As per the Digital 2021: Global Overview report, more than half of the world uses social media. Social listening tools provide you access to what people are saying about your brand, products, competitors, and so on.
When done rightly, social listening offers you authentic, unbiased insights about your business. As a result, you can collate necessary information and intelligence from an R&D, and customer service, and gain the ability to use the right insights for business development, creating content, and preparing real-time marketing campaigns.
You’ll need a perfect social listening tool to monitor your brand reach, engagement, and popularity that helps in achieving your long-term business goals:
What is Social Listening?
Social listening is an excellent way of staying up-to-date with what customers and prospects are saying about your business, content, product/service, support, and much more. Additionally, it involves monitoring your brand’s blogs, social media platforms, customer feedback on your website, mentions of your brand, and conversations with relevant topics, industries, and competitors. It is typically followed by an in-depth analysis of your gathered data. In short, it helps you determine the best ways to enhance your brand awareness, social media strategy, and social presence.
What are Social Listening Tools?
Social listening tools help monitor social media platforms and your competitors in one place. With social listening and monitoring tools, you can check relevant keywords, mentions of your brands, DMs, and feedback through tags. Most social listening tools enable users to post on social media accounts collectively from your dashboard. In addition, you can integrate it with various social media platforms to see valuable analytics in one place.
What Is The Purpose of Social Listening?
Your brand may leverage social listening for several reasons, including:
- Competitor Analysis
- Content Creation and Distribution
- Customer Engagement
- Customer Service
- Gather More Accurate Social Media Analytics Data
- Generating Leads
- Getting Customer Feedback
- Enhancing Your Customer Experience
- Identifying Brand Ambassadors and Candidates for Influencer Marketing
- Improving and creating a new product/service according to your customer’s needs by implementing sentiment analysis
- Increasing Brand Recognition
- Monitor social media to create content your target audience will want to see and engage with
- Reputation Management
- Tracking the progress of a marketing campaign
Steps To Setting Up Social Media Monitoring
Here, we’ve created a step-by-step guide to setting up social media monitoring:
Choose The Right Social Listening and Monitoring Tool
Identify and prioritize your top features to effectively narrow down the ultimate social listening and monitoring tools you want to use.
Brainstorm The Top Search Terms
Ask yourself: what words, names, and terms are people using when discussing your brand. For instance, if you run a fast-food chain, chances are, people will mention your veggie burger a lot more than your CEO.
On the flip side, if you’re a 5-person AI startup, the name of your most popular investor may be a common topic of discussion. Here are a couple of search terms to keep in mind:
- Brand or company name
- Product name
- Names of thought leaders, CEOs
- Slogans and catchphrases
- Branded hashtags
In addition, follow the tips mentioned above for your major competitors. Next, expand your keywords to include your industry or niche:
- Industry hashtags and keywords
- Community or group keywords and hashtags
- Platform-specific keywords and hashtags
- Location-based keywords or hashtags
Set Up The Ideal Searches
It mostly depends on which social media listening and tracking tool you choose. It’s recommended that you select a tool that offers simultaneous and saved searches. In addition, consider looking for tools compatible with several social media platforms, including Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest, Quora, and so on.
Check Your Streams Regularly
If you’re in charge of running and managing your company’s Instagram, chances are, you’ll have to check your streams on a day-to-day basis. However, if managing your Instagram is not in your job description, you should consider setting a daily reminder to browse search findings.
Revisit and Tweak Your Search Terms Regularly
Like all social media jobs, social monitoring is an ongoing process-once you set yourself up, you need to monitor results for a couple of weeks. This will help you identify whether the search terms are catching the right things while filtering out unnecessary information.
If you notice irrelevant results, consider constricting search parameters. However, if you don’t gain enough results, widen the parameters.
What Are The Best Social Media Listening and Tracking Tools?
