As defined by HubSpot, social listening is “the monitoring of your brand’s social media channels for any customer feedback and direct mentions of your brand or discussions regarding specific keywords, topics, competitors, or industries, followed by an analysis to gain insights and act on those opportunities.”
It is crucial to have this knowledge in order to provide better customer service, develop your brand’s reputation, engage with your customers, and gather data on your customers and competitors.
The bottom line is that you get instant access to detailed results insights that help you to create content that your target audience actually wants or needs.
Customer Service
Regardless of your type of business — B2C, B2B, or nonprofit — people’s thoughts and feelings towards your brand are important to you and your success. With the help of social listening, brands can discover new opportunities or create better solutions by hearing what customers are saying about your product or service — both tagged and untagged.
Say your customers are turning to social media to share complaints about the limited time frame of appointments available at your office. Knowing that your customers want and need more availability can prompt your business to expand your hours, hire additional team members, or move office locations. While these big changes are not viable for every business, social listening can help businesses of every size helping them understand both pain points and satisfaction levels of customers.
Brand Reputation
Social listening allows marketers to analyze different trends. As many brands know, negative comments come from time to time and can be easy to ignore. But if negative reactions start to outweigh the positive ones, it’s important to see how these reactions are affecting metrics such as follower counts, engagement rates, and even sales.
Consumer Engagement
Customers are quick to review products on social media and expect brands to have quick response times, too. HubSpot states that 79% of customers expect a response to their post within 24 hours, but only 63% are answered during that time frame.
Social listening allows you to filter your online mentions and direct messages to discover the right audience and address them directly. Join online conversations as they happen, reach out and react to your customer’s needs, and find exciting new sales opportunities. These filters also allow you to find User Generated Content (UGC) that is perfect for repurposing into your social content. Simply put, UGC is any content any content that has been created and published by consumers.
Data Analytics
In any business, it’s important to keep up with what your competitors are doing, which includes monitoring how they are being talked about online. These insights can help you differentiate your brand from the competition and increase your brand’s Share of Voice (SOV) in the digital conversation. Social listening helps streamline the competitive analysis process and provides deeper insights into your industry and customers. This knowledge will be useful when reviewing your brand’s marketing strategies and can even provide priceless business value for several departments in your organization.
Social listening provides the perfect opportunity to gather more than just vanity metrics. Their demographics, geographical location, sentiment analysis, the most popular communication channels… The list is endless. Once you gather this information, you can use it as the foundation of your social media communication strategy.
Now you may be wondering: What tools are available for social listening? Luckily, there are plenty of tools available for marketers, each with its unique benefits. With HubSpot, you can easily plan, share, analyze, monitor, and manage your entire social media strategy from one, central location. There are various social listening tools available for marketers. Using HubSpot’s intuitive platform, you can create keyword streams, connect social accounts to your blog, prioritize conversations, trigger email alerts, interact with followers, and report on social media ROI with ease.
However, social listening is only the beginning to unlocking the potential of social analysis. Hearing what is being said about your brand — and your competitors — and applying that knowledge is the future and key to success.
Feeling inspired to improve your approach to managing your social media accounts? Contact the MCG team to discuss how we can help enhance your brand’s social media presence and ensure that you know how your customers are talking about you.
