People love talking. Even more so, they love talking online: every minute, millions of new posts spring up on social networks all around the world.
People go online to voice their complaints, compare different products or praise the service they enjoy. They might also be looking for recommendations or share their experience with a brand. Whatever it is, there’s a bunch of insights for marketers to gain, provided you listen closely enough.
Naturally, not all of the conversations happening online are important to your brand. So how do you spot the relevant ones? How do you go beyond tagged mentions? And most importantly, how do you analyze this data to make smarter marketing decisions?
These are the basic questions addressed by social media listening. There’s obviously much more to it, so let me walk you through the tasks you’ll nail when doing social listening right.
What is social media listening?
Doing social listening means collecting and analyzing mentions of keywords and complex phrases found on social media, news, blogs, forums and the web using dedicated software.
For the purposes of this beginner’s guide, we’ll be using the terms social listening and social media monitoring interchangeably. Upon a closer look, there’s a significant difference between the two, so once you’ve mastered the basics, it could be a good idea to learn and distinguish the terms.
In addition to extracting and analyzing mentions of your brand, social listening tools pull mentions of your competitors, hashtags, and basically any complex industry-related queries you can think of.
Put simply, whatever intel you’re after, social media listening is there to deliver. Without further ado, here’s how you can use it to benefit your business.
Use cases of social listening
Reputation management
Reputation might not be everything, but it does count for a lot.
Arguably the most valuable of any business’s assets, reputation needs management. Social media monitoring helps you cover all the bases here, starting with tracking brand mentions, and fluctuations in their volume. You can then go on to analyze the overall sentiment, addressing any reputation crises as promptly as possible.
Sentiment analysis of mentions. Screenshot taken from Awario.
Social listening tools make assessing brand health easy: create an alert to collect mentions and pay close attention to the prevailing sentiment.
When setting up a reputation alert, make sure you take into account all of the spelling variations of your brand name, including misspellings and abbreviations. Go ahead and include campaign hashtags and slogans so that no valuable data is left behind.
Competitor analysis
Competition intelligence is essential for strategic research. Before you set off to conquer the market, it’s crucial that you find out what works and what doesn’t in your niche.
Follow the basic steps of competitor analysis:
- discover who your competitors are,
- measure each competitor’s share of voice,
- learn about their reputation,
- get to know their customers and brand ambassadors.
Social media share of voice for airlines. Best airlines report by Awario.
Social listening lets you go as deep or as light as your current priorities allow. Make sure you check out this comprehensive competitor analysis how-to to see what there is to discover.
While it might seem overwhelming at first, remember that even the smallest of efforts pay off, so take one step at a time and see where it gets you.
Product feedback
Product development is guided by customer feedback. If what you’re offering doesn’t seem appealing to the markets you’re targeting, there’s an urgent need for product modification. And who better to ask than the people who will be buying?
Topic cloud for Samsung after the announcement of its new Galaxy Note. Screenshot taken from Awario.
In addition to learning what your customers love and hate about you, social listening can and should be used to get to know the customers themselves on a deeper level. Being aware of the language they use and the needs they voice lets you re-evaluate your content and start talking to your audience and not just speaking to it.
Customer service
Customers care about your customer care. Wordplay aside, unhelpful product service can cost you as much as 68% of your customers. And given that 70% of brand mentions on social media go untagged, using social media monitoring software is the only sure way to take hold of your entire audience.
Because most of these conversations happen on social media, your job is to react as promptly as you can. Whether your social care team is 1 or 300, consumers expect a swift reply — swift here meaning received within an hour.
Recent tweets mentioning Spotify support team. Screenshot taken from Awario.
While you can’t always meet this target, social listening lets you pull all the relevant mentions and prioritize them accordingly. This way, you’ll be able to handle the most urgent matters first.
Lead generation
Leads are generating whether you’re looking or not. This is one of the perks of people’s love for online discussions.
If a lead starts a conversation on social media and no brand is around to see it, does it make a customer? It doesn’t. Not right away, at least. But what if you had a real-time feed of people looking for a product you’re offering? Social listening tools happen to provide this data as well.
Social media leads for music apps. Screenshot taken from Awario.
