brand, those of your competitors, and relevant keywords is known as social listening.

You may monitor each and every mention of your business on social media in real time by using social listening. This will provide important information on how customers feel about your goods or services, their problems, and what they want to see from you in the future.

Yet, social listening is more than just monitoring brand remarks. Additionally, you may use it to monitor rival brands, popular articles, and sentiment research on themes pertaining to your industry.

You can utilize this insight to inform anything from marketing and product planning to customer service and support, enabling you to make more informed decisions that will improve the bottom line of your company.

What Distinguishes Social Monitoring From Social Listening?

Social media monitoring is more reactionary than social media listening, which is a proactive technique to follow, evaluate, and participate in online conversations.

Every time your brand is discussed online, social media monitoring looks for specific brand references and notifies you. A different name for it is brand monitoring. That can be helpful for swiftly addressing any unfavorable opinions or complaints, but it doesn’t give you a comprehensive picture of what people are saying about your company or your sector.

On the other hand, social listening provides you with a thorough overview of all online discussions pertaining to your company, its goods, your sector of business, and its rivals. This all-encompassing method offers insightful information that can guide your strategic choice-making regarding your social media and marketing plans.

In other words, you need a social listening strategy if you want to keep up with the newest trends and monitor what consumers are saying over time about your company.

What Benefits Might A Social Listening Strategy Offer Your Company?

You’re developing your business plan while wearing blinders if you’re not using social media listening. Online, actual people actively discuss your brand and your sector. It is best for you to learn what they have to say.

Simply said, you care about social listening insights if you care about your customers. Here are a few advantages of social listening for your company.

Understand Your Audience

You may better grasp what your audience wants from your brand by using social media listening.

An existing client might tweet about how much they enjoy your product, for instance. Maybe you might hear someone talking about a problem that your product or service could solve.

In either scenario, you can use this insightful criticism to enhance your product and please your customers.

Spotify has developed an entire Twitter account around this premise. Users who have questions or concerns are actively heard by @SpotifyCares, which also provides its followers with daily tips, tricks, and feature updates.

By doing so, businesses may simultaneously improve their product, foster loyalty, and offer top-notch customer service.

Business and Product Intelligence

Monitoring talks in the sector also reveal a wealth of information about what appeals to both current and potential clients.

Your customer service, product development, and marketing teams will find this information to be a gold mine.

For instance, the Zappos social team learned some crucial information to share with the UX team here: why not modify an existing product or add a feature to address issues people are bringing up? Maybe what you discover will inspire a fresh product concept.

You can learn about customer complaints about your present items and those of your rivals by engaging in social listening. Can you alter your goods, shipments, or marketing strategies to help with consumer complaints? If you do, use a focused marketing strategy to let people know.

Crisis Management

You can monitor sentiment in real-time with social listening, so you can immediately detect any substantial changes in the volume of people talking about you or the tone of their remarks.

It serves as a kind of early warning system, letting you know when internet perceptions of your brand alter for the better or worse.

Look for the causes if you’re receiving more engagement than normal. Plenty of useful information about what they enjoy and don’t like is shared by your audience. These insights can aid in channel-specific strategy development.

Review the social input if there is a decline in sentiment and make an effort to pinpoint the cause. While you’re at it, search for lessons that can help you avoid making the same mistake again. By doing this, you can deal with PR catastrophes before they become out of control.

Acquisition of Clients and Client Connections

In general, people like it when you offer to help them with their difficulties. Online strangers, however, most definitely detest it when businesses interject a sales pitch into their social chats.

Social listening can help you find queries and discussions about your sector on social media platforms, but you shouldn’t use it as a pretext to start pitching straight away.

Instead, see the conversation you enter through social listening as a chance to build connections with potential clients in your industry that you can then nurture into connections for social selling.

Make an effort to interact with others and spread useful knowledge. When it comes time for a customer to make a purchasing decision, this will help position your business as the best source.

Possibilities for Collaboration

You may identify the key creators and opinion leaders in your field by keeping an eye on social media debates about it. Connecting with these people is crucial. These can have a significant impact on how others perceive you.

Keep in mind that this is a two-way street. Helping people in your field increases the likelihood that they will do the same for you. Connect through partnerships with people who already have a significant voice in the debates you wish to join rather than attempting to impose yourself into an already established group.

You may identify the key creators and opinion leaders in your field by keeping an eye on social media debates about it. Connecting with these people is crucial. These can have a significant impact on how others perceive you.

