What Is Social Listening? How can you conduct it?

 What are people saying about your businesses? Are you well aware of how your consumers view it? If not, then you are missing out on important pieces of information that can make your business grow at a faster rate. As an entrepreneur, you are supposed to get more people to buy your products and services, and which other way can you make that happen without active listening?

 In this article, we mainly focus on social listening by digging deeper to understand better what it is and how it can impact your business if implemented. Let's get right into our 10 minutes read as follows;

What is social listening?

Also known as social media listening, it is the process of analyzing information on what your audiences are saying about your business on social media platforms. The main aim of social listening is to monitor and capture mentions, among other related keywords, that your customers are saying about your business and the services you are offering them. 

Through these mentions, you will know well of the areas you need to improve on and what's trending in your industry, among other factors that will prove helpful when making your marketing strategies.

Importance of social listening

If you pay keen attention to social media platforms, chances are that you will learn more and improve your ways by winning customers' hearts through your brand. Let's find out some of the reasons why we believe social listening is important to businesses as stated down below;

1. Monitor brand reputation 

Through social media listening, businesses can find knowledgeable facts about their brands based on consumers' mentions through social media platforms. This will give them ideas on areas they would need to improve sooner or later, preventing issues that would negatively affect their business in the near future from occurring.

2. Understand customer sentiments

By practicing social listening, businesses can understand customer sentiments better. They would know and measure their customers feelings towards their products through social listening. By acquiring knowledge from them, they would be in a position to develop strategies that would focus on solving their customer's problems and meeting their expectations.

3. Product development

By monitoring conversations on social media sites, businesses can learn facts about their products and services that are not satisfying to their customers. This will push them to develop ideas that will help fix issues and upgrade their products and services in order to satisfy them and if possible, convert them into loyal customers.

4. Identify sales opportunities

Through social listening, businesses will be exposed to a wider audience. This will enable them supply their products and services to reach out to a broad audience interested in what they offer. This would lead to more revenue collection and customer gains.

5. Generate content ideas

Through monitoring conversations on social media, businesses are able to know trends in their industries and identify interesting ideas for their consumers to try out. The idea of keeping up with trends will help them come up with unique products that would be hard to ignore for their customers.

How to conduct social listening

Conducting social listening is important and a must thing to do if you will be looking for ways to grow your business and solve avoidable problems that could lead to customers churning. But in order to do so, you need to know how you can perform it, and this is how you can do it;

1. Set goals

The first step that should never be overlooked is goal setting. This is a must do for every business for the sake of proper planning and better management. Set your objectives you would like to achieve and focus on each one of them. Create goals that would benefit your business and bring change that would positively impact your business.

2. Identify your target audience

Another thing to look into is your targeted audience. Ask yourself who they are and how they fit what you are bringing them to the field. This will help you segment them in order to share reasonable and relatable content to their attention. Apart from that you will also be able to focus on the right people you can count on and contact while conducting social listening.

3. Choose a social listening tool

By choosing social listening tools such as Hootsuite, you will be able to make sane decisions that are bound to give you the best results. Research different social listening tools to know what each has to offer before settling for any. This will help simplify and monitor your work and simultaneously give you the results you will be looking for.

4. Set up your monitoring

Set up a social listening monitor for filters, keywords, and the platforms you need to monitor and make use of. This will help you save time you might take going through the whole social listening process online. You will also be able to analyze data findings and categorize them accordingly.

5. Take action

After you've found the data you need from insights from social listening websites, try to develop strategies that will be useful to bring out changes that your consumers require.

Social listening tools

Performing social listening can sometimes be hectic, but you will be good to go with social listening software to help you monitor your online platforms. With us are some of the social listening tools examples that will help you should be aware of as follows;

1. Hootsuite
2. Talkwalker
3. Sprout Social
4. Google Alert
5. Zoom alert

Social listening KPIs for businesses

Developing social listening KPIs will help your business stay keen and focused on achieving its goals. With us are some of the KPIs you can use to track your social listening metrics and performances as follows;

1. Reach

 By measuring your reach, you will know the number of consumers and users searching for your brand and keywords they are going for online. Take time to track the number of people who are aware of your brand and interact with them.

2. Share of voice

This is to help show the number of times your business has been mentioned compared to other competitors-owned businesses. By measuring your share of voice, you will be at an advantage in understanding your position in the current market. More importantly, you will know the number of times you have been mentioned across social media platforms.

3. Customer sentiments

Customer sentiments will include both positive and negative mentions in them. By measuring your customer's sentiments, you will be able to know your customers' impressions of your products and services. and come up with ideas to improve where they feel not contented.

4. Brand influence

This metric measures the number of followers, subscribers, and customer interactions with a brand across all its social media channels. Such channels could be on Facebook, Instagram, and youtube, among other platforms.

Conclusion

The social listening analysis enables businesses to understand their customers better. Through monitoring conversations, companies can get insights into what consumers are talking about regarding the products and services offered and know whether they are good enough for them. Social listening platforms help you find insights about your business that you wouldn't be aware of if you weren't an active listener. The more you connect with customers, the better the chances you grow your business.

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