Tired of creating and posting social media content that doesn’t get traction? Are you wondering how to use social listening to create tailored content that speaks to your audience and drives engagement?
Your audience and customers may interact actively with your brand, products, or services. But you may not be listening to what they say. The lack of attention may result in low engagement and conversion.
Social listening is integral to your business because it lets you tune into audience conversation across platforms. However, many undervalue its potential. But what’s social listening in marketing, and why is it essential to your small business?
This guide will address those queries, outline practical tips for maximizing social media listening, and provide the top social media listing tools.
What is Social Listening in Marketing?
Social listening, or social media listening, is a marketing strategy that lets you listen to your audience/customers’ online discussions about your business or related topics to gain valuable insights.
Attention to your followers’ conversations can help you predict market shifts and adjust your marketing strategy accordingly.
It gives you information about your audience’s needs and where they hang out the most. Moreover, note that social listening differs from social media monitoring. They may appear similar but vary in their functions.Please click the following link for a more detailed definition of social listening and the difference between social media monitoring.
Why Listen? The Value of Social Listening for Growth?
Many marketers and brands underestimate the value of listening to your audience on social media. Social listening can help you find leads, stay ahead of industry trends and competition, and drive business growth.
To run a thriving business, you must listen to your audience and know what they say about your product/service, or brand. You need to grasp how they feel about your offerings.
This social media strategy helps you understand their needs and preferences, which can help you create compelling content that speaks to your customers.
This undertaking makes social media listening a vital component of your online marketing strategy.
Social Listening Examples to Inspire Your Marketing Campaigns
The following examples highlight how companies and businesses use social listening to drive campaign success. They use this social media marketing strategy to boost consumer satisfaction and build a loyal customer base around their brand.
1. Nike
The renowned sportswear brand is a fantastic example of top companies using social listening to amplify their marketing campaigns. The company’s dedication to listening to audience dialogue exceeds improving product creation.
They also monitor online discussions about their products and interact with customers to resolve their issues based on feedback to strengthen the company’s image.
For example, consider the “Resell industry” issue resolution; the global sportswear brand used social listening to identify customers’ dissatisfaction with the resell industry.
Source: X (Twitter)
They promptly took action to regulate reselling acts. This practice allows Nike to keep up with trends, pinpoint consumers’ issues, and promptly rectify them.
As a result, the company continues to remain relevant, build robust connections with customers, and establish a loyal customer base.
2. Starface
Starface, a company that heals aches and blemishes fast with hydrocolloid vegan face products, is a fantastic example of a brand that makes the most of social listening.
In this example, TikToker Sarah Lugor shared a TikTok video wearing Starface’s pimple patches. Due to the brand’s commitment to listening to social media conversations, the company saw the video and reshared the content on Instagram.
This marketing strategy helps them reach more audiences and potential customers. The image below shows you a combination of Starface’s IG post and Sarah Lugor’s TikTok content.
Source: Starface
3. Cava
The food brand is another excellent example of top brands driving business growth with social media listening.
Cava established a new location in West Loop, Chicago, generating much buzz with consumers applauding the food quality.
Source: X (Twitter)
Given the thrill, a first-time, satisfied customer tweeted that he was addicted to their food and requested the company to create a new store in his location.
Source: X (Twitter)
The company replied to the customer’s request, showing they actively listen. It demonstrates Cava’s dedication to attention to customers’ emotions and needs.
It also reveals how the brand snoops on social media conversations and uses consumers’ local choices to spark interest and increase user engagement.
Click the following link for more examples of social media listening from top businesses and organizations to stir your social listening campaign.
Social Listening Tips and Best Practices
There are various techniques that you can use to implement social listening. Here are five practical social listening tips and best practices to use today.
1. Use the best social media listening tools
The best social listening tool offers keyword-tracking capabilities to help you create tracking systems to determine user sentiments and interaction trends.
While the focus is on social media sites, the best paid or free social listening tools can also activate email alerts for specified keywords and brand mentions.
These software applications simplify workflow between multiple social media platforms, boost productivity, and attentively signal for mentions.
