You know people are talking about your brand online…but do you know what they’re saying?
Do you know how those online conversations impact your reputation?
If you’ve asked yourself these questions, then you need to up your social listening game.
To get ahead, you need to familiarize yourself with what social listening is, how to leverage listening insights to understand your audience and drive business results, and get the tool that makes it easy.
Table of Contents
What Is Social Listening?
Social listening is the practice of tracking online conversations about your brand, industry, and competitors and using these insights to drive strategic decision-making.
As the name suggests, it’s most often focused on the social web: Social media platforms, review sites, and forums like Reddit.
Social listening activities include:
Monitoring for brand mentions, competitor mentions, and key brand messages;
Sentiment analysis to identify how people view your brand;
Joining relevant conversations to improve brand visibility and engagement;
Quickly responding to customer feedback to resolve issues and build customer loyalty; and
Monitoring industry trends to ensure your brand is aligned and up-to-date with what your clients care about.
This is a lot to take on manually; using a tool like Later Social makes it easy to gather and analyze all of this data.
What Is The Difference Between Social Listening And Social Monitoring?
Social media monitoring is a process where you look for and respond to customers talking about your brand online.
For instance, if someone has a question about your brand and posts about it on Instagram, you can quickly identify it and respond in a comment on their post instead of waiting for them to submit a form or send your support team an email.
Social media monitoring is an important way of ensuring customers are happy and that your brand reputation remains stable.
Social listening, on the other hand, involves evaluating all conversations people are having about and related to your brand, industry, and competitors. You then use this insight to craft marketing strategies, plan new products, and make key business decisions.
While social monitoring is an important part of social listening, it’s just one tactic rather than the whole strategy.
How Brands Benefit From Social Listening
Social listening delivers massive wins to brands that integrate it into their analysis; here are some of the key benefits:
Improve Customer Advocacy
When you know what your customers are saying about your brand, you can take decisive action by:
Responding directly to questions or concerns;
Joining online conversations to amplify top customer comments;
Suggesting products and services as a solution to customer needs; and
Amplifying and sharing positive posts from happy customers.
Using Later’s Social Listening tool, you can monitor your mentions in posts and comments by topic, allowing you to tailor your response based on the post theme.
Joining customer conversations goes far beyond responding to comments; it allows you to build relationships with your customers, improving brand loyalty and making them more likely to recommend you to their friends.
Get Insights From Potential Customers
Social listening allows you to tap into conversations that are already happening online, beyond those mentioning your brand.
Using social listening, you can track things like:
What people are talking about in your industry;
What people want (or wish they had) from brands like yours; and
What people want to avoid or hope brands don’t do next.
These insights give you a quick, reliable analysis of what people are saying about your industry without employing a research team or conducting time-consuming surveys, allowing you to make actionable decisions quickly.
Pro tip: You can use these insights to create proactive social media campaigns, inform positioning for the sales team, or craft your next product or service.
Stay Ahead Of The Competition
Active social listening can give you the knowledge you need to beat the competition by:
Monitoring what competitors are posting about, giving insights into their marketing strategies;
Highlighting phrases or terms that resonate strongly with customers when your competitors use them; and
Collecting real data on how people engage with certain topics when you (or your competition) post.
This means you can adjust your messaging to get ahead of your competitors on social media and ensure that you’re hopping on trends as they come up.
Manage Potential Crises
In the age of the internet, things can go wildly wrong very quickly.
A good social listening program can detect hints of an issue before it becomes a full-blown crisis.
Your social listening platform can indicate:
Sentiment changes from positive to negative about your brand;
A change in the way people use certain words, turning a previously strong campaign into something cringe; or
Something major happening in your industry that customers will expect you to respond to.
This could help you uncover a potential crisis long before it goes “viral” (in a bad way), giving you the chance to address it before any major brand equity damage.
How Marketers Can Use Social Listening
Here are a few ways social listening can directly impact your marketing and sales activities.
