What is Social Listening, and Why Is It Important? (Updated)

Social listening is a new way to get insights into customers’ behaviours and opinions. This allows businesses to understand their target audience better and improve customer experience.

Millions of consumers worldwide discuss brands, products, and customer service-related issues on social media. Savvy brands on social media also take part in social listening.

Over the years, traditional marketing has developed into digital marketing, and consumer-generated media is also replacing mass media steadily.

Today’s consumers trust the experiences customers share about your product and services on social media rather than your traditional marketing or advertising messages, whether print or electronic.

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What is Social Listening?

According to this definition, social listening monitors social media channels for mentions of your brand, competitors, product, and more. It allows brands to track, analyse, and respond to conversations about them on social media. It’s a crucial component of audience research.

Why Is Social Listening Important?

Active listening on social media platforms for consumer-generated media is critical for any B2C business that claims to be social media savvy. Here are a few reasons social listening is essential for your business.

1. Active social listening is the foundation of your social media strategy. Learning what a social media user says about your brand and industry will determine your content creation effort, i.e. the content you create or curate on social media.
2. Through active social media listening, you’ll now be able to measure, test, and analyse the volume of conversation and performance of your social media activity and integrated marketing campaigns. This information can help your social marketing and improve future campaigns.
3. In our digital age, the consumers shape a brand’s reputation and not the brands themselves through social media brand’s reputation and not the brands themselves. So active listening on social media will help you find and address damaging conversations about your brand.
4. You can also use the feedback and criticisms about the brand in product development to help improve your product and service delivery by showing your consumers that their opinions matter. You’ll build goodwill for your brand and the potential to win new customers.
5. Do you know what consumers are saying about your industry? Do you know what makes consumers happy or unhappy about your trade? Do you know any common misspellings of your brand name that people make? Answers to these and much more are from active social listening. These answers will help you develop your business strategy for social networking to ensure customer satisfaction and make you an industry leader.
6. Through active social listening and competitive analysis, you’ll also be able to benchmark your performance on social media with your competitors and discover areas you need to improve to achieve your business goal.
7. It can help you find key influencers for your influencer marketing to boost your social media presence. People on social media whose opinions of your brand can help sway consumers towards or away from your brand. Develop relationships with these people to gain valuable insight into your products, brand, or industry.

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Let’s also look at some interesting stats:

• According to research by Sprout Social, 83% of respondents like when brands respond to questions, and 68% like when brands join conversations. (source)
• Being responsive on social media makes a difference; after all, 48% of customers purchase with a brand that responds to its customers and prospects on social media. (source)
• Fewer than 30% of social media mentions of brands include their handle, so you’re ignoring 70% of the conversations about your business by not using a social listening tool. (source: marketingland)
• Given that 60% of consumers expect brands to respond within an hour and 68% of customers leave a company because of its unhelpful (or non-existent) customer service, not reacting to those social media conversations can cost your business money. (source: marketingland)
• According to a recent survey by Clutch, 86% of medium and large businesses surveyed use social listening tools to monitor customers’ concerns, questions and requests. (source)
• Twitter found that 60% of consumers expect a response from brands within an hour, and 68% of customers will leave a company because of its poor customer service. (source)
• A colossal 80% of social customer care inquiries start on Twitter. Therefore it pays to be on top of all of your mentions. (source)
• Social listening allows you to be proactive in your media presence, rather than have a limited reactive strategy, and will help grow your brand as “85% of customers are likely to recommend your company to others after having a satisfactory interaction online. (source)

Do you see why a social listening strategy is essential for your business?

What Is the Difference Between Social Monitoring and Social Listening

According to this article, collecting, identifying, and responding to mentions of your brand is social monitoring. For instance, a large company’s social media team might monitor Twitter for @ mentions and reply as soon as possible. Social listening uses the data from these individual interactions to draw broader conclusions. You can use social listening to learn how your customers are doing, what’s trending, and any future trends. So, in summary, social monitoring/social media monitoring is about collecting the data, while social listening is about using this data to inform your broader marketing strategy and approach to business.

How Is Social Listening Measured?

Social listening is about much more than tracking metrics of online conversations, social media profiles and social media accounts. It’s about gaining insights into what your existing and potential customers want from your brand and how you can give them that. Millions of posts are made on social media every day. So how can you cut through the clutter and use the data to your advantage? To do so, you need to use social listening to your advantage and measure specific vital metrics about your social media presence.

