Understanding your audience’s needs is crucial to establishing a successful brand in today’s digital age. Thanks to social media, most of the communication predominantly takes place online. It has become critical for brands to utilize social listening and realize its importance in order to thrive.
Social media listening is one of the core elements that helps brands discover how they are perceived by their audience and what is being talked about them. Receiving feedback and working on improving your strategies is essential to become successful.
Let’s dive in deeper to find out more about social listening and its significance for businesses.
What is Social Media Listening?
The term “social media listening” refers to the process of monitoring and tracking information about your brand from various social media platforms. This information could be about your brand, products, services, industry, competitors, or relevant topics.
The process doesn’t end here. It also involves analyzing the information to find out how your brand is perceived by people and how you can improve their perception. It’s important to understand the trends that drive these conversations on social media and the context behind them. Only then you can conduct social media listening effectively and comprehend your audience’s needs and pain points.
Why It Matters
If you’re not yet into social media listening, you are missing out big time. People out there are talking about your brand online. You need to keep an ear out for the discussions happening about your products, services, industry, and any topics related to your business.
Doing this will let you know what your audience thinks and feels about your brand. When you put yourself in their shoes, you can understand their needs, interests, expectations, pain points, and concerns in a much better way. This is a great way to measure your brand’s overall health and find out what your audience thinks about your competitors.
Social media listening is a critical element for your brand’s online success. It helps you connect with your audience beyond likes and shares. By analyzing the information about you available online, you can create relevant content and modify your marketing strategies accordingly to improve your audience’s perception of your brand.
Making the Most of Social Media Listening
In order to stay ahead of the competition, you have to be proactive in your approach. Use the following steps to make the most of social media listening and thrive in the digital space.
- Defining Objectives
- Choosing Data Sources
- Building A Strategy
- Monitoring the Right Metrics
- Analyzing Results
-
Defining Objectives
This step comes prior to beginning with social media listening. Before you get into it, you should be clear about why you want to conduct it in the first place. Start with defining your goals and objectives for listening. Do you want to improve your brand perception, grow your Instagram followers, get better with customer service, monitor your reputation online, or conduct market research?
Depending on what your goal(s) are, you can develop a strategy that works for your brand. If you do not have your objectives defined beforehand, you won’t be able to conduct social listening effectively.
-
Choosing the Right Tools
Doing the listening manually is a daunting and time-consuming task. It’s better to let softwares do their job so you can focus on more important things. There’s a plethora of social media listening tools available on the internet to help you keep track of brand mentions and discussions happening around it. Choosing the right tools is essential to do the listening aptly.
There are a few key factors you should consider when deciding on a tool. Check if it’s convenient to use, falls in your budget, and aligns with your objectives. You have to find one that makes it easier to track the keywords across multiple platforms.
-
Building A Strategy
While social media listening can help you unlock new avenues of growth, it’s important to develop effective strategies for listening that help you achieve your objectives. It is similar to building a content marketing strategy, for example, to increase TikTok followers.
Listening can be used to analyze your competitors, marketing campaigns, and industry insights as well. It depends on what you want to achieve through social media listening that will guide you in building the right strategies for your brand. For example, if you want to improve your customer support, you would look through what are your consumers complaining about the most. Then, you would devise the necessary strategies to resolve this issue.
-
Monitoring the Right Metrics
Even with automated tools to track the relevant data, there is a certain limit to them. You can’t monitor all the available data even if they do track it. So you have to set your priorities straight regarding what you want them to listen to.
Choose the important relevant keywords, hashtags, topics, and phrases and put them up for listening. Track all mentions to have a deeper look into your audience’s opinions and perceptions about your brand.
-
Analyzing Results
Once you are done tracking and monitoring the mentions and relevant keywords, it’s time to dig deeper and analyze those results. Get to know the context and sentiments behind those conversations. Do they reflect positivity, have negative elements within them, or are they neutral?
Through this analysis, you will be able to identify the loopholes in your strategies as well as the emerging trends and topics in your industry. It will guide you in developing better strategies for the future to improve your image in the eyes of your audience.
Final Words
Social media in the current age requires you to be vigilant all the time. Whatever is being talked about your brand on social media has a direct impact on your brand image and perception in the minds of your consumers.
If you don’t employ social media listening, you can’t move ahead in your journey of establishing a successful brand. Listening helps you understand your audience’s needs, expectations, and concerns. You will be able to channel and strategize your content in a much better way through social media listening.
