Is Social Media Listening Playing a Larger Role Today?

Updated on :October 18, 2023

Abstract:
Social media platforms are a gold mine of information that may help brands understand what people are saying about a specific topic and how brands can improve the experience for the customers, staff, product, and brand. The analysis of a brand's social media data for actionable insights and the application is known as social media listening. It gives the context for where the business is showing up on social media and actionable data to help to improve the brand's online presence. When the customers mention a brand in a tweet about their product or even in a negative review, they must acknowledge their opinion and answer quickly – and positively; offering excellent customer service on social media can create or shatter a brand's reputation. 

The research ‘Is Social Media Listening Playing a Larger Role Today?’ tells about what social media listening is and what tactics brands must adapt to outstand their rivals in the market. This research delves deeper into aspects related to monitoring the company's online discussions, monitoring and tracking the company's remarks, discovering keywords and influencers, identifying new leads, and finding – what is and isn't working.

Introduction

Millions of people discuss businesses, goods, and customer service-related issues on social media. As conventional marketing has morphed into digital marketing, customers trust other consumers’ experiences shared on social media, blogs, or discussion boards than traditional advertising messages(1). All B2C organizations that recognize the importance of customer experience must take user-generated content seriously through active social listening. Social media listening allows monitoring keywords and mentions about a company, brand, service, learning more about the target audience and industry, discovering potential leads, engaging with the audience to see what they're talking about, identifying top influencers and potential brand ambassadors, and conducting content research to see what is and isn't working.

This research ‘Is Social Media Listening Playing a Larger Role Today?’ elaborates on why social listening should be a part of the social media strategy, using social listening to monitor the brand's overall health, develop content that the target audience wants to view. This research also emphasizes the importance of social listening to generate campaign ideas, improve the customer experience, make smart product decisions, and understand the target audience and industry, competitors, and content.

Significance of Social Listening For Brands

Listening to people on social media has become the most crucial aspect of developing a digital strategy. Monitoring, analyzing, and taking action are the three main processes in social listening(3). The advantage of social listening is that it allows brands to know what customers say about their brand and products.

1. Top brands that are serious about digital marketing include a social listening strategy in their plan. Brands can learn which social media network their customers prefer by targeting listening. It also aids in determining public perceptions of the brand, its products, services, rivals, and industry. Brands may improve the efficiency and accuracy of their social strategies by adopting social listening.

2. Brands get real-time feedback on their products and services through social listening. Brands can quickly examine their consumers' comments to gain valuable insights and adjust their plans to meet their needs. This input is beneficial because it aids in the improvement of the brand's product, service, and overall strategy.

3. A practical social listening approach will assist companies in evaluating the success of their campaign. A share of voice, the number of mentions, and other quantitative data can be analyzed. Sentiment analysis can examine qualitative measures (i.e., positive, negative, and neutral mentions on campaign posts). A brand's capacity to analyze both quantitative and qualitative parameters of a campaign is unrivaled by social listening. By tracking sentiments, social listening analysis aids brands in determining the success of a campaign. Brands can also change the content to achieve the most favorable feedback.

4. The importance of brand reputation cannot be overstated. An excellent brand reputation enhances customer loyalty and confidence. Social media listening aids in the management of a company's online reputation. In recent years, the importance of social listening has increased by leaps and bounds.

By listening to the current and potential clients, have to say brands can:

  • Obtain leads
  • Boost the user base's loyalty.
  • Maintain control over the brand's public image.
  • Avoid dangerous circumstances.

Brands may create a reputation by analyzing mentions across media, responding quickly to questions, and delivering solutions(4). Monitoring social media on a timely basis is crucial.

5. Brands can streamline effortless competitor analysis via social listening. Competition listening is a technique for learning about the competition landscape, such as advertisements, strategies, and customer complaints. It assists brands in gaining a better understanding of their customers' needs and requirements and developing marketing strategies tailored to their needs.

Brands benefit from competition listening in the following ways:

  • Make brands aware of the issues with the products of the competitors.
  • Assist brands in reaching out to potential customers.
  • Assists brands in comprehending their distinct value propositions.
  • Assists in keeping track of new product additions.

