A Guide to Social Listening for Your Business

If you’ve made it this far you probably have some understanding of social listening. However, it remains a sometimes complex or confusing concept and in many senses is still in its infancy.

What is social listening?

The Wikipedia page about what Brandwatch does defines it as “software which archives social media data and conversations happening online in order to provide brands with information and the means to track specific segments to analyze their online presence.”

However we like to take a simpler spin on it: “the act of using technology to track what is being posted online”.

In essence any social listening platform will allow you to do one key thing at its core; tally the volume of instances that a particular topic is mentioned online. The corresponding metadata, user metrics and other analysis follows the aggregation of this original data.

The evolution from monitoring to listening

Those with a fine eye for detail may have noticed a slight shift in how social listening companies like ourselves define what they do.

A year ago the majority of the social listening industry described themselves as social media monitoring companies (we still do to some extent). Yet in recent months there’s been a shift to instead using the term social listening.

Social Listening vs Social Media Monitoring on Google Trends.

But why change the name? There’s no clear reason for this, instead it’s made up of a accumulation of smaller points – perhaps even that social listening is less of a mouthful and to distinguish it from traditional media monitoring.

A common practical thought is the term monitoring can assume you are looking at a specific subject; global temperature, price of bread, students grades etc. Keeping an eye on things, if you like.

In contrast, with listening you don’t just monitor, but you actually comprehend. This can be anything – from a Royal Baby to an anecdote from space.

How businesses can use social listening

You really can use social listening to do an awful lot. It’s much more than upgrade of old school market research: it’s actionable, unsolicited and real-time.

Comparing mentions of Premier League competitors over the last 7 days.

• Customer Service: Allowing for proactive and intelligently prioritized social customer care
• Influencer Marketing: Identifying individuals that can amplify your messaging in a relevant and impactful way
• Market Research: Gather information on your customers, product segments or target markets

Comparing Ben & Jerry’s ice cream flavors over time.

• Reputation and Crisis Management: Remain alert to potential crises and limit them at the first possible instance.

Negative mentions of Apple increasing during the #bendgate crisis.

If you’re still struggling to gage exactly how social listening adds value to any of these points then click through on the hyperlinks or here to find some extra content that goes into serious detail on each of these use cases.

What to look for in a social listening platform

There are plenty of criteria to consider when selecting a suitable platform for your needs.

Things to look out for here are:

• The amount of data on offer – how much data can the tool track, just API streaming or do they have access to the full firehose?
• How many sources do they gather data from? Will you be getting the coverage of sites most useful to you – review sites, forums, blogs, news etc?
• Do they have access to historic data? Many tools won’t allow you to look backwards to track trends and validate research.
• How many languages do they track? And if they cover them, do they support them? Is sentiment analysis and topic extraction available in those languages?

You also want to check how easy it is the harness the power of the social listening tool. Some things to look out for could be:

• The ability to create bespoke dashboards to view your data in the manner most useful to you
• A helpful interface that feels intuitive to use and easy to learn.
• Filters allowing you dig deep into segments of your data
• Automated, bulk processing to analyze sets of data on a recurring basis with ease

Add ons are also pretty important when considering your purchase, they allow you to figure out value for money. How strong is their customer support? How committed are they to innovation? Do they publish expert content about their field?

The future of social listening – movement towards social media intelligence?

Within the next year you should see a lot of small innovations that will not only make social listening easier, but more valuable to your company.

In the short term you should expect a whole host of incremental advancements: faster and larger data coverage, more languages, increased location accuracy and eventually photo tagging and analysis. The kinds of things you might expect, perhaps.

In the long term, social listening has the potential to amplify into something with far wider application than today. What exactly that is, we’re not too sure yet, but here’s a few ideas.

• The internet of things will allow for collection of data not only online but in the physical world. For example; you’ll be able to tell how many people washed their clothes within the last hour, what was their gender, age, hair color, and – of course – what TV show they watched whilst they waited.
• Purchase decisions will be built on social data. You’ll be able to instantly gather data on a pair of shoes, restaurant or fridge – compare expert reviews with general public perception and match that with your own social data to see if it’s the right price, style, quality etc. for you.
• There will be a continued shift in power from brand to the consumer. Brands will have to make products that adapt to the needs of each consumer and (you guessed it) they’ll do this by analyzing their social data.

Take away

Don’t disregard social listening due to a lack of understanding or belief in the tool – try one and make that choice yourself. If you happen to be using a tool that you’re not happy with don’t settle.

We don’t want to talk too much about how we’re performing in regard to each of these points, partly because some lovely people are already doing that for us.

Instead, why don’t you put us to the test? Get a free demo today and see if we match our own high standard:

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Feature image taken from SumAll blog post: What Taco Bell Can Teach You About Being a Better Social Media Marketer