Keep in mind that this is a two-way street. Helping people in your field increases the likelihood that they will do the same for you. Connect through partnerships with people who already have a significant voice in the debates you wish to join rather than attempting to impose yourself into an already established group.

Through social listening, you can discover natural ways to integrate yourself into relevant online communities in a way that comes across as helpful rather than pushy.

Also, you’ll come across folks who already adore your company and are raving about you on social media. These people are logical brand supporters. Reach out to them and look for chances to work together in productive ways.

Competitor and Industry Trends

Understanding what others are saying about you is only one aspect of social listening. You should also find out what they have to say about your rivals and the industry as a whole. This provides you with crucial information about your location in the industry.

You may see what your rivals are doing in real-time by using social listening. Are new items being introduced? are new social media marketing initiatives being developed?

Uncover Market Trends

Everyone is aware of how quickly the social media world evolves. What is popular today may be outmoded tomorrow. To keep your content strategy current and avoid losing out on important dialogues, it’s imperative to stay on top of these trends.

You can stay on top of the most recent trends in your business by keeping an eye on the pertinent keywords and hashtags that are associated with them.

By examining not just what people are talking about right now but also how those discussions have evolved over time, you can utilize social listening to forecast future trends. You’ll be able to tell which subjects are gaining and losing traction by doing this.

Your content strategy, product development, and marketing efforts can be shaped by these insightful observations.

Improve Campaign Targeting

Any social media advertising effort must incorporate personalization. Instead of merely pumping out generic material, your audience wants to feel like you’re speaking to them specifically.

You can develop a thorough grasp of your target audience by using social listening. You can determine what topics matter to them, how they speak, and what information speaks to them. Imagine it as a background survey that is constantly running.

This knowledge will help you develop content that speaks directly to your audience and will inform every element of your campaign, including the copy and the graphics.

• Are clients discussing social burnout? Create a work-life balance guide to demonstrate your concern.
• grumbling about the weather in your target area? Launch a brief sale for seasonally relevant merchandise.
• Seeing an increase in small business demands for social media? Why not create a comprehensive effort to assist them?

The Best Social Listening Tools to Help You Conduct Research

It’s time to start using some social listening tools once you’ve decided what you want to listen for. The greatest social listening tools are listed below for your use.

1. Hootsuite

You may use Hootsuite to create social media streams that keep an eye on discussions, keywords, mentions, and hashtags even if you have a free or Pro Plan.

Instead of signing in and out of numerous social platforms, you may monitor conversations and mentions directly from your social media dashboard.

By keeping an eye on the competition, networking with influencers on social media, and identifying prospective brand champions, Hootsuite also enables you to stay on top of developments in your sector.

One of the aspects of Hootsuite that clients appreciate the most is social listening.

2. Adview

Unlike the bulk of social listening tools, Adview is only used for social listening on Facebook and Instagram advertisements. You may monitor an unlimited number of sites and up to three Facebook Ad Accounts using it.

After you’ve integrated Adview into your Hootsuite dashboard, you can respond to comments on all your Facebook and Instagram advertising from any location. Also, you get comprehensive information on which adverts are getting the most feedback so you may change your campaign plan.

3. Talkwalker

With one dashboard, Talkwalker’s powerful social listening software capabilities may monitor blogs, forums, videos, news websites, review websites, and social networks. Talkwalker collects information from over 150 million sources.

You can separate your data using advanced filters so that you can concentrate on the messages and audience that are most important to you. To be informed of any increases in mentions or term usage, you can also set up notifications.

Talkwalker makes it simple to keep an eye on conversations involving your business and analyze their emotion, engagement, and reach.

4. Synthesio

Synthesio is a social media listening tool that monitors talks among carefully selected communities about incredibly niche issues. Your social listening data can be divided up by factors like language, geography, demographics, sentiment, gender, influence, and more.

The reports also provide a useful social reputation score so you can see how you compare to rivals.

5. Mentionlytics

Use this social media listening tool to track mentions, keywords, and sentiment across several languages. The Mentionlytics social media monitoring tool searches blogs, news websites, and social media platforms for mentions. It’s linked with Hootsuite, so you can view them right on your dashboard.

Additionally, Mentionlytics makes it simple to locate influencers across social media platforms and other internet sources. You can quickly monitor terms in several languages, keep track of your top influencers, and even identify the sentiment behind each mention.