Building Customer Insights Pre-Launch
If you’re gearing up for a big launch, you can leverage social listening to gauge how your customers might respond to campaigns. For example, you could:
Tease some messages and see the reaction: For instance, if you’re launching a new feature for your platform, you can publish posts about the problem it solves to see how people engage.
Listen to conversations already going on: Then, you can craft your campaign and key messages based on existing conversations.
Netflix is a great example of a brand that pays attention to what people are talking about online—and then brings those insights into its marketing.
For example, they jumped on the “Demure” trend within days and posted their Netflix-ified spin on it, showing that they’re not only a world-class media company, but also in tune with current trends.
Understanding The Response To A Campaign
You put time and effort into planning a marketing campaign. How did it go?
Of course, you will get some idea by tracking key metrics like impressions and reach, link in bio clicks, and conversions.
But what are people saying about your campaigns?
This is where social listening is valuable.
If things go well, you will often see it reflected in online conversations. You might see people getting excited about your brand, even if they don’t “convert” in the ways that you’re tracking through your analytics platform.
Alternatively, if the campaign didn’t go well, listening may help uncover the reason.
For example, if conversations suggested your campaign misused a phrase or the tagline didn’t resonate, it might help to explain why the product didn’t sell as well as you’d hoped and help you reposition the campaign for success.
Learning About The Competition
Let’s say you’re worried about a key competitor. Maybe they just raised a new round of funding or put out a product that might draw your customers away.
But that’s only half the story.
With social listening, you can see what people are saying about your competitors so you can monitor the conversation and even participate if it makes sense for your brand.
Later Social enables your team to track topic performance by hashtag and competitor profile giving you a comprehensive overview of the top-performing content in your industry.
Wendy’s is a great example of this; the fast-food chain regularly uses its sassy social media posts to promote its brand. Often, this is done at the expense of its key competitors like McDonald’s and Burger King.
By responding to a McDonald’s campaign with its trademark sass, Wendys drummed up over 570K views on a single tweet.
Identify Key Influencers
As you execute your social listening strategy, you might notice some people driving the conversations.
These people may not be professional creators or influencers. They may also not have the largest followings, but they are potentially impactful partners or ambassadors for your brand.
Keep an eye out for the surprise perfect partner with social listening, but also apply a more scalable approach and look through pools of vetted influencers for your projects.
Later’s new Social Listening tool is the easiest way to connect your social insights with your influencer marketing program, with curated creator recommendations for your next campaign.
Book a demo today to be one of the first to try it out.
The Power Of Listening
Social listening is more than just monitoring social media; it’s about unlocking the full potential of online conversations. When done strategically, it transforms scattered social media posts into actionable insights, allowing you to gauge public sentiment and make informed decisions about your brand.
But to truly harness the power of social listening, you need more than just a tool for tracking mentions — you need a comprehensive solution that integrates seamlessly into your entire social media and influencer strategy.
That’s where Later’s social listening tool comes in. With Later, you’re not just listening; you’re leading, turning insights into impact, and driving real business results.
Book a demo of our social listening tool today and start getting ahead, faster.
Social Listening Pitfalls To Avoid
Avoid these common mistakes when using social listening to inform your marketing and overall business strategies and goals.
Don’t Forget To Focus On Trends
Social listening isn’t about making up a strategy based on a single social post — it’s about aggregating overall conversations and brand sentiment to generate real insights based on what people are saying.
It’s easy to focus on the one person who said something cool (or mean), but the overall data like frequency of messages and sentiment are going to make the biggest difference.
Pay attention to stand-out messages if they get a strong reaction, though; you don’t want to ignore a potential crisis or engagement win.
Don’t Pigeon-Hole Social Listening
Social listening is often seen as a tactic that helps improve your social media and marketing strategy—and it is!
But it’s also a powerful addition to:
Product and design research;
Market and user research;
Industry sentiment analysis for the C-suite.
Simply put: Social listening is a form of research and data gathering that can add value in multiple ways beyond social media campaign improvement.