What is social listening?

Social listening is a technique or a process of actively monitoring and listening to conversations online. This can be conversations on social media, forums and video platforms such as YouTube. With social listening tools you can track the overall health of your brand, build content your audience is crying out for, establish new ideas for marketing campaigns, work towards improving customer experience and develop new and improved strategic product decisions. Social listening is used to by organisations to get a better understanding of their target audience. To understand what is important to them, how they speak about certain to topics, when they talk about these topics and what are the characteristics of this audience segments. By understanding their customers and target audience better, organisations are then able to provide better marketing, advertisements and products. Social listening can also be used to track how far campaigns reach, find pain points of customers and react to them in a timely manner. With social listening you get a far greater picture of what’s going on with regards to your brand on social media. While tackling issues one-by-one might seem like a logical approach, the modern-day digital marketer can benefit immensely from having a deeper understanding of what’s going on to tackle issues using the bigger picture.

Why is social listening important?

With thousands of conversations taking place every-day, all of which are relevant to your brand, social listening becomes an essential tool to understanding where you stand among the social chatter. Social listening is widely used to hone in on sentiment analysis - a method of understanding how audiences feel about your brand and marketing strategies. By paying close attention to what your audience is saying on social, you can gain a better understanding of your audience's’ response to your brand. That’s not all. Social listening doesn’t restrict you to seeing those who are upset with your brand. You can use the aggregated data to understand how both negative and positive sentiment affects your brand overall. Social listening keeps your brand aware of the bigger picture. Instead of focusing on individual tweets and issues, you get an aggregated view that highlights trends and themes you can use to direct brand strategy.