Social listening for companies is an incredible tool that is widely used today. It allows you to project the presence of a brand on social networks. Therefore, it is of vital importance to create new strategies.
What is Social Listening?
Basically, it is in charge of monitoring how a corporation is perceived from different platforms. It should be noted that it is an alternative method to surveys for data collection. It measures the brand’s influence on social networks through mentions; keep in mind that it can receive negative phrases, but also favorable ones.
In addition, it is recommended to have a database of strategies that work and those that failed. All this provides you to make the ideal decision to grow the brand. It is a good technique to have an overview of the interactions around your service or others.
Social listening is not only about clarifying doubts or answering comments. It requires nothing more than counting the mentions of your company.
This is linked to social media monitoring and data collection. It changes if you use what is offered to determine your marketing strategies, for example. In that type of situation, social listening is considered to be used. Keep in mind that social listening should include your slogan and that of the competition.
Carry keywords along with frequent hashtags, linked to your area. It is essential that the brand name, services, products and other basic details appear. Influencers of the sector in which the brand operates and names of relevant characters should not be missing.
Finally, detail the geolocation and know the social networks that are used. It is also necessary to specify the geographic location from where the brand is positioned.
Benefits of Social Listening for brands
The first thing to highlight is that the use of social listening reduces investment risks. Therefore, it allows you to know the preferences of your customers and determine whether the methods applied work or not.
It also offers useful information to your digital marketing strategy.
It makes it possible to observe the impact of the networks on the corporate image of your business and reputation.
✅ It catalogs the recognition of the sector in the eye of consumer users.
✅ Optimize the content created, know its impact and capture influencers for your brand.
✅ Identify what type of format brings more interactions, at what time it should be published and how often.
The concept of what social listening is leads you to stay on top of market trends. If you learn about the latest in the industry, you will greatly improve your traffic.
It should be noted that the information obtained from this analysis is not stagnant. It is shared with other areas of your company. That is why they achieve excellent results with the marketing strategies decided from there. Choices are made about what to apply according to the needs and demands of the market. When you use social listening well, you get what you need so that other people can help you grow.
According to surveys, 83% of people trust what people with certain status recommend to them.
How to perform social listening
You should know that social listening can be done manually or using certain tools, paid or free.
If you are going to do it manually, in the search engine of each social network you analyze you need to add the keywords related to your brand; the name or a certain product itself.
Of the options to use we recommend HowSociable. It has a free version that favors crawling in 12 social networks.
There is also IceRocket, which keeps track of mentions on Facebook, Twitter and blogs in about 20 languages. In addition, for social network management we recommend Google Alerts. It is a free Google service that sends alerts to your e-mail when a word of your interest is shared.
On the other hand, TweetReach is an analyzer that shows you the reach of a URL or user on Twitter.
Social Mention alerts you through keywords in real time. Remember to use them according to your needs, ideas and marketing strategies. One piece of advice is not to get defensive if you receive any negative comments. Although it is not pleasant, it is also a sign of attention. Take it as an impetus to improve.
A survey by Sprout Social revealed that 83% of respondents like to hear back. Meanwhile, 68% like it when brands join the conversation about them. In addition, 48% of users will buy from a brand that always responds to their community.
Advantages of Social Listening
When it comes to social media strategy, social listening earns a high ranking. First of all, it increases your knowledge of how your brand or business is perceived by potential customers on the internet. It lets you know what they think of you and how much they mention you. It also provides you with the maintenance of information organized by each social network.
On the other hand, it will measure your competition, offering you a comparison with you. It also leads you to analyze the decisions that worked for them to test them.
Social listening shows you the marketing strategies you need for your business or brand. It helps you attract potential customers, because it reflects the channels they trust and what they want. It is worth noting that it allows you to see brand ambassadors in your industry; you know who influences others to have certain tastes and choices.
Social Listening also allows you to interact with your customers through conversations on social networks. They themselves can show you what they think of your services.
You will avoid a reputation crisis, since you track what they say about you. That way you eliminate any misunderstanding that could become a big problem in the future. For this you can activate an alert system that quickly shows you when there is a negative conversation. In addition, it enables you to measure the results of a given campaign. With social listening you see the degree of acceptance you are getting. You target what your buyer persona will need and find out how much they like it.