Ever wonder what consumers REALLY think about your brand?

Or maybe you are wondering how your product or service resonates with your audience?

Perhaps you’re curious about the behaviors of your target audience?

These questions come up with every marketing professional. And the good news? These questions you’ve been asking about your audience are all answered through one crucial social media marketing strategy–social listening.

Afterall, Two-thirds of marketers say that social listening has increased in value within the last year

In this post, we are going to dive into every aspect of social listening so that you can implement it today and finally get a pulse on your current and target audience.

An Explanation of Social Listening

Social listening is the process of identifying what is being said on social media about brands, products, services or individuals. 

It allows you to react proactively and gain insights into your brand health. 

Not only can you gauge what consumers are saying about your brand on social media, you can also use social listening to get a pulse on industry topics pertaining to your brand and how your competitors are performing on social. 

Why is Social Listening Important?

Implementing social listening has many benefits.

• Knowing how consumers feel about your brand
• Gain audience insights
• Be proactive about negative brand mentions
• Campaign analysis 
• Get a pulse on competitor’s online presence
• Industry trends
• Identify unhappy customers
• Collect campaign information
• Avoid a crisis before it escalates
• Discover thought leaders in your brand’s industry

How Exactly Does Social Listening Work?

Social listening contains 3 components.

Monitoring: This involves tuning in to conversations about your brand, products, services, and keywords that resonate with your brand. This can be done manually or through a social listening tool which we will get into later in this post. 

Analysis: This entails using the mentions you find through monitoring and making them actionable. Based on these social-centric conversations, you can analyze your audience and their sentiment when it comes to your brand.

Response: After monitoring and analyzing, the last step of social listening is choosing how to respond. This can be individual engagement with social conversations or even repositioning the entire brand strategy.

Social Listening Best Practices 

Once you’re ready to implement social listening, there are some strategies that will help this strategy be effective:

• Get a thorough understanding of your audience and develop social media buyer personas and use collected data to frame your social media marketing strategy
• Monitor for mentions of your brand as well as keywords that pertain to your industry
• Use a social media listening tool to save time identifying conversations
• If consumers are saying negative things on social about your brand, develop a strategy to engage with such consumers
• Adapt your social media marketing strategy based on conversations discovered through social listening
• Identify which social platforms your audience is on to engage with them
• Respond to posts about your brand in real-time

Platforms to Power Your Social Listening Efforts

To save yourself a ton of time scraping manually for brand mentions, consider a platform that automates this for you.

There are a variety to choose from and most of them aren’t super expensive. Most of them also offer a free trial so take advantage of this and find the platform that resonates best with you.

Some places to start are Hootsuite, Talkwalker, SproutSocial, and Lately.

How to Get Started With Social Listening For Your Brand

Now that you know everything you need to know about social listening, it’s time to get started!

If social listening sounds a little overwhelming to run in-house, there are agencies like Rossman Media that will stay on top of your social listening strategy. 

If you’re going to run social listening in-house, be sure to memorize the best practices we outlined and dedicate the time to run this strategy effectively. And be sure to get a social listening platform or you’ll waste a lot of your time. 

At the end of the day, social listening is crucial to getting a pulse on your audience. When done well, it will help you make business decisions and gain insights into what people really think about your brand.

Do you implement social listening for your brand? We’d love to read your tips in the comments below!