Social listening is tracking social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin for brand & company related conversations and mentions along with user feedbacks, reviews, ratings & then analyzing them for insights to discover opportunities to act.
It’s a three-step process:
Step 1: List out the Social Media platforms and their channels which we know would have a majority of the brands/company's consumers, clients, partners and influence makers active on it. This is to understand the impact of their posts & trends w..r.t. to the brand & company's business. Also the right tools for listening on social media is to be addressed in this.
Step 2: Target the relevant channels like newsfeeds, comments, hashtags etc. to monitor users conversations and engagements. Next use the tools crawlers to monitor social media channels for mentions of your brand, competitors, products, and keywords on these channels. This should be a fastest time data gathering process so as to enable prompt action to it.
Step 2: Collate & analyze the information/sentiment gathered on a periodic basis for ways to put what you understand from it into action. That can be something as small as responding to a happy customer or something as big as shifting your entire brand positioning. Also, many of the trending memes or meme of some old post of the brand may emerge out unexpectedly by the social media users and it is useful to have a strategy to counter it instantly.
How is social listening different from social monitoring?
At first glance, social listening might seem like social media monitoring, but the two concepts actually differ in important ways.
Social media monitoring is all about collecting the conversation & engagement data. It allows you to look back at what has already happened using metrics such as:
- Brand mentions, Brand Reach, Brand Followers
- Relevant hashtags
- Competitor mentions, Trends on Social Media.
- Industry trends
Social listening looks beyond the numbers to consider the mood behind the data. This “online mood” is also called social media sentiment.
Social media sentiment analysis is a key part of social media listening because it helps you understand how people feel or are forming perceptions about you and your competitors on a timeline basis. Instead of just counting the number of times your brand gets mentioned, you understand the overall emerging sentiments and behavioural patterns from social conversations to drive brand imagery & promotion.