The What, Why, and How of Social Listening for Your Brand
At its core, social media is an ecosystem of interconnected conversations about an untold number of topics. Most social media strategies rightfully focus on adding your brand's voice to that conversation, ideally leveraging storytelling value-based promotional strategies to engage your audience. But even the best social media strategy is incomplete without social listening.
By the end of 2022, Meta’s family of social media apps—Facebook, WhatsApp, Messenger, and Instagram—had more than 3.7 billion monthly active users. Along with that, YouTube had 2 billion monthly active users, and TikTok had more than a billion. That’s billions of potential customers who might be watching, reading, creating, or commenting on pieces of content, any of which might be relevant to your brand.
Social listening can ensure that your brand becomes aware and, where relevant, a part of those conversations. This guide will cover the nuances of the topic, from a basic definition to why it has become such an important marketing tactic and how you can get started.
What Is Social Listening?
At its core, social listening is the process of monitoring and engaging with any social media conversations that might be relevant to your brand. Examples include:
Brand mentions
Mentions and conversations about industry-related topics
Mentions and conversations related to your competitors
Effective social listening also includes a pathway to engaging with these mentions and conversations. Finally, social listening analytics help you track how frequently your brand is mentioned in relation to your competitors, the sentiment behind those mentions, and more.
Why Social Listening Matters in Today's Digital Ecosystem
In the broadest sense, social listening matters because it allows brands to hear what others say about them and relevant topics. It will enable them to be active or passive in a conversation regardless of whether or not they are paying attention.
Imagine a customer sharing a bad experience with your product on social media. Other customers may agree, sharing the word. This conversation exists whether you engage in social listening or not. With listening, you can address the concern directly, reach out to those affected, and make things right.
Your customers want you to pay attention. One survey found that nearly 50% of consumers believe that a brand responding to their concerns online makes them "best in class" among their competitors.
Additional Benefits of Adding Social Listening to Your Approach
Beyond customer service, social listening also has a few other important advantages:
Monitoring your own and others' brand mentions allows you to track sentiments about your brand and how those sentiments compare with your competitors.
Monitoring trending industry topics helps you better understand customer pain points and develop potential content ideas for your marketing strategy.
Tracking engagements over time allows you to identify members of your target audience who frequently mention your brand, engaging them as potential influencers.
Listening to campaign-specific hashtags adds another dimension to measuring the success of that campaign, adding audience engagement into the equation.
Event-related social listening helps you track the online chatter about your event. Then you can gain insights for future events and evaluate your success in generating conversations.
In other words, this is a multi-faceted strategy that can help you track brand health, monitor competitors, develop content ideas, and more. That is why social listening has become a core piece of digital marketing for brands of any size in recent years.
6 Steps to Get Started on a Successful Social Listening Strategy
Engaging in social listening means going beyond mere monitoring and includes the natural next steps to engage in the conversation. The steps below can help you get started.
1. Define the Scope of Your Social Listening Efforts
The amount of unstructured data in posts, updates, photos, and more posted daily could be much better. If you want to help make social media listening actionable, an excellent first step has to be narrowing the scope.
Think about precisely what you want to get out of your listening efforts. For example, the focus might be on brand health, competitive analysis, or customer service. The more specifically you can define your goals and desired outcomes, the better.
2. Narrow Your Listening to Target Audience Preferences
The second step to narrow your scope into a manageable dataset is to hone in on your target audience. More specifically, you have to limit yourself to the social networks on which they're most likely to spend their time and talk about your brand to each other.
Social media discussions revolve around the same three to five networks. However, your audience might spend their time on hundreds of platforms. A second variable is their behavior on each network. Twitter has a smaller user base than Facebook; however, the audience is likelier to discuss customer service there than on other networks.
This step is about knowing your audience. Once you understand how and where people spend their time, you can narrow your listening scope to preferred methods.
3. Identify a Tool to Help With Social Listening
Manual social listening is almost impossible. Instead, use the scope you've defined and the channels your audience prefers to find a tool that matches your needs. This list of some of the industry-leading platforms can help you find the right software for your brand.
4. Create Exclusions to Minimize Irrelevant Data
Next, it's time to set up the actual monitoring piece of the equation. Identifying the terms to track is relatively straightforward, with a well-defined scope. It might be your brand name, competitors' brand names, or industry terms and hashtags. But there is a second side to the coin.
Because social media is an almost endless stream of unstructured data, many of your terms might still lead to irrelevant results. For example, brands like Tide are well-known in their field, but simply listening to that term will inevitably lead to unrelated discussions about ocean tides, pieces of apparel, and more.
Minimizing this irrelevant data means setting up exclusions. Define specific words, phrases, and hashtags that should never appear in your social listening reports. As you develop and refine your strategy, you can add to these exclusions over time.
5. Build a Strategy for Engagements With Brand Mentions
Listening without engagement is just monitoring. Choose which conversations and mentions to engage with to make it actionable. That, in turn, means creating an engagement strategy for comments, mentions, and conversations.
This step is complex in its own right. But consider its similarities to a strategy for responding to comments. It helps you understand when and how to engage and when staying away might be the better choice. The more you standardize it, the easier it will be to execute. Again, you can learn from each engagement to refine your strategy.
6. Create Social Listening Reports to Track Your Progress
Finally, a social listening strategy is only complete with a way to report on insights. This is how you can track and quantify brand sentiment, frequency of mentions, brand health, and more.
Most listening platforms have built-in reporting templates that you can use for this purpose. Over time, you can customize these reports to keep your listening strategy as close to the initially defined scope as possible.
Enhance Your Brand's Understanding With Social Listening
Social media listening is essential regardless of the situation. But it becomes especially vital for brands looking to unlock new markets. Here, it can be the central tool helping you understand whether your messaging resonates, how your audience is considering your product alongside more established competition, and more.