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Home » Social Listening: What Is It, Why It Matters And How It Can Be Achieved

Social Listening: What Is It, Why It Matters And How It Can Be Achieved

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Social Listening

Boom! Boom! Someone just posted a tweet in which they praised your company. On the other side of the planet, an article was published which features your company among 2019’s most promising startups. A Reddit consumer elsewhere has launched a thread complaining about customer service.A thousand miles away, a rival made an announcement about their new product.

What listens to social media?

Social listening is the process of monitoring terms, phrases, or even complex questions through social media and the internet, accompanied by data analysis.

A common word to track would be a brand name, but social media tracking possibilities go far deeper than that: you can monitor mentions of your rivals, market, campaign hashtags, and even check for people searching for office space in Seattle if that’s what you’re after.

Social listening is not only about social media, despite its name: several listening tools often track news websites, blogs, forums and the rest of the web.

This is not the only reason the term may be confusing. Social listening goes by several different names: trend analysis, evaluation of social media, monitoring of brands, social media intelligence… and last but not least, monitoring of social media. And while these words do not mean precisely the same thing, today you can sometimes see them being used interchangeably.

The benefits of social listening

The amazing thing about listening to social media is that it gives you access to insightful information about your clients, industry and competition: think about it as getting answers to questions that matter to your company, but without having to ask the real questions.

1. Reputation management.

It is one of the factors businesses use social listening the most frequently. Businesses control company and product mentions to track company safety and respond early on to changes in the number of mentions and feelings to avoid credibility crises.

2. Competitor analysis.

Social media monitoring tools allow you to watch what’s being said about your social networking competition, in the media, in forums and discussion boards, and so on.

This kind of intelligence is useful at any level of competitor analysis: from calculating Voice Share and brand health indicators to benchmarking them against your own, to understanding what consumers of your rivals love and hate about their goods (so you can better yours), to identifying the influencers and publishers with whom they partner

3. Product feedback.

You can track what your customers are thinking about your product online and monitor key topics and feelings, learn how they respond to changes in the product, what they love about your product and what they think is lacking from it.

This form of customer intelligence will also allow you to know more about your audience as a side-perk. By better understanding their needs and learning to speak their language, you will be able to enhance the copy of your ad and website and develop your message so that it can communicate with your clients

4. Customer service.

Fewer than 30 percent of brands ‘ social media references contain their username— this means you miss 70 percent of discussions about your company by not using a social listening device. Since 60 percent of consumers expect companies to reply within an hour and 68 percent of customers leave a business due to their unhelpful (or non-existent) customer service, it could be expensive not to reply to such conversations.

5. Lead generation.

While lead generation is not the primary use case for most social listening apps, some offer social selling add-ons which allow you to find potential clients on social media. Boolean search is an incredibly versatile way to search for prospects for the nerdy: it is an advanced way to search for mentions using Boolean logic to allow you to construct complex queries for any use case. Tell, huh?

6. PR

Social listening may be of more than one benefit to PR teams. Firstly, it lets you track when your company’s press releases and articles are written. Second, online media, PR professionals will track mentions of rivals and business keywords to identify new outlets to get attention on and collaborate with journalists.

7. Influencer marketing

Many social media tracking tools will show you how your brand mentions affect, or touch, you. From there you will find out who are the most prominent brand supporters. When you are looking to collaborate with new influencers, all you need to do is create a social listening warning for your industry, and see who are the most successful people in your niche.

8. Research.

Social listening is not just for brands-it also helps you to track what people feel about every online trend. If you’re a journalist writing a Brexit story, a charity trying to measure the frequency of social cause discussions, or an entrepreneur looking to start a company and do market research, social listening tools will aid.

3 best social media listening tools

Now that we’re clear about the benefits of tracking the social web, let’s see what are the best social listening devices. Below are our top 3 choices for each budget and size of a organization.

1. Awario

Awario is a versatile tool for social listening and analytics. This is one of the most common options for businesses of any scale, with real-time search, a Boolean search mode and robust analytics.

For your buck Awario gives the highest value. For it, for $1 you’re going to get over 1,000 mentions— an impressive deal compared to similar instruments.

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