All You Need to Know About Social Listening
Social listening helps brands from around the world to increase awareness and boost sales. Listening to consumers helps businesses develop product innovations. For example, Ocean Spray used social media stats to discover a $100 million idea. And Britvic successfully launched Fruit Shoot in the highly competitive US market thanks to listening to consumer behavior. Analyzing social media analytics doesn’t only influence crisis response, brand health or customer care. Its where innovative brands create new products, which offer increased value to customers.
To create successful marketing campaigns, you must understand your audience. Discover how your prospects feel about your brand. Identify the topics and trends they’re discussing online. Get to know what your customers really want. To help you connect with your prospects, here’s a brief on social listening, the benefits it offers and the best tools available to boost your brands’ sales and ROI.
The Basics of Social Listening
Social listening comprises two steps. First, you follow and monitor social media channels to discover mentions of your competitors, product, brand, and keywords connected to your business. Next, you analyze the data and act based on analytics. This could mean responding to a happy client’s comment or changing your brand’s social media positioning. Acting based on data differentiates social listening to social monitoring, which only involves the collection of information.
While social monitoring is based on indicators such as mentions, reach, and engagement rate, social listening considers the customers’ behavior behind those numbers. It helps you understand how prospects view your brand but also your competitors. You’ll identify your prospects’ mood or the social media sentiment behind mentions. This way, you can keep your marketing strategies and product innovations on track.
The Benefits of Social Listening
Learning more about your target audience will help you create a more personalized user experience and be present where your target audience is. You’ll find out what your prospects are discussing and what content they engage with. Also, social listening allows you to monitor mentions of your brand. Set up alerts for mentions of your brand, so you can act immediately.
How do you create an experience where you’re not left behind because another brand better engaged a customer?
Social listening helps you understand your competitor’s marketing strategy better. Discover where they’re active, what platforms they use, and what content has the highest success rate. Also, tap into the content formats they use and their audience engagement rates.
Social listening uncovers social selling possibilities. Look for keywords relevant to your niche, monitor competitors’ mentions, and your brand’s mentions. To boost lead generation rates, set up alerts for these searches so you can engage with your audience at the best times.
Top Tools
If you’re not using social listening, you’re leaving money on the table. Real prospects are talking online about your brand and your niche. If you care about how to know your customers better than the competition, consider the insights you can discover from social listening. Here’s a list of the top three tools to improve your online marketing strategy.
Awario
Awario is an accessible and affordable social listening and analytics analyzer with Enterprise-level features. You can start by using a free trial to test the app and subscribe to plans starting as low as $29 per month. With Awario you can identify mentions of your business, industry, and competitors. What’s more, you can create Boolean queries for exceptional cases. For example, you can identify plagiarized copies of your online content, discover linkless mentions of your brand, or check backlinks to your website.
Awario also includes a free add-on social selling tool, respectively Leads. It uses predictive data to identify prospects who’re inquiring about a product or service like yours. But you can also use it to find people who are looking for alternatives to your competition’s products or services. Awario supports a wide variety of social networks including Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, news sites, blogs, and the web.
Keyhole
Keyhole is a live tracker for keywords and hashtags used on Instagram, Twitter, and news sites. Also, it’s an online content scheduler and publisher. Use Keyhole to monitor mentions of your brand across news sites and blogs. What’s best, the tool also includes analytics. So, you can analyze consumer sentiment, mention maps, which display the source countries of your brand’s mentions, and keyword clouds.
If you subscribe to the high tier plans, you can track industry influencers, enjoy API access to the tool’s data, and access historical brand mentions. Start out with the basic plan and work your way up to the Enterprise tier for $1,000 per month. You’ll enjoy a custom number of posts and searches.
Brandwatch
Brandwatch offers full social media and in-depth metrics analysis. Besides social monitoring, this tool provides image recognition, it identifies trends in your market niche, and it offers demographic data on your target audience. You’ll enjoy API access and you can export entire dashboards into personalized PowerPoint slides.
What’s more, Brandwatch includes a data visualization online platform, respectively Vizia. It helps you visualize information and you can combine it with analytics from Google Analytics, Hootsuite or Buzzsumo integrations.
Brandwatch supports social networks such as Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, news sites, blogs, and the web. Subscriptions start at a high $800 per month for 10,000 mentions every month. For the Enterprise version, you must submit a request for a customized offer.
Conclusion
Social listening involves monitoring information about your brand and your competition and acting based on the data collected. You’ll find a variety of available tools such as Awario, Keyhole, and Brandwatch to monitor metrics about your brand, your competition, and your target audience. The world’s most successful brands use social listening to improve their products, to innovate, and reach huge ROI.