Social listening (SL) can be expressed as all the things that are said about the brand or product that we encounter with the increase in digitalization. What is said and written about your brand shows how much your brand is talked about and attracts attention. We have explained it in detail in our article.
Social listening is the process of understanding and measuring online conversations about a company or brand, as well as its products and services. Social listening tools help companies collect and analyze customer data from a variety of social media and online review platforms to use data to improve marketing, operational and business metrics.
Social listening allows you to understand what your customers are talking about, what they think, how they are feeling, and what they need from your business. SL dynamics; It consists of making sense of what your followers are saying about you, listening to what is being said about your brand, and combining customer data.
Social monitoring, which means social monitoring, is the process of monitoring content on social media sites, blogs, news sites, forums, message boards, and other websites as a way of learning. It includes what people are saying about your brand, your competitors, your industry, your products or services, and anything else you want to know. With social monitoring, you can monitor the conversations people have about you and the topics you care about, without having to physically check every message, every post, and every reply on every social network.
When we talk about how to do social listening, it is important for brands to determine the area they want to measure, to choose keywords and topics, and to develop customer feedback. SL with the right tools is successful and allows you to monitor conversations about your business and detect how people are talking about your brand on social media. Done right, it empowers your company to make strategic decisions that will work best for you.
Things to consider when doing social listening are as follows;
- Identify people and choose the audience you want to listen to. Analyze which social media platform this audience uses.
- Decide whether to target an existing customer or a new audience.
- Determine the purpose of your listening. For example, you may want to do SL for a product or an innovation.
- Identify your competitors. Find out who you’re competing with.
- Get feedback from customers.
- Make a list of keywords you use specifically for your brand.
- Analyze comments/interactions.
- Decide how you will respond to bad reviews/reviews.
Social listening has a great impact on obtaining concrete insights in digitalization. Below, we talked about the importance of using SL tools for brands.
- SL tools help you make comparisons, understand the industry, get to know your competitors, measure expectations and improve customer experience.
- SL allows your team to understand how you compare against your direct and indirect competitors.
- Your team provides tips for identifying competitors and moving beyond the market in areas such as customer service, retention, reputation and other factors.
- SL will help you identify influencers in your industry, your target audience.
- By learning who your real influencers are, you get the opportunity to learn how they talk about your brand or what they say about other brands similar to yours.
- You can increase the customer experience. You can use data to drive strategic business changes.
- This may include messaging, product descriptions, product pricing, improvements to services, and generally making it easier for people to do business with you.
There is no stark difference between social listening and social watching. SL, which means social listening, includes hearing, interpretation and understanding. Monitoring involves watching, observing and tracking progress over time, while listening refers to applying these definitions in the context of social media.
Social monitoring is the process of monitoring and observing social media conversations to follow a company, brand or campaign over time. Metrics such as consumer sentiment and conversation volume are commonly used in social monitoring. Depending on the specific use case, it can also be important to keep track of things like conversation density and potential impressions.
Social listening is the process of hearing and interpreting social media conversations to understand consumers. SL is good at uncovering metrics that can drive change in your company. SL includes broader social conversations. Listening is ideal for looking ahead and identifying future competitive clusters. Social listening is organic. It is based on conversation, listening, human relations. Its organic results make it a powerful tool for brands.
Social listening has many advantages for brands. Customers want to feel heard on social media. For this reason, it is effective in the formation of the emotional bond between the brand and the customer. Here are some of the benefits of SL.
It enables your brand to grow: It allows you to continuously analyze and access real-time data about your brand. It allows you to interact with the customer in line with their expectations. This will return success to your brand.
It allows to detect the negatives about the brand: Using social listening allows you to identify the situations of your brand that will create a negative reputation. You can see if the increase in negative reviews really leads to a decrease in followers, sales, or any metric you choose to research. Then you can determine if serious measures need to be taken or if this is just a phase with no lasting effects.
You can increase customer acquisition: Social media has many opportunities to expand your reach to potential customers. After all, your followers are not just your loyal customers; they are also people who like your content or follow your social media. It is ideal for converting your content viewers and followers into leads and ultimately customers. Using social listening, you can discover the types of content that followers and mentions like by viewing their posts, shares, hashtags, and photos.