Have you ever asked yourself, “who is my audience, and what do they want from my company?” If so, you’ve come to the right place.
When marketing your product or service, you shouldn’t blindly guess what customers want to see. Instead, you should gather as much information as possible and give them exactly what they’re looking for. And that’s where social listening comes in.
Keep reading to learn everything you need to know about it in this guide.
What Is Social Listening?
Social listening involves tracking social media sites for discussions or trends surrounding your brand and industry.
This is different from social monitoring, which tracks relevant data about your company. This includes mentions of your company, mentions of your competitors, hashtags, and relevant keywords.
To put it simply, monitoring tells you the facts or the “what” whereas listening tells you the overall mood or the “why.”
Why Use Social Listening?
Social listening gives you insight into public brand perception, campaign success, competitor strategies, and industry trends.
Learning about your brand perception will help you understand your overall brand reputation. Moreover, it shows what people specifically like and dislike about your brand.
Analyzing a marketing campaign shows you the overall mood toward the campaign. Furthermore, it demonstrates which demographics engaged with the campaign and the impressions of each campaign post.
Gaining insights about competitors will show you their strengths and their weaknesses. Using this information, you can evaluate your own company to see how you compare.
Listening to the industry trends will show you social issues to address (if they’re relevant to you), problems within the industry you could solve, and FAQs about the industry that you can answer.
How to Use Social Listening to Your Advantage
Social listening is only beneficial if you take the information and make informed marketing decisions with it. To do this, you should modify marketing campaigns, engage with customers, handle problems, pursue new leads, track competitors, and connect with influencers.
A good model of this is Wendy’s, which has gained lots of attention in the past few years for its Twitter marketing strategy. After listening to their audience, they started using Twitter to create a clear brand image, speak with customers, and outshine their competitors.
For example, when asked, “How much does a Big Mac cost?” Wendy’s Twitter account replied, “Your dignity.” This is not only a clever marketing strategy, but it also makes people think of their products as superior to McDonald’s products.
Now You Understand Social Listening
The benefits of social listening are truly endless. You’ll not only be able to make informed marketing decisions but you’ll also be in the know about your brand. And once you start listening, you’ll connect with your audience in a way you didn’t know was possible.
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