Social Listening Benefits: Importance of Social Media Listening

Social listening is a marketing strategy companies use to leverage what customers, influencers, and social media users communicate about their brand over social media. Companies use this market research to inform business decisions and perform competitive analysis. By studying social media conversations, hashtags, reviews, and mentions of your brand, you can better understand industry trends, brand reputation, and content marketing strategies to serve your target market.

Social listening and social monitoring are two distinct parts of social media analytics. Social monitoring involves collecting all possible social media metrics—from brand name mentions and shares to hashtags and views—that companies can use to analyze social listening. Social monitoring is the “what,” and social listening is the “why.” Sentiment analysis, a subtype of social listening, uses natural language processing to analyze the context of the data.

For example, consider how a pet food company might use social monitoring and listening. The pet food company posts to social media a video of a dog eating food. It gets 5,000 views. A week later, the company shares a video of a cat eating food. It gets only 3,000 views. Social monitoring is the quantitative data set. Through social listening, the company can determine it reaches more dog owners than cat owners, especially if multiple tests confirm this outcome. These insights can influence the company's marketing strategy on social media networks.

Listening to online conversations on social media channels can be advantageous to companies. Consider how companies can use social listening and its benefits:

1. 1. Customer support facilitation: People use social channels to engage publicly with a brand. Companies should track mentions in social media posts to boost customer support and quickly respond to needs, showing other potential customers that support is a priority.
2. 2. Improved social media strategies: Harnessing social media data tells a company about the content that performs well. Brands can use social listening to sharpen content creation and optimize ads more likely to meet customer preferences. Social listening can also help brands identify supportive social media influencers to partner with for influencer marketing efforts.
3. 3. Enhanced reputations: Analyzing likes, comments, hashtags, and subtweets across forums informs companies about their brand reception. This can help companies set benchmarks for reputation management efforts.
4. 4. Informed content creation: Social listening data has many uses in digital marketing. In addition to monitoring brand mentions, companies should analyze how social users engage with general content. Companies can gain insights into what their followers are watching, commenting on, and sharing to determine what content resonates with those demographics.
5. 5. Product performance analysis: Brands can monitor the social engagement around a product on social media platforms and review sites to understand the customer experience.

To maximize your company’s digital marketing, follow these social listening tips:

1. 1. Invest in social media management systems. Social listening tools have functions to track hashtags and brand name mentions so you can monitor social engagement in real time.
2. 2. Know what to search. In addition to brand monitoring, you can search for hashtags, keywords, and specific topics relevant to your target audience. This can help inform the type of content you plan to share when designing your social media marketing strategy.
3. 3. Listen to competitors. You should listen to what social users communicate about your brand and competitors. Competitive analysis can inform business strategies and product decisions moving forward.
4. 4. Understand channel variance. Content preferences vary from channel to channel; know what content performs best to create channel-specific content as part of your comprehensive social media strategy.

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