Let’s discuss what the best social media listening and monitoring tools are and how you can benefit from each:
Brandwatch
Brandwatch is a consumer intelligence platform with analytics that covers everything from image recognition to customer demographics. It includes an innovative AI analyst Iris who automatically brings insights to the surface. In addition, this robust social media monitoring tool offers daily segmentation of data about your services or products. With a better understanding of your audience’s intent, you can visualize this information across various departments of your company. Brandwatch assists you in discovering trends and topics that best resonate with your customer and measuring content performance. Note down the influencers the tool identifies to ensure precise targeting.
Falcon
Falcon is a popular social media advertising, customer data management, listening, and publishing platform. Its revolutionary social listening and tracking tools offer you a clear picture of who’s involved, what’s happening, and why.
This way, you can use the collated data to identify popular hashtags and topics to better design content and campaigns. Falcon makes it easy for you to keep tabs on conversations about your products, services, and brand.
This innovative social media listening tool offers incredible flexibility, allowing you to track various aspects, including brand names, phrases, keywords, and topics. You can even add advanced parameters or refine your queries for better targeting.
If you boast a global audience, Falcon.io helps you engage and track wherever your followers are present. Besides this, you can add various filters, and access and view data via keywords, content type, demographics, influencers, and source.
In addition, Falcon provides sentiment analysis in multiple languages while marking mentions as negative, neutral, and positive. It helps you prioritize engagement. You may even set alert notifications for specific mentions, as well as reactions to negative publicity before it spirals.
Falcon helps you identify influencers who engage with your topics of interest. Ultimately, you can prepare better strategies for collaboration and brand growth. It also allows you to collect data on audiences from various social listening projects.
Hootsuite
Hootsuite is a social listening and social monitoring tool that offers you an instant overview of innumerable online conversations. The app allows you to view and respond to your brand mentions, comments, and messages across different social channels while using a single, concise dashboard.
In addition, the platform helps you track influencers and leads on importable lists that you can share with other employees. Hootsuite enables you to search for different topics and keywords and filters by demographics, data, location, and much more.
Leverage its key analytics to identify brand advocates and thought leaders. It is an effective and easy way of understanding your brand’s perception in the overall market. You may add notifications to get instant alerts whenever mentions of your brand spike.
Hootsuite lets you customize paid social campaigns that help you balance paid advertisements and organic reach to boost content engagement. With this tool, you can measure success across different compatible social platforms, including Instagram, Facebook, Pinterest, Twitter, YouTube, LinkedIn, and much more.
Sprout Social
Sprout Social is an excellent and comprehensive social media management and tracking platform that offers real-time solutions for social listening, customer care, analytics, and employee advocacy.
This state-of-the-art tool helps you monitor and manage conversations across various social networks in its unified Smart Inbox. In addition, you can integrate Sprout Social to collate accurate social reports and map out a killer content strategy.
You may even schedule posts using its publishing tool. Lastly, Sprout Social helps you uncover trends in social conversations, gain actionable insights, and learn about your audience to improve your marketing strategy.
Awario
Awario is a comparatively new tool that makes web monitoring and social media listening affordable for small, medium, and large businesses alike. This tool offers enterprise-level features that help you monitor mentions of your brand, competitors, and industry and even set up complex Boolean queries.
In fact, with Awario, you can spot plagiarized copies of your content, find linkless brand mentions, and monitor backlinks to your website.
You can also unlock a social selling tool called Leads that offers predictive insights to find people seeking recommendations about products similar to yours or aspiring competitors.
Talkwalker
Talkwalker is an Enterprise-level social media tool boasting fantastic social listening features. Apart from exclusive social media monitoring, it covers broadcast, print, and TV outlets to measure brand impact and traffic across multiple locations and audiences.
Talkwalker helps you translate your market efforts into KPIs and use customizable dashboards to share your listings with your team. In addition, its in-depth sentiment analysis and reputation scores help you identify your campaign performance globally.
