What Is Social Listening & Why Is It Important?

Social listening or also known as Social media listening, is a way of building a solid strategy based on how customers think. Various social media listening tools are in the market, which helps you make these understandings. But before you understand how your customers think, you need to know the basics of what social listening is and why it is so important.

This article will provide a guide on what social listening is, why it is essential, and which social listening platforms to consider.

What is Social Listening?

Social listening is a practice in use by social marketers to monitor various social media platforms. The primary goal is to monitor:

• How do these channels mention your brand
• What are they saying about competing brands
• Other related keywords

In short, Social Media Listening helps you keep track of every mention of your brand with real-time data. Doing so offers you critical insights into your customers’ feelings towards your services or products. It also gives other valuable insights, like what your customers would love to see you offer to improve your products or services. It doesn’t matter if you have your website on a shared hosting server as long as it can host unlimited domains.

Social media listening is an effective intelligence-gathering method – helping you make data-driven, informed decisions to positively impact your business.

Social listening vs Social monitoring – Key Differences

Social media listening is the proactive approach of tracking, analyzing, and responding to social media conversations. As for Social media monitoring or simply social monitoring, it is a reactive approach.

Social monitoring takes a look at information like Brand Mentions – sending alerts back to you when it is mentioned online. Social Monitoring is also known as Brand Monitoring. This reactive approach helps you make quick responses to any negative sentiments against your brand. Keep in mind, this only gives you an alert and not tells you what people are actually saying.

The reason why social listening is important is that it offers a detailed view of every online conversation about your services, products, competitors, industry, and brand. To summarize, you need to employ a social media listening strategy for employing to remain on top of trends about your specific brand. In case, you are an e-commerce business, you need to have a robust e-commerce hosting service to handle the integrations for social listening tools.

What is a Social Listening strategy, and how does it help your business?

Not utilizing the power of social media listening means you are running a business blindly. Real customers are talking about both your brand and its related industry. You need to know what they are saying.

Take a look at some of the social media listening strategies to boost your business growth.

Understand the Target Audience

Suppose you are building an e-commerce website, you can use both WordPress and Wix to make this website. Take an e-commerce hosting server to put your resources on. Now before you get any sales, you need to make a marketing strategy to propagate your products. This is where social media listening comes into play.

It helps you actively understand what the consumers wish from your brand. One customer might love the product whereas another is looking if that product is right for them. This offers you valuable feedback to make your offers better and convert more customers.

Business Intelligence

Social monitoring comes into play here as you uncover tons of valuable insights about what is in the trends and what is not. This kind of information can be invaluable for your business’s marketing team. It helps them to make customers like and recommend your brand – more likes means more visitors, and more visitors means more customers.

You can also employ other growth-boosting tips and techniques to unlock new customers.

Industry and Competitor Analysis

Social listening is more than listening to what people say about your brand or business. You need to know what they are saying about the competitors in the same industry. You can start your competitor analysis for your digital marketing campaigns.   

This competitor analysis, by employing social listening tools, allows for knowing what the competitors are doing in real time. Are they promoting new products or formulating a new digital marketing campaign?

Unveil New Market Trends

Even if you are a small business, you must be aware that social media is an ever-changing realm. A thing viral today might not be the next day or the very same day. You need to remain up-to-date with these trends – ensuring your content marketing strategy is relevant to your brand persona.

Take the necessary steps to track relevant Hashtags and keywords about your industry to remain on top of the industry trends and ahead of the competition. We recommend using a dedicated managed hosting for this – freeing up you from any server-side issues and focusing on the business side.

Improving Your Campaign Targeting

Personalization is important for any social media advertisement. Even as a small business, you need to implement the right social media strategies before running any social advertising campaign. Social listening is also part of these social media strategies, as it provides each aspect of the campaign you will run, like its copy and visuals – resonating with your audience directly.

What are Social Listening Tools?

Once you know all the strategies for social listening, you know the need to use social listening platforms. These platforms or tools can assist you in better decision-making. A robust VPS hosting with unlimited bandwidth can handle the load of all these social listening platforms easily.

Adview                                             

Adview is a social listening platform to specific social listening of Instagram and Facebook ads. With it, you can do social monitoring of 3 Facebook Advertisement accounts for unlimited pages.

With some simple configuration, it lets you reply to all Facebook and Instagram ads’ comments in a single place.

Talkwater

Talkwater comes with efficient software for analyzing the following in a single dashboard.

• Blogs
• Forums
• News Sites
• Social networks
• Review Sites

It can draw data from nearly 150+ million sources. With advanced filters, you can segment the data to focus on the audience and the messages that matter the most.

Synthesio

It’s another great platform for tracking conversations on diverse topics for segmented audiences. You can now segment the social media listening data by:

1. Language
2. Sentiments
3. Gender
4. Location
5. Influence and much more

Reports come in with a Social Reputation Score to let you know about the competitors.

Audience

With Audience, you can identify any audience despite the size. With custom reports by the platform, you know what the audience is discussing, what do they like, and how they behave. Use this to create your unique market persona and base your product development on it.

Digimind

With Digimind; get access to 850+ million data sources in 200+ different languages. Utilizing the AI, it can analyze the mentions for monitoring customer sentiment and trends and offer helpful data visualization.

BrandMaxima Analytics

This social monitoring and social listening platform is built specifically for analyzing Twitter analytics. With this, you can do real-time social monitoring for:

• Hashtags
• Keywords
• Events
• Brand Campaigns

Conclusion

Social listening is a proactive approach to help know about everything related to your brand, its products, its industry, its competitors, and what the customers are saying about all of it. Monitor social media by utilizing effective strategies to come up with your marketing and advertisement strategies. To further enhance decision-making, employ the help of social listening platforms and tools to gather valuable marketing insights for informed decision-making. In short, social listening is more than a strategy; it’s an Intelligence-Gathering technique for coming up with the right business decisions.

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