6. Social listening can help determine what products and trends are popular in the sector. Every sector evolves, with new trends and products emerging regularly. As a result, companies must remain on top of trends and know what's causing a stir. Customers use social media to guide their purchases. As a result, brands may adjust and develop their products to meet the needs of their clients. So, if customers are raving about a hot new trend or product, figure out what they like about it. It's then up to brands to customize their product to meet the customers' needs. Listening uncovers new trends gaining attraction among first-time consumers, and brands can use social media to emphasize how their product is a better choice.

Differentiation Between Social Listening, Monitoring, And Deep Social Insights

Social Listening: Social listening gathers information from social media mentions and online customer comments to make business decisions. Brands conduct surveys to collect customer data, but it can be done far more quickly, widely, and cost-effectively by using social listening.

Brands can actively use customers' input to ensure that their product or service is ideal for their customers. Customers' honest feedback can be gathered through social listening. An added benefit of social listening is that it provides the brand's product management team with all of the contexts they need when developing a new product or simply rehashing an old one, allowing them to anticipate any adverse reactions that may have been recorded earlier.

Suppose brand aims are to comprehend general client sentiments, uncover particular difficulties or problems with the brand's products or services, improve standings versus competitors, track awareness across several platforms, or obtain insights into industry trends. In that case, social listening is a preferable way.

Social Monitoring: Social media monitoring entails keeping an eye on social media to interact with the customers and appropriately respond. Its purpose is to warn brands and enable timely reactions to avoid negative mentions from staying and influencing the public's image of the brand(5). Several organizations use automated social media analytics and monitoring systems to overcome this problem. It finds vital phrases and terms relevant to the business using keyword tracking and displays them for brands to reply.

Deep Social Insights: Many brands use both listening and monitoring techniques. They provide valuable insights into public perceptions of industries, themes, and companies. But another degree of understanding tells companies who the audience is rather than just what they're posting. It zooms in on the interests and lifestyles rather than focusing on their activities. It gives the in-depth information required to run effective campaigns.

This necessitates the use of third-party software. They can collect large amounts of data and distill psychographics, affinities, and other useful information from it. To put it another way, third-party tools can assist brands in combining data from numerous social media channels and identifying patterns in behavior or brand engagement among the target audience. This gives brands the power to understand their consumers as the people they are and connect with them personally.

Not only will brands know the constituents of the audience, but they can segment the audience according to various data points.

Ways To Grow The Business Through Social Media Listening

1. The first thing is to pay attention to:

  • Brand mentions, social media handles (e.g., @BrandOfficial), and product names
  • Hashtags, campaign names, and keywords that are relevant
  • Important person names of the company (e.g., your CEO)
  • Topics connected to the company's image

2. It's also vital to pay attention to conversations or comments where: 

  • Users don't tag or mention you
  • Users misspell your brand name 
  • Users use common/popular brand short terms and abbreviations 

3. Keep up with what's trending in the brand's niche. By doing so, marketers can gain information on the following: 

  • What your audience is interested in right now.
  • Any economic difficulties that may affect your firm 
  • Industry gaps that you can solve.

Participate in conversations and events that are important to the audience; this gives them the idea that the company cares about them. Collaborating with renowned social media influencers can substantially expand the brand's reach.

4. Categorizing the customer's feedback into positive or negative is essential to the appropriate steps.

  • If it's negative, look more profound: what unseen pain point are they attempting to tell if a specific product or service element isn't pleased by the target audience?
  • If it's a positive response, figure out what they like about the brand and use that information in future efforts.

Empathizing with customers leads to more successful resolutions and more valuable engagement.

5. Every marketing strategy should include a competitor analysis, and social listening can help to refine the analysis even more. Examine what works for them and what doesn't:

  • Set methods to exceed them if something is working. Don't aim to be like someone else; instead, strive to be better and more valued.
  • If something isn't working, figure out what can be done to improve the experience for your target audience.