How to set up social listening using Keyhole
Here’s how:
- Set up a data collection process (monitoring streams) for your business name, competitor brand names, relevant industry keywords, and more.
Using a tool like Keyhole will help you start listening to your audience’s interactions. For example, you can use Keyhole’s social listening feature for TikTok to follow conversation trends on the platform.
The tool allows you to evaluate audience engagement through search terms and phrases to understand user sentiment about your product, service, or business.
2. Select critical phrases, search terms, and topics to track
Setting up social media listening campaigns may seem overwhelming. But it’s relatively simple to watch particular relevant topics and keywords and keep updating your preferences for vital outcomes.
This practice involves engaging with your followers practically and monitoring their conversations to gather valuable data and create impactful social media posts.
How to track these variables
Create a tracking system with a robust social listening tool to monitor industry topics, keywords, and mentions.
Once set up, track the following elements:
- Direct brand mentions: Business/company name, including name variations, quotes, common misspellings, etc. Also, monitor your offer, competitors’ product or service tags and their competitor mentions. Further, watch out for mentions of your name, employees, or competitors.
- Industry/niche keywords and phrases: Track keywords and phrases related to your niche and industry, such as common terminology and jargon. Monitor competitors’ names, products, and services to understand what people say about your competitors. Besides, look for discussions about common issues in your industry and mentions of potential flaws of competitors’ products or services.
- Customer feedback and sentiments: Pinpoint phrases like “love,” “hate,” “recommend,” or “suggest” to understand user sentiments. Also, watch out for complaints or praises about your products/services, and look into business directories and listing platforms to find reviews and customer feedback about your brand.
- Hashtags and keywords: Track relevant hashtags and keywords in social media posts and marketing campaigns. Also, look for specific slogans or taglines related to ongoing promotions around your niche.
- Emerging trends and topics: Use social listening tools to find relevant hashtags, phrases, and topics that suddenly gain traction. Besides, look into emerging competitors or new market entrants and use the data to fine-tune your marketing strategy for better results.
3. Analyze competitors’ marketing strategies
Analyzing competitors’ marketing strategies is an acceptable way to find robust marketing nuggets for your social listening campaigns.
They provide valuable knowledge of what works and what doesn’t. You will also find gaps that you can fill to drive significant results.
In other words, you will understand your competition’s strengths and weaknesses and use the details to optimize your campaigns. Social listening reveals the insights you need, giving you a competitive edge.
How to analyze competitors’ marketing strategies
Here’s a step-by-step method:
- Be attentive to social media conversations involving your competition using listening tools. Join in the discussions and sift through to glean invaluable information.
- Use social listening for competitor monitoring with the strategic intent to understand their customer engagement tactics better. This approach gives insights into their timing method and response duration for improving sales interaction channels.
- Use the best social listening tool to evaluate audience sentiment and compare how customers perceive your brand to competitors.
You will be able to make informed decisions based on the data collected. This article shows you how to use social listening to analyze your competitors.
4. Spot user pain points and gaps in products/services
While these tools can do the tasks mentioned above, you can also use social media listening to study conversations across social media sites to find the following:
- Audience reach
- Demographics
- Audience behavior and sentiments
- Popular marketing trends
The best listening tool will help you understand each audience segment and spot gaps in your product/services or industry. It will also assist you in discovering your audience’s struggles by listening to their discussions.
The information will help you rectify the issues and improve user satisfaction.
How to spot customers’ problems with social listening
- Track and study dialogues related to your niche and industry to find frequent issues your audience complains about.
For example, an audience member expressed confusion about disconnecting future activities in the screenshot below of an Instagram post.
- Once you identify repeat queries, list the questions and carefully study them.
- Next, provide a helpful answer to address the queries
This technique lets you create content that drives engagement and boosts your marketing campaigns.
5. Use social listening to drive leads
Can you generate leads with social media listening? Yes, you can! By paying attention, you will encounter relevant accounts and profiles and invite them to participate in meaningful discussions.
Once you engage them in conversations, you can offer your skills and demonstrate your expertise by providing valuable tips to applicable topics or questions.
