Social Media Listening: What Are the Examples and Important Aspects You Need To Know? Share: Aumcore Date Published 30 August 2022 Categories Blog Reading Time 6-Minute Read social listening is essentially looking out for what is being said about a company, individual, product, or brand on the internet, specifically on social media. Let’s start at the beginning, shall we? What is social listening in marketing? Social listening, or social media listening, is essentially looking out for what is being said about a company, individual, product, or brand on the internet, specifically on social media. Online conversations produce tons of massive amounts of unstructured data, and because of that, it’s important to know what your business wants to achieve when it comes to social media listening. The right tool for the job will depend on the goal that you have. In some cases, it can be as simple as using Google Alerts but can become a more expensive exercise by using more comprehensive social listening tools. Social media monitoring tools can combine text for specific keywords to identify the different types of social listening on social networking sites, blogs and discussion boards, and other social media. Monitoring software converts specific words or phrases in unstructured data into numerical values associated with structured data in a database. In this way, the data can be analyzed using traditional data mining techniques – making it an important part of any social media strategy. How can a social listening strategy help your business? Social media listening is important because social media monitoring helps with business development and research and development. It also requires delivering the right responses to the right customers at the right time and addressing their issues immediately. Some values of social listening include: Improve performance: The keyword tracking in social media listening tools will pick up when people are using the keywords you have selected. The reactions could be either a good experience or a bad one, either way, they provide a chance to improve the company’s online performance and reputation. Find brand advocates and influencers: When you interact online with different people who represent your brand, you can find influencers and build good relationships with them. Once you find brand advocates, you can ask them to spread the good word and reviews about your product. Identify areas for brand promotion: It’s easy to find the places where the biggest changes are happening on the web – a lot of time is wasted trying to find the right place to promote your brand. Social listening tools make search platforms easier. What are some of the best social media listening tools? Without spiraling too far off topic, let’s keep things simple with a list of our favorite social media listening tools: Agorapulse HubSpot Social Media Management Software Oktopost Sprout Social Iconosquare io Digimind Social Hootsuite Buffer Mention TweetReach Tailwind BuzzSumo Awario Keyhole What is the most important aspect of social listening? Social media listening combined with consistent targeted posting and effective storytelling is a recipe that has helped us grow our online reputation, and increase followers, visibility, and engagement. Always remember first and foremost that social media is just that, it’s social. Let’s say you were at a social gathering with your friends. If you walked in, approached a group of people, and started speaking about yourself and everything you were doing and all that you accomplished and so on and so on, eventually those friends would tune out. Right? It’s the same with social media. Social media marketing is a two-way form of online communication between you (the business) and your online community (your followers). You see, any healthy relationship, friendship, or social dynamic relies on the ability to listen. It’s a balance between listening and speaking while understanding the other person’s needs—because you’re in tune with their feelings. Additionally, social listening examines similar sites (and reads their comments for feedback). Social listening also includes listening in the real world. What does your team say they need more of? When he talks, listen. If there is a problem, use social media to find a solution. Use your creative stories to create content based on their needs. Answer their top questions or concerns by creating posts that show your answers in a positive light. Social media listening examples from famous brands Sarah Lugor is a content creator and posted a video of herself wearing Starface patches. She didn’t tag the company in the video, but because the company paid attention to its target audience on social media, they found his content and posted it on Instagram. In this example, Starface uses social listening to discover user-generated content that will provide them with valuable social proof. Spectrum is an ISP that requires company-specific keywords (specifically spectrum and outage) to find conversations that indirectly reference their social accounts. For Netflix, social listening isn’t just about responding to and re-sharing content from your audience on your social channels. It can also listen to conversations about your business and incorporate consumer sentiment and feedback into your marketing strategy. Netflix uses this strategy to create a video that teaches people how to make socks while watching Netflix in direct response to consumer trends and memes. HubSpot uses social listening to interact with content that doesn’t directly mention their brand, it’s about keeping an eye on related channels and listening for mentions of your company. Chipotle uses social listening to find content creators that they know are part of their target audience. The Cheeky Boys challenged them to send a burrito into space, and Chipotle shared it as user-generated content on Instagram. It’s all about listening At the end of the day, the best way to know and understand the needs of your customer is to listen to them. See what they are saying, identify any issues that they may have and find ways to address them. It doesn’t get easier than that. This blog post is written by Ghia Marnewick. She is a creative content writer for Aumcore, a digital marketing agency in NYC that specializes in SEO and creative content marketing services. She is passionate about finding new ways of sharing information with the world.