6. Providing excellent customer service is one of the most practical applications of social listening. Brands may quickly soothe bad sentiments if they listen proactively rather than wait for users to message or mention them explicitly. Respond quickly, ideally within 30 minutes or within 24 hours; regardless of the query is positive or negative, answer it promptly. Acknowledge and thank people who have said kind things about the company. Participate in conversations with potential clients inquiring about the brand's products or services or looking for something comparable to the brand's offer.

7. Select the tools used for the social listening endeavors. When it comes to social listening, native social media analytics can be restricted (Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, etc.).(7) Therefore, brands might want to invest in a more thorough listening service. Some of the most acceptable alternatives for this include Sprout Social, Mention, and Brand 24, which all have full functionality for tracking and monitoring online conversations(8). They then analyze those interactions to extract useful information such as interests and sentiments that can be used to enhance the strategy.

Role of AI In Social Listening

Social listening works by scouring the internet, usually on a large scale, to observe what people are talking about the business or other topics using an algorithm. When social listening is combined with AI to help commerce, it becomes far more potent.

Filtering through the massive volumes of data saved in databases would be impossible for human personnel to do without AI. However, when combined with AI, the raw data in these pools might give essential insights into client behavior and patterns.

The intersection of linguistics, natural language processing, and technology is now a distinct field that yields precise findings. With AI-powered social listening, sarcasm, intonation, accents, and trending terminology can be detected(9). Images and videos may simply crawl to determine branding awareness or event public relations uptake.

This effective teamwork has several advantages. Through its natural language processing (NLP) ability to recognize trends and patterns, an AI system improves its expertise at gleaning meaning as it sifts through enormous amounts of data. Smart AI engines can now provide more accurate forecasts, delivering valuable consumer data for any level of organization(10). At the same time, enterprise-level operations appear to be the primary beneficiaries. As AI technology gets more affordable, smaller businesses will be able to use its data-sifting capabilities.

Because AI handles the problematic effort of sorting through the acquired data, the analytical process requires less human interaction, giving data analysts and advisers more time to focus on how to use and apply the data found.

Social Media Listening Trends

Social listening has been a critical component of the marketing technology stack for a long time. With new technologies, increased use, and expanding applications across business units, the entire landscape of social listening has constantly been developing. Here are a few of the most recent social listening trends to keep an eye on.

#1: While social listening will remain important, brands will re-evaluate the surface-level KPIs. While the goal of social listening, in the beginning, was to get actionable insights from a more expansive universe, marketers are now discovering that capturing what is being said by those who matter is more important than capturing all that is being said.

#2: Listening to people on social media would become more important than collecting data from everyone. However, data from target groups and communities characterized by shared interests, a specific demographic segmentation, or passions will always make more sense than generic data in terms of social listening.

#3: Social listening can assist brands in developing advanced, targeted, and dynamic content. In terms of digital channels, social media will be their most effective. The majority of major corporations would boost their digital advertising budgets.

#4: Brands would be pushed to redefine influencer marketing due to social listening.

#5: Social media listening will be crucial in fostering innovation. The internet is awash with examples of how brands use social listening to drive real innovation. There are no limitations to the breakthroughs that brands can make in the future by applying strategies based on social listening insights.

#6: Keeping track of stories, videos, and gamified content would provide a wealth of engagement statistics. The most successful Facebook and Instagram brands keep track of their results, run A/B tests, and duplicate their triumphs.

#7: For many brands, social listening has become an essential aspect of market research, product development, and customer support. Many outstanding brands are already using social listening to fuel product creation. L'Oreal, for example, uses social listening to identify diverse market trends and learn what consumers want.

Top Social Media Listening Tools

With so many social media listening tools on the market, selecting the best social media listening tools is critical. Such software performs admirably and aids in achieving company objectives(12). The following are some of the best social listening tools:

1. Hootsuite is a social listening platform that is entirely free. The software listens in on discussions and finds relevant keywords to find mentions and hashtags of your business, services, and items.

2. Sprout Social is a social media management application with analytics capabilities. It's a social media conversation management solution that any company can use. Customer relationship management is aided by social listening.

3. Buffer is a tool that allows brands to manage many social media accounts from a single platform. The buffer application provides additional insights and statistics with social material and posts, making it easier to manage social media, and is a free social listening tool.