Then, you can offer your product or service where it’s fitting as the solution to their problems.
This hack helps you:
- Boost brand awareness
- Increase audience interaction
- Establish your business as a valuable resource for practical information
- Drive quality leads to your small business
How to generate leads using social listening
Here’s a step-by-step process:
- Find and engage with appropriate social media posts with lots of comments.
- Scan the comments to find questions participants are asking (such as “How to do XYZ)
- Display your skills by providing helpful information through comments that answer those questions.
- Present your offer as the solution.
How Does Social Listening Works?
Social listening eavesdrops or snoops into relevant social media conversations around your industry or company to understand the audience’s group and their choices.
This practice requires using social listening automation tools to:
- Track social media discussions to glean helpful information.
- Study audience interactions and brand mentions and segment them based on customers’ views
- Examine clients’ feedback to understand your brand image and customer perception.
- Watch sentiment trends in due course to identify shifts in customers’ attitudes.
- Evaluate competitors’ social media presence and audience reactions to gain strategic insights for better positioning.
The purpose is to track applicable social media conversations on various channels to determine followers’ sentiments about your product/service.
This technique allows you to respond effectively by creating marketing campaigns that positively impact their emotions.
5 Top Social Listening Platforms
You must listen to your audience and clients’ conversations to acquire valuable data to tailor your marketing campaigns effectively.
Here are some of the top social listening platforms in the industry:
1. Keyhole
The Keyhole social listening and reporting tool offers robust listening features for identifying existing and emerging trends. Keyhole listening tool also helps you find marketing opportunities to gain an edge over the competition.
Furthermore, the software allows you to monitor competitor mentions and audience discussions to understand your audience and their preferences better.
You can use Keyhole to increase audience sentiment about your business or products. This tactic helps you to understand what customers and your followers want, such as what topics or content types resonate with them.
Moreover, you can use the social listening platform to monitor and identify relevant influencers for your social media marketing campaigns.
2. Brandwatch
Brandwatch helps you understand and engage with your audience and customers across social media platforms.
The platform enables you to maximize information that gives you an edge by gathering tons of data from relevant social media posts, user comments, and interactions.
You can search applicable keywords, segment and analyze them, and execute based on informed insights. The software also examines historical discussions from 2010 and provides real-time data with over 500 new conversations added daily.
This measure lets you discover trends and how they evolve, providing invaluable insights into your industry, popular topics, and audience priorities.
3. Exolyt
Exolyt listening tool allows you to research various TikTok content and topics to obtain insight into the posts and their target audience.
It helps you understand trends, consumer preferences, and their struggles. You can search for related hashtags and topics to gain more knowledge about your niche.
Exolyt also gives you comprehensive data on your TikTok audience sentiment and how they feel about your product, service, or brand.
You can use Exolyt to monitor distinct TikTok accounts, hashtags, and videos and gauge performance against your competitors. This step gives insights into who mentioned you or your business in their posts. You will also find valuable data about audience demographics, influencers, and relevant creators.
You will collect helpful real-time information to amplify your brand strategy and create marketing content that resonates and drives traction.
4. Later
Later software offers a solid social media listening feature that lets you find actionable information about what your audience and customers want.
You can use Later’s listening tool to find influencers on Instagram and TikTok for collaboration and execute social media campaigns that deliver results.
The tool provides information about the best-performing posts and brand mentions. Like its alternatives above, Later allows you to monitor brand mentions, understand audience sentiment, and jump on trends.
The sentiment analysis feature helps you evaluate your brand reputation on Instagram and TikTok and adapt your social media strategy for better outcomes.
5. Ipsos Synthesio
Ipsos Synthesio is a robust social listening (Social Intelligence Suite) tool that provides crucial insights that enable you to make informed business decisions.
Synthesio allows you to scan and analyze users’ social media data across platforms. You can quickly research your industry and track evolving trends, social mentions, audience behavior, and competitors’ strategies.
Reacting to these events immediately helps you identify growth opportunities. You will understand your audience’s sentiments, needs, and preferences well. Given the data you gathered, you can create impactful content that resonates.
