As social media continues to grow, it's more important than ever to keep track of what's being said about your business online. Have you ever wondered how you can do that? Let us explain.
What is Social Listening?
Video By @brand24
The phrase "social listening" is beginning to be thrown around a lot in the business world nowadays. However, people very rarely take the time to explain exactly what this means. Ultimately, social listening is a way for businesses to keep track of what is being said about their brands online. This helps gauge an honest overview of what consumers truly think about them and their products. Social listening itself is split into two parts: monitoring and analyzing.
Monitoring
First off, it's important to monitor what users are saying about the topics that you're interested in. The easiest way to do this is by setting up a brand monitoring project. Once the project has been created, the tool will begin to collect all the publicly available mentions containing your keywords, whether that be your brand name or even that of a rival.
Analyzing
Once the monitoring process has been set up, the social listening can then begin. This will take your monitoring process one step further as it starts to analyze the gathered information and begin to draw the most actionable conclusions that will help you achieve your business goals. It does this by adding valuable data to your social monitoring, such as estimated reach, most active sites, as well as helping you identify some influences that can help raise your brand awareness.
12 Key Benefits of Social Listening
Now, social listening could ultimately prove to be the difference between an ineffective and a highly effective strategy, so it is crucial for your business that you take it seriously. Let me outline 12 key benefits for you, and you'll understand why social listening is becoming increasingly important.
- Improve Your Customer Service: The internet has become a haven for people who love to rant and rave about poor experiences with products and services. With social listening, you can use this to your advantage. Social listening can allow you to view any complaints quickly and easily, meaning your customer service team can put out any fires instantly.
- Find New Leads: Social listening can also help you to generate new sales leads. The key to achieving this is by looking out for mentions related to your goals. It is important to monitor keywords that are related to the name of your company, your products or services, or even your competitors. This will allow you to swoop in on social media and spark a conversation with a potential new customer.
- Track and Measure Your Marketing Campaigns: Nowadays, it is pretty common to see dedicated hashtag campaigns, especially since it's proven to be one of the most effective ways to increase both reach and user engagement. Monitoring online conversations on different social networks will help you to gather the data that could benefit your brand's marketing campaigns.
- Use Social Media Listening for Customer Engagement: These days, more brands than ever are engaging in online conversations with their fans and clients. Once a user posts something on the internet that is related to either a brand or an entire industry, social media managers are there to interact with the audience. Social listening will help your social media team notice more of your brand mentions, even if your page isn't tagged in the post.
- Access Customer Insights: Today's consumers are more open to sharing their opinions and reviews about the products or services that they use, mainly due to the rise in social media. You can use this to your advantage, using these posts to improve your brand and services using customer feedback.
- Identify Social Media Influencers: As I touched on earlier, social listening will help identify influencers that help improve your brand awareness. They can be ranked in order of how likely they are to be beneficial to your brand, as you only really want to work with those who truly believe in your products and values. Now, I don't think that we'll be seeing Elon Musk promoting a Ferrari anytime soon.
- Protect Your Brand Reputation: This one is one of the most common and obvious social listening uses. Sadly, you often see fake comments and profiles popping up all over the internet, with brand jacking becoming a real problem. Brand jacking is when someone impersonates a brand online, often replying to a genuine question with often a rude or malicious reply. This will damage your brand reputation massively if you're not quick to react and get the fake user profile taken down.
- Reveal Purchase Decision Factors: Learning which factors have the greatest influence on customer purchase decisions is possibly the most valuable customer insights that you can derive from social listening. If you learn the reason why people buy your product, you could then create marketing campaigns that play off of these reasons, ultimately boosting your sales.
- Prepare Content Tailored to Your Audience Needs: Social listening is widely used by many bloggers who are looking for content inspiration. It can help them find out what the latest trends on the internet are and what members of the public are currently reading. It's a fairly simple process; you just need to monitor relevant keywords. Naturally, keyword selection depends on your industry and the topic of your blog.
- Find Top Talents for Your Company: Human resources is another department that can benefit from this research method. HR specialists who know how to use social media as a recruitment tool are able to find potential candidates to fill a vacancy in no time. You can easily set up a project to monitor phrases like "looking for a job," "I need a job," etc. Results can even be curved to specific geographic regions and industries by adding required keywords.
