What is Social Listening (And Why It's Important)

Also known as social monitoring; social media monitoring; or social media measuring, social listening is the act of keeping an eye on mentions made to or about your brand to track topics, emotions, and trends in order to gain actionable insights.

Social Listening = Know Your Customers!

Social listening really represents that opportunity to be a fly on the wall for conversations your customers are having about your brand. They are having these conversations either way, but now you can be aware, reactive, and proactive to better meet their needs.

What is Social Listening

As the picture implies, the conversation you're listening to is usually occuring on social media.

Social listening is a different form of marketing research that centers around getting the honest, unfiltered opinions that customers are expressing on the internet. You can monitor brand mentions to evaluate the overall sentiment, whether it's positive or negative, associated with your brand. The volume of posts on a certain day can also be enlightening. Another social listening technique is to monitor specific campaigns or mentions about a specific product. This can give you further insight about how your marketing efforts are paying off.

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Why is Social Listening Important?

Why is social listening important? People are freely giving their unfiltered opinions, you might as well listen to them and give them a better experience.

There are many reasons why you should be implementing a social listening strategy.

• Awareness - At the very least, you should know what customers are saying about your brand. Why do social listening instead of just surveys/interviews? Because respondents might self-filter in order to please the interviewer or might not want to be too honest. On social media, they have no reason to hold back.
• Responding - If a customer is talking about a good experience with your product, then share in the joy with them. If they are complaining, reach out with genuine empathy. Either way, you've connected with them in way you might not have been able to before.
• Insights - Social listening software often has an algorithm that automatically assesses the sentiment associated with posts about your brand, in addition to extracting specific emotions that were expressed.
• Demographics - Another feature of social listening platforms is the ability to see details about who is talking about your brand, including their age, gender, location, income, education level, etc.

4 best tools for social listening https://t.co/TkiHbhTova #socialmedia #sociallistening #socialnetwork pic.twitter.com/50OcIjlu1z

— Neil Patel (@neilpatel) October 9, 2017

Free Taste of Social Listening

There are plenty of platforms out there... but I want to encourage you to give a free life-hack a try first.

You want to try out this social listening thing, but don't want to shell out for an expensive, fancy platform just yet? That's fine! You can do some basic social monitoring for free. You won't get the functionality mentioned above, but hopefully this little taste of social listening gives you the kick in the butt you need to invest in a robust social listening strategy.

Use Google! - When Googling, use "site:twitter.com" (or site:reddit.com) in your search to only see results from a particular site. Then include the name of your brand or product. Make sure to use either quotes around a phrase you want an exact match for (e.g. "coke vs pepsi") or plus signs between words that need to appear in the results somewhere, but not necessarily next to each other (e.g. coke+pepsi). Use the minus sign before any words that you don't want to see resutls for (e.g. -drugs). Narrow it down to be within the last week, month, year, etc by clicking "Tools" on the resutls page and then selecting the appropriate timeframe.

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