If you’re working for clients, you can give your clients actionable information that shapes their business decisions.
Furthermore, the tool lets you monitor various social media metrics, such as posts:
- Likes
- Views
- Shares
- Reposts
- Favorites
- Bookmarks
- Audience remarks
What to Look for When Choosing The Best Social Listening Tool
When assessing the top social listening tools for your needs, you must consider many core features and capabilities. Evaluating the vital factors will guarantee you pick a reliable platform that aligns with your business needs.
Here’s what you should look for:
- Compatibility & integrated insights: Your social listening tool must cover all the top social media platforms, allow you to monitor audience discussions as they happen, and provide actionable data in real-time.
- Robust filtering & segmentation: The social listening tool must be able to monitor designated keywords and phrases, including hashtags of your business and competition. It should also be capable of segmenting and filtering data to enable you to understand various audience categories.
- Practical sentiment analysis: A top listening tool should offer a reliable, trustworthy sentiment analysis feature that can quickly recognize and categorize positive, negative, or neutral mentions. It should understand how people talk to get the right feeling behind audience discussions.
- Track & identify trends: A robust social media listening tool should help you track and identify existing and emerging trends in your industry. These trends include hot topics and conversations, viral posts, and trending hashtags.
- Solid competitor insights: The software must be able to contrast your business performance against competitors in engagement, mentions, and sentiment. It needs to be able to gauge your brand share of voice (online conversations) compared to the competition to determine your market presence.
- Custom dashboards & reporting: Does the listening software offer a customizable dashboard that displays essential metrics in an easy-to-understand format? It must provide an intuitive dashboard that lets you export reports in various formats, such as CSV or PDF.
- Influencer & content analysis: Your social listening tool should help you identify top influencers who talk about your product or service, business, and relevant topics. It must also be able to monitor content performance and find what types of content work and what’s not.
Wrap Up
The competition to get noticed on social media is intense. You should determine what your target audience, followers, and customers need to gain traction. Find out what they say about your brand offerings.
The most reliable way to do this is to activate social listening tools on multiple social media platforms to track applicable online discussions.
The right tool will monitor and listen to:
- Relevant conversations about your business and competition
- Content performance
- Brand mentions
- User sentiment
This social media marketing strategy helps you find top influencers for collaboration and other pinpoint growth opportunities. The information would help you make critical adjustments and improve your marketing strategy.
Author bio
Mos Clement is a B2B content writer and marketer. Since 2018, he’s worked with top SaaS and digital marketing brands, helping them rank in Google with SEO content and ghostwriting services. He’s worked with brands like Semrush, SocialPilot, Serpstat, NealSchaffer, and others. You can find him reading top industry blogs when he’s not writing!
Frequently Asked Questions
1. What are the benefits of social listening tools?
The best social media listening tools offer several benefits for your business. They help you understand your audience and customers' priorities and emotions around your brand.
They also allow you to define competitors' marketing strategies and pinpoint gaps to enhance your campaigns.
They also help with the following benefits:
● Improve customer satisfaction
● Discover emerging trends
● Boost content marketing strategy
● Improve brand reputation
2. How does social listening differ from social monitoring?
Both marketing tactics sound similar since they involve keeping an ear to the ground on social media. But they serve different purposes.
Social monitoring focuses on tracking specific mentions and conversations about your brand, often for customer service and immediate response.
Conversely, social listening goes beyond merely tracking. It analyzes audience sentiments, marketing trends, and insights from these conversations to inform your business strategies.
3. What is social listening used for?
Social listening is an invaluable, multipurpose tool for various business applications. You can use it for a wide array of marketing activities, including:
● Improving customer service
● Conducting market research
● Crafting content marketing strategies
● Managing online brand reputation
● Facilitating influencer marketing
● Generating leads for your small business
4. What is the impact of social media listening on ROI?
Social listening can increase your small business's profitability in several ways.
For example, it can:
● Prevent customer attrition or churn by resolving issues promptly.
● Improve marketing strategies through insights based on data.
● Identify gaps for improving conversions and sales
● Discover prospects for upselling or cross-selling your products or services.