In turn, insights aid you in developing high-quality campaigns and enhance audience engagement and targeted messages. You can also find an incredible Virality Map to learn more and navigate your niche’s network. Learn what topics are viral and engage with key figures to add credibility and momentum to your messaging and marketing efforts.
Buffer
Buffer curates an incredible omnichannel experience for you and your social media teams. These social media listening tools make it easy for you to pinpoint the conversations that matter the most, join discussions, and engage with your audience.
Buffer allows you to post content and connect with customers and viewers from a single centralized dashboard via a team-shared inbox. With this state-of-the-art tool, you can create effective social campaigns and schedule posts with its publishing features.
In addition, Buffer offers unique analytics to help you monitor your team’s performance by measuring audience behavior and engagement. You may even use the story monitoring feature to analyze and record stories on social media channels like Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, and much more.
Buzzsumo
Buzzsumo is another incredible content analysis tool that performs as a social media listening tool. It helps you search the web for content that matches your search term.
This tool provides you with the search result and offers you engagement rates associated with each search. For instance, if you set up a search for your organization, the platform will locate its online mentions alongside the number of times people shared an article on Facebook, commented about it on Instagram, and tweeted about it.
Buzzsumo offers engagement figures for Pinterest, Reddit, Facebook, Twitter, and Quora. It even tells you the total number of links a result generates. This innovative tool includes a useful alerts feature to track competitor mentions, brand mentions, backlinks, an author, keyword mentions, and content from a website. You may even set parameters for your alerts.
NetBase Quid
Another consumer and market intelligence platform that you need to check out is NetBase Quid. This tool provides you with several state-of-the-art products like historical social-media analysis, social listening tools, an AI-driven platform, and insights on keywords and topics.
NetBase Quid makes it easy for you to collate social data, no matter if it’s for market research or brand management. It means users can focus on other essential tasks. This platform helps uncover consumer insights, identify consumer trends, and understand brand perception within seconds.
Keyhole
Keyhole is a widely-recognized two-in-one social media tool that allows you to automate your posts, as well as track keywords and hashtags across Instagram and Twitter. Moreover, you can monitor brand mentions across news sites and blogs.
The tool comes fully equipped with analytics, sentiment analysis, keywords clouds, and comprehensive mention maps that display which countries your social mentions root from. Keyhole’s high-tier plans offer premium features like getting API access to its data, tracking industry influencers, and unlocking historical mentions.
How to Social Listen with Socialays?
Socialays offers an incredible way to develop a social listening and monitoring strategy. Let’s take a closer look at the top features and benefits of using Socialays:
- This platform reads your comments and analyzes emotions into 9 main categories: sadness, happiness, and hate. As a result, you can build a positive community of people who talk about your products
- Socialays checks and takes instant actions depending on your custom needs, such as hiding comments that include profanities or ad content. In turn, you can ensure the viewer’s across various social media platforms enjoy a positive experience while learning more about your brand
- Stay on top of your comments by getting alert notifications whenever a follower asks you a question or mentions you in a comment
Top Social Listening and Monitoring Tips To Keep in Mind
Here are a couple of social listening and monitoring tips you need to keep in mind when commencing your search:
Monitor in All Languages Your Customers Speak
One thing users often overlook is monitoring in various languages that customers speak. For instance, if you just launched your startup in Montreal, you may set up searches using French and English words and phrases. Based on the importance and size of your consumer base, you can easily select the perfect social monitoring tool.
Another plus of the social media monitoring tool is that you can share permissions with other team members. This way, you can get help wherever you need it.
Learn From Your Competition
You can always learn something new from your competitors, especially from what people are saying about them.
Find out what they’re doing right and what people love about them, as well as what mistakes they make that people don’t like. You’ll find that it’s relatively less painful to learn hard lessons by tracking your competitor’s actions and mistakes.
Feed Your Hashtag and Keyword Strategy
If you’re stuck and can’t decide what hashtag you should add to your Instagram or Facebook post or YouTube video, social media listening and monitoring can help.
