What is Social Listening?
For your brand to become a household name and achieve high brand recognition, it’s critical to have a solid reputation and social media following.
Things aren’t always so black and white, though. Bad service, scandals, and other issues can lead to unfavorable social media mentions, which is the last thing you want.
Because of the potential for a rocky road, it’s critical to keep an eye on your brand’s social media channels and watch for any red signals. This is when social listening enters the picture.
What is Social Listening?
Tracking mentions and conversations about your brand on social media sites, then evaluating them for insights to find opportunities to act, is known as social listening.
Reasons to Use Social Listening
Customers like it when brands respond to their needs.
According to the Sprout Social study, “marketers may favorably impact consumer behavior to benefit the entire organization by prioritizing responsiveness and relevance on social.” 90% of those who follow brands on social media will buy something.
They’re expecting a response from you. But there’s a lot more. It’s all about incorporating social listening into well-crafted solutions that add actual value. These are the types of replies that will boost customer retention and brand loyalty.
You can keep track of your Brand development.
Brands are occasionally involved in serious problems or scandals. Things happen, yet even a single occurrence might cause bad feelings.
This is a fantastic opportunity to practice social listening. You may see if the spike in negative comments has resulted in a decline in followers, sales, or any other metric you choose to check into by looking into the current occurrence. Then you’ll know whether you need to take immediate action or if it’s just a passing phase with no long-term repercussions.
You can open your eyes to new possibilities.
Your customers will frequently do the job for you. When a large number of consumers start complaining about the same issue or rooting for the same winner, it’s a cue to pay attention to and act on. You can utilize social listening to uncover methods to innovate on these developments rather than just observing them.
You have the ability to increase customer acquisition.
Many options for expanding your reach to prospects exist on social media. After all, your followers aren’t just loyal clients; they’re also folks who appreciate your material or happen to stumble on your social network. This is the type of person you should be aiming for.
Inbound marketing emphasizes the significance of creating engaging, valuable content that people appreciate. This first draws people to your business and prevents you from having to badger them with annoying advertisements.
Social Listening Tools to Use
1. Hubspot
HubSpot offers a social media solution to help you prioritize your social relationships and connect with the right individuals. All in one tool, you can develop marketing campaigns, publish content like blog posts and landing sites, automate information sharing across many social media channels, and calculate the best times to post.
You may also set up email alerts to notify your sales team when prospects mention you on social media, track social interactions with contacts in your database, and create custom keyword monitoring streams.
2. Brand 24
Brand24 goes beyond just a simple social monitoring tool, with its configurable listening parameters and ability to trawl the web for practically any mention of a brand. The extensive data and insights you may obtain from it combine to offer a complete picture of how the rest of the world perceives your brand.
The one true flaw with Brand24 is the absence of collaborative tools, it would be a fantastic feature if team members could leave notes for each other around comments or stats and keep the conversation on the platform.
Although the Slack integration is a great workaround, it only benefits firms that already use it. Still, any slacker marketing staff would be better off utilizing Brand24 in silos than some other social listening solution with more advanced communication options, which is a testament to the software’s competence. And you should pay attention to such advice.
If you’re interested in learning more about Brand24, check out my complete Brand24 Review.
3. Hootsuite
Hootsuite also provides a social listening and monitoring platform. The social media marketing and management dashboard help you build and maintain relationships with your social media followers.
Hootsuite allows you to respond to all of your messages, comments, and brand mentions across several social channels from a single dashboard.
You can also create lists of your influencers and leads that you can share with others in your company. The analytics and reporting features of Hootsuite may help you maintain track of what’s being said about your brand, competitors, and industry, and change your efforts accordingly.