- Back Up Your Marketing and Competitor Research: If you've got a marketing campaign coming up and you need to get the most out of your research, then you've guessed it: social listening can help with that too. You can derive a lot of information about your target group based on the data that you monitor, including user demographics, preferred online channels, and when your audience is most active, not to mention their levels of engagement, the context of public discussions, and much more.
- Measure the Value of Organic Reach: Measuring the value of your organic reach is especially useful for agencies who need to report the results of their strategies to the board of directors in the form of data. You cannot precisely estimate how many people have made a purchase decision after watching a TV commercial. However, if you display the same ad online, you can collect precise information about conversion rates at each step of the customer acquisition process.
Top Nine Social Listening Tools
Now you know the benefits of social listening, I think it's about time that I told you all about some of the best social listening tools out there.
- Hootsuite Insights - Hootsuite Insights is a social listening tool that allows businesses to monitor social media conversations, track brand mentions, and analyze sentiment. It also provides real-time analytics and customizable reports.
- Brandwatch - Brandwatch is a social listening tool that allows businesses to monitor social media conversations, track brand mentions, and analyze sentiment. It also provides real-time analytics and customizable reports.
- Sprout Social - Sprout Social is a social media management tool that includes social listening features. It allows businesses to monitor social media conversations, track brand mentions, and analyze sentiment. It also provides real-time analytics and customizable reports.
- Mention - Mention is a social listening tool that allows businesses to monitor social media conversations, track brand mentions, and analyze sentiment. It also provides real-time alerts and customizable reports.
- Talkwalker - Talkwalker is a social listening tool that allows businesses to monitor social media conversations, track brand mentions, and analyze sentiment. It also provides real-time analytics and customizable reports.
- Awario - Awario is a social listening tool that allows businesses to monitor social media conversations, track brand mentions, and analyze sentiment. It also provides real-time alerts and customizable reports.
- Digimind - Digimind is a social listening tool that allows businesses to monitor social media conversations, track brand mentions, and analyze sentiment. It also provides real-time analytics and customizable reports.
- NetBase Quid - NetBase Quid is a social listening tool that allows businesses to monitor social media conversations, track brand mentions, and analyze sentiment. It also provides real-time analytics and customizable reports.
- Synthesio - Synthesio is a social listening tool that allows businesses to monitor social media conversations, track brand mentions, and analyze sentiment. It also provides real-time analytics and customizable reports.
What's More - For business, consumer insights are also very important
VOICE OF CUSTOMER lets consumers tell you what they need, what they expect, and why they buy. Multi-channel integration + AI intelligent insights + scientific business models, from data to action in a single step, using the voice of consumers to guide business decisions. consumer voice to guide business decisions. VOC can help you solve the following problems to improve product quality and drive brand growth.
- A variety of feedback channels: Various feedback channels such as Amazon/ebay, social media, email/chat, etc.
- Insufficient number of manual spot checks, resulting in wrong conclusions: Wrong insights, resulting in serious wrong business decisions
- Time lag of insights conclusion: Organizational manpower spends a lot of time reviewing partial feedback, not able to identify problems in time
- Inability to identify new opportunities in a timely manner: New opportunities are a few voices hidden in a large amount of feedback, which is difficult to find manually
- Inability to develop quantifiable action points: Problems can't be optimized if they can't be measured
- Which aspect of the competitor's product do consumers like and why? Everyone knows this product sells well, but few people know why?
- In which aspect does the competitor surpass my brand and why? In which aspect of installation/use scenario/quality/packaging/logistics, the reputation is better than mine
- Which attribute of the competitor has the best reputation and why? Which factor impresses consumers the most, capacity, color, material?
- What are the reasons for my consumer churn? What consumers dislike most about the products/services I provide
About Shulex VOC & GPT
Shulex is a global business data insights company and an AI-powered applications company. We capture multimodal consumer voices from across the web and leverage GPT AI's powerful analytics to provide our global clients with intelligent, scientific, and efficient consumer insights. We also provide a free Amazon ChatGPT browser extension, a custom VOC consumer insights platform, an Amazon category analysis report, and a one-stop e-commerce customer experience workbench. From AI data analysis to AI business application, we provide a full range of services to effectively help global sellers achieve business strategic planning, product planning and solutions, e-commerce operation optimization, and customer experience improvement.
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