For example, most social media listening tools offer ideas on keywords and hashtags you should consider adding to your ongoing monitoring activities. It also provides you with keywords and hashtags you should add to your posts and blogs as part of your hashtag strategy.
Collaborate with Other Teams
Social listening and monitoring offer a wide range of valuable information for your overall company. The data can be anything from a great blog post, a revolutionary idea for a new product, or a new feature.
All in all, your customer service, product development, and content marketing teams can benefit from what you’re listening to on social media. Be sure to communicate your learning and seek input from other groups.
They likely have specific questions you can answer by tweaking your social listening setup.
Be Proactive
Here’s the thing: if you fail to take action, you’re only leveraging social media monitoring, not listening.
Social listening is more than just tracking metrics. Instead, it’s about gaining insights to identify what your existing and potential customers want from you and how you can deliver that.
Be sure to analyze patterns and trends over time instead of simply individual comments. These comprehensive insights play a crucial role in helping you create a powerful strategy in the future.
Grow Better With Social Media Tracking Tools
Trends in social media are constantly evolving and growing. Here, we’ve made a list of the top 6 benefits of social media tracking and listening tools:
Identify Influencers and Brand Advocates
With social media tracking tools, you can find out who’s sharing information about your brand and its products and services. In turn, you can organically spread positive news about your brand, as well as spot new opportunities for influencer relationships.
In addition, find your brand advocates and reward them for spreading information about your brand and its products. Happy and satisfied customers are likely to spread information about your brand without being asked. And word-of-mouth is one of the best ways to market your brand.
Continue to foster customer relationships to improve business and boost sales.
You Can Measure and Track Brand Performance
Social listening not only helps you measure and evaluate your social media strategy, but it’s also helpful in measuring tactics for your campaigns. This way, you can analyze qualitative as well as quantitative metrics.
These analyses offer valuable insights to identify social performance above and below the line. You may even monitor the sentiment of conversion and adjust the content you are posting according to your results.
Enhance Customer Service
Part of leveraging social listening tools is hearing positive as well as negative feedback. In most cases, people recommend that you listen to negative feedback as it helps you improve your business. Most people suggest that if someone’s taking the time to complain about your product, they’re not a lost consumer. Instead, they’re showing that they still like your brand and product and are open to being helped.
You Can Discover New Opportunities
In most cases, your customers will do the work for you. If your customers start complaining or rooting about the same feature, it’s a sign that it’s something that you need to note. Social listening not only monitors these changes but also finds new ways to innovate on different changes. For instance, if your customers are frustrated about fitness classes filling up too quickly, you can create more classes with larger spaces or limit the number of people in one class. Each option offers you different pros and cons.
Testing different methods is an effective way of relaying actual results to satisfy an increased number of customers.
Gain an Edge on Your Competition
Social listening and social media tracking tools help you set up keyword tracking to monitor mentions relevant to your products and services. Make sure you list all variations of your product name, as well as common misspellings. Moreover, you may find people complaining about a competitor’s product and customer service. This is an opportunity to see what and why shortcomings are present.
From there onwards, you can tell them how your product can solve their problems and explain the benefits of your product/services. This way, you can find new opportunities and customers while showing people that you care. It will make your business increasingly attractive to potential customers.
Product Development
Another benefit of social listening is that you can receive incredible customer feedback on your brand, industry, and product. Treat input from your customer the same way you’d treat feedback from a focus group. In addition, identify and analyze what consumers are saying to spot valuable insights to adjust your business strategies to fit your customer’s needs. Prepare yourself to receive honest feedback that may criticize aspects of your business. Keep in mind that this criticism is valuable since it helps you improve your customer care, business strategies, and product features.
The Bottom Line
With more people using social media to access market research, get valuable customer insights, and conduct competitor analysis, social listening and monitoring tools are becoming increasingly robust. Listening, tracking, and engaging in conversations about your brand, competitors, and industry plays a crucial role in garnering a positive user experience.
