Social networks have become one of the most effective communication channels between companies and their audience. In addition, it has also become a valuable source of information, since through social networks you can find out what the public thinks about the brand or its products or services. It is precisely here where you should practice Social Listening.
We explain what Social Listening is and how you can apply it in your digital marketing strategies.
What is Social Listening or social listening?
He Social Listening or social listening consists in track or trace the times your brand, product or service has been mentioned on social networks. Once these mentions are located, the information must be analyzed to find out the opinions, criticisms and other data that the audience has about the brand, product or service and act accordingly.
You can do Social Listening in just two steps:
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Search on social networks for the brand nameof the product or service through hashtags, keywords, tags…
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Collect the mentions and analyze the information what’s in it.
The important thing here is not the number of times the brand, product or service has been mentioned, but the comment or information that accompanies that mention. This way you can find out what people think about the brand, even about competitors. This is a way to discover if you are going in the right direction or need to change your strategy.
There is no doubt that having access to this type of comments gives very valuable information to the company, since on social networks people express themselves freely and without filters, so you can know the most authentic truth. Knowing this, it is much easier to make improvements to increase sales or even improve brand image.
You can also take advantage of this search for mentions to respond to users, both those who have left a positive comment and those who have left a negative one, to give a much closer and more committed image.
Advantages of Social Listening
Social Listening, also known as social listening, has numerous advantages for a brand.
Allows you to interact with users
Users can mention the brand to make a positive or negative comment, so You can take advantage of this search to give an answer to all or, if there are many, to the most notable ones. Those who have said something positive about the brand or its product or service can be thanked, while those who have given a negative opinion should be given an apology, as well as reassurance that an attempt is being made. solve that problem or improve.
Social Listening also allows you to detect if any of the actions have bothered the audience. In this case, it is best to apologize publicly, even withdraw the advertisement, product or anything that was not liked on a large scale. This will give a brand image committed to the audience.
Have completely reliable opinions
Social listening serves to know in a totally reliable way what the audience thinks about the brand and what it offers. It is not necessary to make guesses or assumptions, since through comments you can know the most sincere opinion of the public. This can be used to improve in many aspects.
Through these opinions you can identify brand weaknessessince customers will comment on the problems they may have had with customer service, with a product or service, during the purchasing process… All this information should not be ignored, it should be used to improve and offer the customer a much better service in a future as near as possible.
Identify brand advocates
There are people who like to show on social networks those products or services with which they feel satisfied, they even talk about specific brands. Through the tracking carried out in Social Listening, these profiles can be found, who can be offered a collaboration, especially if they have a large number of followers.
This is a way to thank them for mentioning the brand and, at the same time, advertise and reach a larger audience.
Know the competition
Social listening should also serve to know what the competition does and what the public thinks about it. Knowing what the audience says about the competition helps to know where to direct a marketing campaign, in addition to knowing what improvements to offer. It is even a way to detect possible threats in time, such as the launch of a new product, to plan and respond to it as soon as possible and not lose customers.
Get new clients
Responding to both positive and negative comments is one way to gain authority and give greater value to the brand, even to gain positioning.
The public likes to get a response from the brand, especially if it solves a problem. This action allows us to create much closer relationships with potential clients, as well as give a much more committed image to the public. Of course, it is not about responding only to negative comments, since those people who leave a positive one also highly value a thank you response.
Responding to comments makes a person consider that brand as the best resource to make a purchase, hence we say that it is a way to get new customers.
Event tracking
Social listening allows know how participants feel before, during and after an event organized by the brand or in which it is a participant. All mentions can be useful to improve, especially if it is an event that will be repeated. It serves any type of event: exhibitions, fairs…
Tools to apply Social Listening in your company
Now that you know what Social Listening is and all the advantages it has, you are surely wondering how it can be applied in a company, since collecting and analyzing the information from all the mentions is not easy. However, there are tools that can make this job much easier, especially for medium and large companies.
These tools are:
Hootsuite and Hootsuite Insights
They are the best tools to manage and manage social networks, since they allow you to track comments, mentions and hashtags, in addition to responding and communicating with the public from Hootsuite itself. The difference between the two is that Hootsuite Insights allows you to use filters, which makes the tracking much more exhaustive.
Synthesio
It is integrated into Hootsuite and is used to control mentions on social networks. It also allows you to add filters, something very useful for doing much more exhaustive searches.
HubSpot Network Management Software
Together with Hootsuite, it is one of the best tools to monitor everything related to the campaigns launched on social networks, as well as detect trends related to the keywords that have been selected.
Sprout Social
This tool can be integrated within HubSpot. One of its strong points is that it is very easy to use and intuitive, allowing you to do social listening quickly and easily.
Brandwatch
It allows you to discover key insights from your digital consumers and thus be able to stay ahead of your competition. It is one of the tools most used by leading companies in the market.
Review Trackers
It allows you to monitor reviews from more than 50 different websites, even allowing you to respond to those published on Google and Facebook.
TweetBinder
Twitter is one of the best social networks to find out the opinions or feelings of users in reference to a brand, product or service, since its quick and simple way of sharing text makes it ideal for publishing reviews, whether positive or negative. With TweetBinder you can analyze mentions, calculate the reach of a tweet and know who is most influential within a topic.
Although social listening tasks could be carried out using the search engine, it is clear that these tools make the work much easier. They also allow this action to be carried out in a much more precise and efficient way, in addition to the fact that different fashion social networks can be analyzed from one tool.
In conclusion, Social Listening has become one of the best marketing strategies, since it offers the brand very valuable information about what its audience thinks and thinks about it. All of this can be used to improve and, above all, to position yourself ahead of the competition.