What is Social Media Listening and Why It’s Important

Social listening is a valuable tool for success on social media. It involves analyzing conversations and trends related to your brand, competitors, and industry. By listening to your audience, you can gain insights into their needs and preferences, allowing you to create a more effective social media strategy.

Benefit of Social Media Listening

The benefits of social listening include:

• Understanding topics and trends that your audience base is passionate about
• Finding ways to outshine your competitors
• Identifying emerging pain points and challenges your audience face
• Learning which types of messages resonate with your audience

Many brands are guessing instead of listening to their audience. Through strategic social listening, brands can analyze audience conversations at scale, resulting in a more meaningful and effective social media strategy.

How to Get Started

To get started with social listening, you need to choose a social listening tool. This can be either building your own internal tool or using a third-party provider. Determine your initial goals and desired outcomes for social listening, such as understanding audience perceptions, monitoring industry trends, or tracking competitors. Choose relevant data sources, such as Twitter, Instagram, or Facebook, to gather the necessary information.

Successful Social Media Listening Strategy

To create a successful strategy, it is crucial to build topics and themes for listening. Brainstorm specific queries related to your brand, including keywords, hashtags, cashtags, mentions of users, and mentions from users.

Listening goes beyond just hashtags and keywords. You can refine your search by adding additional parameters. For example, if you want to track sentiment around Chicago-style pizza, you can use specific queries that include variations like “Chicago pizza,” “chi-town pizza,” and “chicago deep dish.”

Exclusions can be helpful to narrow down the scope of your search. For instance, if “Chicago pie” could refer to both pizza and baked goods, you can add exclusions to ensure your search focuses on pizza.

Once you have refined your topics, you can start gathering data to inform your strategies. Analyze the frequently mentioned keywords and identify patterns or trends that can guide your content creation. For example, if many messages mention cold weather in Chicago, you can create social posts about being open during freezing temperatures or come up with weather-themed promotions.

To measure the effectiveness of your listening strategy, analyze your data and prioritize metrics based on your campaign goals. Consider metrics such as clicks, reach, new followers, profile visits, engagement rates, and engagement speed.

Conclusion

By listening closely to your audience, you can build meaningful relationships and increase your engagement.