Volume of Conversation

This metric tracks how often an active user (existing or potential customer) mentions your brand or product on social media. Your conversation volume should rise when running a campaign. In social listening, volumes of conversation are measured. It’s not about quantity, as that kind of measurement doesn’t reveal much, but quality, i.e. the quality of the conversation or social media post.

Rate of Engagement

Several metrics can gauge your engagement rate (engagement rate), including the number of replies, mentions, retweets, favourites, shares, etc. Based on this metric, you’ll be able to determine how likely your posts will go viral and how relatable your brand is. Each spike in this metric could signal the start of a social media crisis. We calculate it as the total number of interactions your content receives divided by your total number of followers, multiplied by 100%.

Share of Voice

It compares your brand’s share of industry-related social media messages with your competitors. Your share of voice can help determine the prominence of your brand awareness campaign to potential customers. It’s often measured as a percentage of industry-wide mentions or mentions among a narrow group of competitors. It’s what’s determined when social listening meets competitive analysis.

The more extensive your social network, the higher the share of voice you get. It’s an excellent way to build a community with your target audience. Still, it can tap into other aspects of interacting with others, such as link sharing, relationship building or thoughtful customer engagement. While this data may not show an actual social conversation, it paints a picture of the general mood of the community. It is also a great indicator to see what topic is being discussed and how influential each voice on social media has become for the time being. This data provides an understanding of your customers and brands that organisations cannot obtain through traditional means.

Sentiment Analysis

You could have a high rate of engagement, volume of conversation, and share of voice on a social platform, but if all the posts are negative about your brand, you’re in big trouble! Monitoring your brand’s social sentiment on various news sites, review sites, and social media sites will help you determine whether those social mentions or sentiments are positive or negative feedback. It will also help you provide stellar customer service when they are not.

Although sentiment analysis has been around for decades, it was only recently that it became possible to employ algorithms to “read” human language by analysing text on a social channel. This made it possible to measure sentiment in real-time, including support, dislike, agreement, and disagreement among humans, instead of just tracking opinions.

People use sentiment analysis on social media networks to determine if a specific content is liked, shared, or commented on. Facebook has popularised this technique.

Sentiment analysis is about extracting linguistic information from social media posts to determine how people feel about specific topics or brands/products. Despite its potential to provide valuable results, sentiment analysis cannot determine whether a post is true. Still, it does provide insight into how people feel about specific topics on social media.

The most common type of sentiment analysis involves analysing the words that social media users type into a search bar or on a website or social media platforms to measure how often they use particular words when communicating about a product or service.

Competitor Metrics

To judge your success on social media networks, you’ll need to compare your brand to your competitors’ social media presences. Besides share of voice and engagement, consider brand mentions/chatter and the frequency of social media messages. By gauging how your competitors are performing better, you’ll be able to adjust your own messaging and techniques to suit your shared audiences better.

One of the major types of social listening is the competitor metric. Advertisers and website owners use competitor metrics to determine if they’re achieving the right amount of social listening within their accounts. Competitor metrics include how many people shared your post, how many people replied to your comment, or what recommendations you received from other users in social networking forums or online communities.

The information gathered through social media monitoring and social listening campaigns is used internally and externally by companies researching their competitors’ activities.

What Is the Best Social Media Listening Tool?

This is a question I often encounter from social media users, and as I always say (as with most things in marketing), it depends. The best social listening tool will depend on your requirements and how proficient you or your team are using the social listening tool. There are several social media monitoring tools to consider, and it is impossible to view them in a single blog post. But few that come to my mind now are (in no particular order):

• Hootsuite
• Sprout Social
• BuzzSumo
• Agorapulse
• Semrush
• Sprinklr
• Keyhole
• Mention
• Awario
• TweetDeck
• Nuvi
• Sendible
• Brand24
• Meltwater
• Adview
• Socialbakers
• Talkwalker
• ReviewTrackers
• Synthesio
• Audiense
• Brandwatch
• Mentionlytics

Disclaimer: The list above is in no particular order and is not an exhaustive list. The mention and the listing of a social listening tool in this post do not constitute our endorsement.

Conclusion

In conclusion, social listening is crucial because it helps businesses understand their target market and gain insight into what they need to improve in their product or marketing campaign.

Do you have questions about how you can put in place or improve social listening in your business? Or about digital marketing or social media marketing in general? Please get in touch with us.

I look forward to helping you reach your target audience and grow your business online.

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