Social media is abuzz with a flurry of conversations and if you don’t keep your ears to the ground then you might miss a lot. A large amount of content, ideas, thoughts, and opinions are shared here, and it is important that you listen. Social media listening is an essential part of digital marketing strategy as it plays a major role in decision-making.
What is social media listening?
Social media listening is analyzing the trends and conversations happening around your brand and the industry as a whole. It involves tracking through the various social media platforms that you use for conversations and mentions related to your brand. Analyzing the information from these insights helps you make better marketing decisions and discover opportunities to act.
Social listening makes you understand how, why, and where conversations related to your brand are taking place. You will find out what people are thinking when they mention or tag your brand. It will inform you what people are saying about your brand, how the industry is changing, and who is the market leader.
A social listening report provides you with the best way to understand industry trends and brand sentiment. This information will help you plan your future campaigns, build an impactful brand, improve content strategy, create an effective influencer program, and outpace your competition.
The process is broken into two parts as follows:
- Collect data of mentions related to your brand, products, competitors, and keywords linked to your business and create a social listening report. The platforms may include Facebook, Twitter, or Instagram, but only pull data from the places where your brand is most active.
- The second step is to analyze the data collected and try to make sense of the conversations, sentiments, and trends. Try to understand your customer’s viewpoint and the industry as a whole, and put what you acquire into action. The information will help you make smarter marketing decisions for your brand and create more effective SMM campaigns.
A social media listening report with more data will give you a more accurate insight into how your brand contends with the competitors. Social listening tools provide you with a unique perspective that enables your marketing strategies to work smarter rather than harder.
Benefits of Social Media Listening
- It builds better relationships with customers
- It improves the brand image
- This will enables product and service improvement
- SML allows you to test your ideas
- It helps you to build a better marketing strategy
- You will get real-time insights
- It enriches sales
Distinction Between Social Monitoring and Social Listening
Social media monitoring is the identifying of messages related to your brand and handling them appropriately. It is all about collecting data using metrics such as brand mentions. Competitor mentions, relevant hashtags, and industry trends. However, numbers alone cannot tell the whole story, and this is where social listening comes in.
Social listening goes beyond looking at the numbers and considers online mood behind the data. This mood is known as the social media sentiment, and it helps you to understand the feelings of people towards you and your competition. By understanding the sentiments behind the numbers, you are able to know how to respond to unexpected changes.
Creating a social media listening report is not an easy task if it is something that you have never done before. However, with the help of experts such as NetbaseQuid, you will get it done professionally to achieve the desired results. NetbaseQuid is a remarkable expert in brand health, campaign strategy, product innovation, trend analysis, competitive intelligence, crisis management, and technology scouting. You can rely on them for the most intrinsic consumer and market intelligence.
