Social media is ever-evolving, and for your business to stay on top of things, your social media marketing needs to be adaptable.
Besides having a social media marketing agency that understands your needs, you must also employ a social listening strategy.
Social listening, while not new, has become a lot more critical in recent years. It lets you understand what consumers say about your business and how you compare to competitors.
This valuable insight will help you develop your brand and create a digital marketing strategy focused on providing consumers with what they really want.
What Is Social Listening?
Social listening is tracking the mentions of your business on social media platforms. You “listen” to what consumers have to say about your brand or niche.
It’s up to you to take these insights, analyze them, and implement the ones of your choosing into your marketing strategy and business.
With social listening, you will:
- Record Mentions: Keep an eye on social platforms for any mentions regarding your brand, products, services, competitors, interface, etc.
- Analyze Insights: Use the gathered data and analyze it. Determine which data is usable and can be incorporated into your business.
- Take Action: Take action by implementing them into your business.
Social Listening Is Not Social Monitoring
Social listening and social monitoring are often confused. While there’s some overlap between these two concepts, some key differences completely change how we use them.
Social or brand monitoring allows business owners to test campaigns, gather data, and check engagement. For example, it’s the data that tell you what day and time to post to increase your reach.
Simply put, social media monitoring focuses on numbers. Social media monitoring might tell you a post has gotten a lot of engagement.
In contrast, social listening will tell you if that engagement was because of many angry people.
Like active listening, social listening is more about the sentiment behind the engagement than the numbers.
You can learn how people feel about your business and competitors by gathering data like brand mentions, business hashtags, niche trends, and competitor mentions.
With this insight, you can learn about things that need improvement and how to do it and ultimately gain more conversions.
4 Steps To Use Social Listening
Now that you know what social listening is let’s share 4 easy-to-follow steps for correctly using social listening.
1. Use A Social Listening Tool
Manually scanning and analyzing every single mention of your brand and competitors is impossible. But with the help of a social listening tool, you’ll be able to view all this data in condensed, bite-sized portions.
You can buy social listening software or outsource it and have someone build it for you.
Whichever you choose, make sure the software knows how to pick up the intention and not just numbers. You can quickly develop an effective social listening strategy with suitable software and the right mindset.
2. Choose Your Goals
Changing to fit all the data you receive at once can make a mess of your brand and your social media presence. Algorithms and consumers value consistency, and doing a complete overhaul can be jarring.
So first, narrow down the goals you would like to achieve by using social listening.
- Do you want to establish what the public thinks of your brand and change what they might not like?
- Do you want to keep ahead of trends by keeping an eye on your niche sentiment?
- Do you want to establish what content your consumers like most and focus on creating more/variations of it?
- Do you want to determine what products/content competitors offer that your consumers enjoy and implement similar options?
These are just a few examples of goals you can work toward with social listening. If you have many, create a list and slowly work through them.
3. Select The Right Data
Pulling data from every imaginable place will overwhelm your strategy and cause chaos.
Instead of trying to gather every bit, select the data you want to know more about. Use digital performance reporting to bring it all to you in one place, in an understandable and actionable way.
Choose the social platforms with the most engagement. Messages, mentions, and comments can be used to develop a report on internet sentiment surrounding your business.
We also recommend gathering information on Twitter and Instagram. These two platforms are so big there’s bound to be talk about your brand.
4. Measure Your Performance
After implementing strategies for social listening and gathering the applicable data, combine this with your social media monitoring (analytics) data.
With the data sets side by side, you will have a more comprehensive view of your business and your online presence. Turn this into actionable steps and start building digital marketing campaigns with this new data as your foundation.
As with any marketing strategy, it won’t be a one size fits all solution. Marketing is different for every business and is a constantly changing and evolving project.
But by analyzing sentiment and analytics, you can drop what doesn’t work, focus on what does, and build on your social media presence from there. Don’t be afraid to experiment. And don’t hold on to campaigns that are clearly not working.
When you see success and leads that become sales, use the success of those campaigns to support future endeavors. Never stop learning and be flexible about your processes.
Get Started With Social Listening
Social listening is integral for a successful, robust social media brand presence.
Monitor and listen to trends with the right social listening tools. Establish your brand sentiment and use social listening insights to create a social marketing strategy that guarantees you a shot at real success.
Luckily, you don’t have to be a marketing expert to benefit from social listening. You can hand over the reins to professionals who can manage the process for you.
At Digitlab, a full digital marketing agency, we provide digital services to help brands grow by harnessing the power of social media. Partner with us today, and unlock your brand’s performance.
