Feature
The Gist
- Digital dialogue. Social listening captures authentic customer conversations on social platforms.
- Strategic tool. Brands use listening for marketing, sentiment analysis and trend spotting.
- Platform power. Various tools simplify the social listening process and enhance its effectiveness.
Social listening is the process of monitoring and analyzing social media conversations to understand customer needs and preferences. It is a valuable tool for businesses of all sizes, as it can help them to improve their products and services, develop more effective marketing campaigns and build stronger relationships with their customers. In this article, we will examine the benefits of social listening, provide tips on how to implement a social listening strategy and examine some of the top social listening platforms.
Key Benefits of Social Listening
According to a 2021 Media Post survey, 31% of those polled said that social media is their most-preferred channel to post feedback about a product or service, and 33% indicated that it is also the place where they raise customer service issues or questions. As such, social media provides authentic insights into the unfiltered conversations customers are having on their preferred channels. By keeping a finger on the pulse of social chatter, brands can identify pain points and grievances that may not arise through other channels. This enables them to proactively improve problematic areas and improve the customer experience.
A 2022 report by SocialMediaToday revealed that 82% of those polled view social listening as a key planning element in their social media marketing strategy. These brands use social listening primarily to determine brand sentiment and brand awareness, followed by industry trends and competitive analysis. Social listening provides brands with the actual words of their customers, a reason why many brands are incorporating social listening into their Voice of Customer (VoC) campaigns.
Lindsey Chastain, owner of The Writing Detective, a content marketing and PR company, told CMSWire that as a digital marketer, social listening has become an invaluable part of her day-to-day work. "By monitoring relevant social media channels and discussions, I'm able to gain crucial insights into our customers' pain points, interests, and preferences," said Chastain. "This level of understanding simply can't be achieved through traditional market research alone."
Social platforms also reveal unmet consumer needs and latent market opportunities through the desires and difficulties customers candidly discuss. The real-time nature of social listening offers brands invaluable feedback on new product launches or ad campaigns, allowing them to iterate based on such reactions.
Additionally, analyzing social conversations enables brands to discern emerging trends, preferences and motivations as people explore new ideas. They can detect shifting tastes, find localized variations, and segment audiences for more tailored engagement. The social voice of the customer adds invaluable context to data that can't be obtained from metrics alone.
Related Article: What Can Social Listening Do to Improve CX?
Social Listening for Better Marketing Campaigns
Social listening is such a valuable tool for brands to create better marketing campaigns because it allows them to learn more about their target audience and what they are looking for. Young Pham, co-founder and HR head at BizReport, a finance-focused media company, told CMSWire that understanding customer preferences allows his team to tailor their content strategy. "We can create content that addresses the questions, concerns, and interests of our audience, thereby providing valuable information and establishing trust." Additionally, social listening informs the product development process. "By identifying common pain points and desires within the financial space, we can innovate and develop solutions that align with our customers' needs," said Pham.
One way brands can use social listening to create better marketing campaigns is to identify customer pain points. By monitoring social media conversations, brands can learn about the common problems and challenges that their customers are facing. This information can then be used to develop marketing campaigns that address these pain points and offer solutions. For example, if a brand finds that many of its customers are complaining about the high price of its products, it could develop a marketing campaign that focuses on the value of its products.
Social listening can also help brands to understand the specific needs and desires of their customers. This information can then be used to develop marketing campaigns that offer products and services that are tailored to the needs of the target audience. Consider a brand that finds that its customers are interested in learning more about how to use its products, which results in the brand developing a marketing campaign that provides educational content.
Ryan Hamilton, creator and founder at Universimm, “the next generation of social networking,” told CMSWire that social listening can also save a lot of time and money for marketers. "With social media platforms offering various filters to refine content, marketers can specify what is effective in determining customer needs and find out what is most important to them,” said Hamilton. “This kind of approach is especially advantageous across large platforms with varying interests and user purchasing habits.” Hamilton explained that it facilitates the creation of targeted content that can be shared with customers directly, reducing the resources that would have been invested in developing broader content for cold audiences. “With this approach, businesses avoid wasting time and money on irrelevant content and budgets they don’t need."
Social listening can also be used to track customer sentiment toward a brand, product or service. This information can then be used to identify areas where the brand needs to improve, and to measure the effectiveness of marketing campaigns. For example, if a brand finds that customer sentiment toward its products is negative, it can take steps to address the problems that are causing this negative sentiment. “With the ability to analyze customer sentiment and feedback, businesses can produce efficient and effective content that builds a loyal community of customers,” said Hamilton.
Finally, social listening can also be used to identify influencers in a particular industry or niche. Once influencers have been identified, brands can partner with them to promote their products and services to a wider audience. For example, a brand could partner with a popular social media influencer to create sponsored content that promotes the brand's products.