4. Awario is a social media monitoring program that aids in social listening by keeping track of the competition. Companies can monitor how people talk about their business and give influencers opportunities to promote the goods.

5. Falcon.io is a platform for monitoring, managing, and analyzing client data on social media. Marketers benefit from the falcon.io application since it allows them to explore digital marketing and customer engagement elements in one place.

6. The Agorapulse app allows brands to schedule posts and publish them at a later time. It's also a social listening tool that can help to track down current product trends and mentions of the brand or services.

7. Mention is a multilingual monitoring program that lets brands keep track of online conversations and content for the company. The notifications and warnings are accessible in 42 languages and are delivered in real-time.

8. Brand24 is a media monitoring tool that tracks mentions of the company, products, or services on the internet. Companies use this program to monitor online chats to study their consumers' social reactions.

9. The Keyhole application is ideal for marketers that want to know about their online influence and work on various social media platforms. It assists users in tracking influencers and analyzing data from social media.

10. The Buzzsumo app is used by marketers to curate content and monitor social media, and it's great for figuring out how to improve the content.

Key Findings

  • Companies use social listening because brand awareness is the fundamental difference between successful and unsuccessful approaches.
  • The advantage of social listening is that it allows brands to know what customers say about their brand and products.
  • Listening to competition is one of the features of social listening.
  • Brands can know which social media network their customers prefer by targeting social listening.
  • Brands conduct surveys to collect customer data, but it can be done far more quickly, widely, and cost-effectively by using social listening.
  • Brands may get real-time feedback on their products and services through social listening. 
  • An added benefit of social listening is that it provides the brand's product management team with all the contexts they need when developing a new product.
  • A practical social listening approach will assist companies in evaluating the success of their campaign.
  • With so many social media listening tools on the market, selecting the best social media listening tools is essential.
  • Providing excellent customer service is one of the most practical applications of social listening.
  • When social listening is combined with AI to help commerce, it becomes far more potent.

Conclusion

Social listening should be a component of your brand strategy because it is one of the most acceptable ways to discover what people discuss about the brand on their social network sites.

Businesses may gain a lot of information about their customers by listening to what they're saying on social media. Customers give their ideas on social media; therefore, the data acquired is unbiased and reliable.

Monitoring social conversations and tracking the online reputation and brand mentions is simple with social media listening tools(13). Brands may use them to keep track of campaigns and events, learn more about the target demographic, and uncover influencers.

want to monitor social media listening tools

This research elaborates on the emerging role of social media listening and states its significance for the growth of business units. The study also covers the best tools for social media listening, the leading brands using social listening actively, and all the latest social media listening trends.

References

  1. https://www.gartner.com/en/documents/3783026
  2. https://www.socialbakers.com/website/storage/2020/11/Social-Media-Listening-Report.pdf
  3. https://www.mdpi.com/2071-1050/12/5/2122
  4. https://www.emerald.com/insight/content/doi/10.1108/CCIJ-01-2020-0028/full/html?skipTracking=true&utm_source=TrendMD&utm_medium=cpc&utm_campaign=Corporate_Communications%253A_An_International_Journal_TrendMD_0&WT.mc_id=Emerald_TrendMD_0
  5. https://stratcomcoe.org/cuploads/pfiles/social_media_monitoring_a_primer_12-02-2020.pdf
  6. https://www.mycustomer.com/sites/default/files/microsoft_social_listening.pdf
  7. https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-981-15-0058-9_54
  8. https://brand24.com/blog/what-is-social-listening/
  9. https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/00913367.2020.1809576
  10. https://www.forbes.com/sites/danielnewman/2019/06/04/how-marketers-are-using-ai-and-machine-learning-to-grow-audiences/?sh=55b6266d1c0b
  11. https://shortyawards.com/8th/netflix-social-media
  12. https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-981-15-0058-9_54
  13. https://blog.hubspot.com/service/social-listening

 

Read more recent research

SEO Pricing Plans: How Much Does SEO Cost in 2024? 150 Companies Polled
How to Launch a New Business? GoodFirms Survey
Website Development Costs Survey 2024: Find Latest Prices for Small Businesses, MVPs, ECommerce & More