People are looking for recommendations on social media and beyond. What social media monitoring lets you do is collect those posts and engage with leads, turning them into customers as you go.
PR
PR teams benefit from social listening every which way. From monitoring your current media coverage to discovering new outlets to partner with — social listening tools are there for the job.
Most influential news articles featuring Google Play Music. Screenshot taken from Awario.
See how well your visibility campaign is received across the media, learn what kind of coverage your competition receives, and get to know the journalists that brands in your niche work with.
All of this makes social media monitoring an all-round useful part of any PR efforts.
Influencer marketing
Influencers are not just specific brand advocates; they’re authoritative people in your field. This means that competitors’ brand advocates are likely to be a match for your brand as well.
Unlike companies, influencers build personal relationships with their audience more easily, which makes them a valuable asset and an efficient selling channel.
Top Instagram influencers collected for smartphones marketing. Screenshot taken from Awario.
Turn to social listening software to check the reach of brand mentions and discover industry influencers, however big or small. You can then get in touch with them and eventually turn them into your brand advocates.
Research
Market research goes way beyond brand mentions and sentiment analysis. It lets you discover what your audience believes in. So do your research, examine conversations around any cause and make smarter marketing decisions.
Analytics for mentions of Greta Thunberg. Screenshot taken from Awario.
Social listening tools may be employed by anybody interested in what people have to say about a phenomenon online. Thorough research brings tons of insights — use these for your own purposes, commercial or not.
Social media listening tools
Now that we’ve discussed social media monitoring’s many applications, let’s dive into how to reap all its benefits with the least possible trouble. That is, using dedicated software.
Below are the best 3 tools for social listening of any scale. Take a look and see if anything catches your eye — if so, it’s likely to be a good catch for your business as well.
Awario
Awario is your go-to option with advanced search functionality and powerful analytics in one tool. For real-time data, the app relies on social media APIs and its own crawlers that scan an impressive 13 billion web pages per day.
With Boolean search mode, Sentiment Analysis, and Topic clouds, Awario is also one of the most cost-efficient solutions: as little as $1 can bring you as many as 1,000 mentions.
Awario scans Instagram, YouTube, Twitter, Facebook, Reddit, news, blogs, and basically the entire web in real-time, which ensures wide coverage and the freshest data.
Pricing: Starter plan (3 topics to monitor; 30,000 mentions) comes at $29/mo. The Pro plan (15 topics; 150,000 mentions) is $89/mo. Enterprise (50 topics; 500,000 mentions) comes at $299/mo. Pro tip: going for an annual option saves you 2 months’ worth of subscription.
Free trial: 7 days; available via signing up.
Brandwatch
Brandwatch is an Enterprise-level intelligence tool that deals with every possible aspect of social media monitoring, however sophisticated.
Brandwatch’s key features are image recognition, exportable visualizations, customizable dashboards, and impressive analytics. The tool also offers API access and Google Analytics integration.
In addition to the platforms covered by Awario, Brandwatch offers Sina Weibo, VK, and QQ.
Pricing: Brandwatch’s Pro plan (10,000 mentions) comes at $800/mo. You can also request a custom plan of the Enterprise level.
Free trial: No.
TweetDeck
Tweetdeck is a free dashboard application integrated into Twitter’s interface. It’s brilliant for managing multiple accounts, scheduling tweets, replying to DMs and monitoring mentions of whatever it is you’re tracking.
The tool offers access to multiple timelines, mentions, DMs, lists, trends, favorites, search results, hashtags, as well as customizable and easy-to-use dashboard, advanced filters, and user interaction functionality.
Although TweetDeck doesn’t offer any analytics, it’s still the most powerful Twitter tool for real-time tracking, organizing, and engagement.
Pricing: Free.
Free trial: N/A.
Recap
Social listening is by far the safest and shortest way into your customer’s minds. Enough time and effort, together with social listening tools, will get you plenty of insights valuable in every aspect of running a business.
Hearing your customers out pays off in very real money and a good reputation you allegedly can’t buy. So listen up and see what social listening has in store for you.
About the Author: Julia Miashkova is a social data analyst with a background in public relations and SEO. Her focus is research and data journalism.