Related Article: 4 Tips For Better Social Listening
Social Listening to Identify and Track Customer Trends
Social listening provides a powerful lens for identifying and tracking shifts in customer trends and preferences over time. By keeping a constant pulse on relevant social conversations, brands can spot emerging topics and changing tastes as they arise organically from customers themselves.
“On a daily basis, I spend time searching key industry hashtags and using alerts I've sent up for brands, products, or people I work with,” said Chastain. “This allows me to identify potential issues or complaints in real time and address them before they spread. I also look for recurring themes and topics that our audience cares about.” For instance, Chastain noticed a lot of questions around fall gardening on a discussion board. “We were able to turn that listening into a blog post answering common questions.”
The real-time, authentic dialogue on social platforms acts like an early warning system for trends taking root. When certain products, features, or interests spike in popularity on social channels, savvy brands take note. They can dig into why a new trend resonates and how it fits into people's lifestyles. From viral meme topics to surging discussions around innovative brands, monitoring what gains traction provides insight into where customer enthusiasm is heading.
Brands can also segment social data to uncover how trends differ across demographics and locations. A design aesthetic growing popular among teenagers may not resonate with baby boomers. A hot trend in Australia might take six months to pick up steam in America. Tracking geo-localized conversations and monitoring niche communities reveals nuances that might otherwise never be discovered. “Through hyper-localized content filtered by countries and interests, marketers can gain important insights into customer behavior, preferences, and pain points,” said Hamilton. “The insights gained from this kind of approach will assist businesses to be more proactive, saving resources in the long run.”
As patterns emerge from the noise, brands have the opportunity to respond before competitors. They can highlight relevant products, refine messaging and ride emerging waves early. Using social listening, brands can evolve in sync with consumers rather than playing catch-up to trends that have already crested. The real-time insights that are discovered allow a connection to customers in the moments that matter.
Social Listening Tools
Social listening involves monitoring the web and social media sites for mentions of a brand and its products and services, a chore that can take a vast amount of time and effort if done manually. Fortunately, there are many social listening platforms that are available that enable brands to easily take control of the task. Here are some of the top social listening platforms available today:
- Mention – A robust platform for tracking brand mentions, keywords and sentiment across social channels plus news and blogs, Mention features customizable dashboards and reporting.
- Sprout Social – A leading social media management and listening tool, Sprout Social enables the monitoring of public social data or social media accounts.
- Awario - By crawling over 13 billion web pages daily, Awario tracks an unbelievable number of social sites and forums, providing keyword and topic analysis with visual data.
- Keyhole – Billed as an all-in-one social media analytics tool, Keyhole filters data by location, user interests, and influencer status, and provides real-time posts and analytics.
- Talkwalker – The Talkwalker Consumer Intelligence Platform provides comprehensive listening for brands across 30+ social networks, 150 million websites and 100 customer feedback sources.
- Hootsuite – The Hootsuite Advanced Analytics platform shows a brand’s paid, organic, and web metrics side by side and incorporates a listening module with keyword and queue monitoring.
- Brandwatch – The Brandwatch social suite combines social listening with survey data, online news, threat monitoring, and reviews, and focuses on audience insight and research.
Although legacy tools such as Google Alerts can still provide insights from around the web, these best-of-breed social listening platforms simplify the process of social listening, provide detailed analytics, and include features that enhance the effectiveness of a social listening campaign.
The Challenges of Social Listening
While social listening offers immense potential, businesses need to be aware of common pitfalls that can undermine its effectiveness. A common pain point from social listening is information overload — the sheer amount of unstructured data on social platforms makes it difficult to extract meaningful signals from the noise. Social listening platforms are very useful to avoid getting lost in the data. Resource demands can tend to be high, with a dedicated social media team needed to properly monitor, analyze and interpret the firehose of conversations.
Biases can inadvertently be introduced if analysts approach the subjective social data with preconceptions (i.e., Facebook and YouTube are for liberals, while Truth Social and Rumble are for conservatives). Additionally, social feedback itself suffers from biases such as vocal complainers distorting brand perception. Too much focus on these negative conversations versus positive advocacy is a trap that is easy to fall into.
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While metrics such as likes, followers and mentions may seem concrete, they don't necessarily demonstrate impact. As with all data analysis, discipline and critical thinking is key. By using a social listening platform along with a prudent strategy, brands can obtain powerful customer insights from social media in spite of its messy nature.
Final Thoughts on Social Listening
Social listening, when done strategically, offers invaluable real-time insights into the authentic conversations customers are having on social media. By tracking mentions, keywords, trends and sentiment with the right tools, brands can deeply understand pain points, preferences, motivations, and shifting tastes. Social listening provides a direct line to the wants, needs, desires, and dislikes of the audiences that matter most.
