Social listening tools are constantly evolving and new features are being added continually. For that reason, it’s now easier for businesses to use them across departments to grow their business.
Time to delve into the world of social listening!
What is social listening?
Social listening is the activity of collecting mentions from the Web, including social media (Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube), blogs, news outlets, and other sites. This means that when someone posts the exact phrase you’re monitoring somewhere on the Web, you know about this in real time. You can track any keywords of your choice, such as your brand name, product name, or phrases people use when looking for your product.
Here’s a classic example of what social listening looks like in real life:
Gotta love Tesco Mobile for that answer, but gotta love them even more for the fact they picked up that conversation in the first place – notice they’re not tagged, so no “@” sign, and their handle is @tescomobile and not Tesco Mobile. This means they are most likely monitoring the phrase “Tesco Mobile”.
What metrics should you focus on?
One of the key metrics you should consider is the volume of discussion about your brand.
Two stats to look at here are the number of mentions (marked in blue) and Estimated Social Media Reach (marked in green). These tell you how many times your keyword was mentioned on a particular day, and how many people potentially came across that content.
It’s super simple to spot any out-of-the-ordinary events because you can see spikes in your dashboard. This usually means that either you were mentioned by an influential site or author, or you were mentioned by numerous individuals with a smaller following.
What’s in it for me?
Social listening has a number of applications – here’s a quick roundup of some of them.
1) Increase engagement
Creating quality content is a must, but engaging your audience is equally important.
As most brand conversations happen online, being able to engage in conversations related to your industry means you can increase your social media reach and find new customers. Remember it’s a long process which doesn’t happen overnight, but it should be your goal to build relationships with your audience.
2) Protect your reputation
Find people talking about you in social media, presenting you both in good light…
… and talking about you during the not-so-happy moments (high five to Zendesk for picking up this tweet!):
3) Sell your product in social
According to LinkedIn report, “more than 70 percent of sales professionals use social selling tools, including LinkedIn, Twitter and Facebook, making them the most widely used sales technology”. Being able to optimize these tools to find online conversations centered around your niche saves time & allows you to be more effective.
It doesn’t matter if you’re a SaaS tool, a hotel, or a childcare product – people are asking for recommendations of what you have to offer. We’re no exception here at Brand24: in fact, Quora is one of the best sources of traffic for us. Here’s a sample answer our Community Manager Gloria wrote:
There are also people looking for project management apps…
…hotels:
…and business cards:
All you need to do is to show them that you have exactly what they’re looking for. The good news is you’re saving time and energy you normally use to market to people at the very top of the funnel and you can focus on those actively expressing interest in what you have to offer.
4) Find influencers to work with
The phrase “Influencer Marketing” has been around for a while, but do you know how to work with influencers to make the cooperation truly beneficial to your audience?
First of all, you need to make data-driven decisions to select the right people to work with and constantly evaluate the results of your influencer marketing campaigns. Some social listening tools come with influence stats you should look at too see if someone is a match for you. Find out more about boosting your brand with influencer marketing in this post.
5) Get to know your audience (and how they use your product)
You can see your product in its natural environment which can be an important source of information for you because you see the context. Here’s a couple of examples I found based on tracking company hashtags.
3-D printing industry:
And beauty products:
Some of the user generated content (UGC) you may come across is so good it can be shared in your official social media channels. Not only does it validate what you’re doing, but it’s also free of charge. Make sure to let the person posting pictures of your product know that you’re sharing them and engage in conversation to build relationships. If they’re sharing pictures of your product with a positive comments, they may like that you’re reaching out.
6) Evaluate the effectiveness of your marketing campaigns
There are a number of ways to do that – one of them is to create a unique, campaign-specific hashtag and monitor it. This way, you can discover exactly how much traction your campaign got and WHO engaged with it.
You should also see an increase in the quality and quantity of online conversations about you in your social listening project.
Your move. There’s so much more you can do!
Article written by Karolina Piwiec
Content Jedi @Brand24. Passionate about blogging, content marketing, and social listening. Avid reader & peanut butter fanatic.
Whoa! It’s a great pleasure to be featured here ♥ Thanks, Karolina!
There is a lot of great tips in this article that everyone should put into practice. Social listening is one of them and I truly believe that it could change quality of relations in social media. Thanks For Sharing Such A Great Information
Social listening is one thing every marketer must do. We as a digital marketing training company started using couple of tools for the same, and used to position our brand information properly whenever we got suitable opportunity. This not only increased our daily traffic and visibility, but it directly increased our conversions and sales. This is a comparatively easy job with the proper use of right tools. One thing to remember here that responding timely is one of the biggest challenges as well as opportunities here.
Wow.Whenever i visiting your sites as always you produce unique content.i really appreciate your hard work.You contents are different form each other.I am new in this digital business.I have launched my site recently.But i don’t know how to do marketing.I researched a lot but i did not get fulfill information.After read this i can say that i got a brief idea and i will follow these steps.Thanks for sharing this with us.
Right here is the right web site for anyone who wishes to find out about this topic. You understand so much its almost tough to argue with you (not that I personally will need to…HaHa). You certainly put a new spin on a subject that’s been discussed for years. Wonderful stuff, just great!
Aw, this was a very good post. Taking a few minutes and actual effort to create a superb article… but what can I say… I procrastinate a whole lot and never seem to get anything done.
It was really a helpful article for me. Social Media Marketing has always been a prime factor for business growth and brand awareness. I like the way you describe how we can enjoy benefits from social media.
Amplifying your content reach is easier said than done. It is one thing to create good content. But it is another thing to get people to read it. Thanks for sharing.
As a Digital Marketer, social listening is playing a very important part to increase your conversion ratio or engaged in a social influencer for your business. Thanks, for sharing this informative article with us.
Well written Karolina. In our business, this social listening worked very well. Whenever we get alert of any citation or mention about our brand name on Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn or on Quora, we try to immediately respond and even just a quick thank you works great. Customers become influencer and brand ambassador if you have a good product or service and can manage your response well through social listening. Thank you for your article.
Hi you are doing a great job and sharing marketing knowledge , strategies
Thank you, I read your blog Karolina. It’s Nice and Good. It’s really a valuable post about social listening. We are also providing social listening services for our customers.
Thank you, I read your blog Karolina regularly. It’s Nice and Good. It’s really a informative post about social listening. .
Social listening is really helpful for every business on Social Media. By the way interesting blog.
It was really a helpful article for me. Social Media Marketing has always been a prime factor for business growth and brand awareness. I like the way you describe how we can enjoy benefits from social media.
Thanks for the informative blog. Can you help me with the best tool for social media listening, monitoring, and analysis?
Hi. From our experience, Mention is one of the best tools you can try. Hope it helps!
Very Informative blog.Thank for the write up.
social media is the most important part of growing your business. Your post is always Informative thanks for sharing with us.
Hi Karolina, Thanks for your tips on Social listening.
For the brand exposure, social media platforms are the best, and also due to the millions of users social media platforms are the best way to communicate with the potential user.