6 Reasons You Need A Social Listening Strategy

What is Social Listening? 

Social listening lets you tune into social media platforms to discover what your audience is saying about you in real time. This is done by rounding up online conversations and mentions of your brand to analyze and discover insights that help you decide on any necessary changes. 

NOTE: Social listening is often confused with social tracking. Social listening is done with the intention of gaining valuable insights with the intention of acting, whereas social tracking is the compiling of data. Think of social tracking as a step within the social listening process. 

What is a Social Listening Strategy? 

Now like everything in marketing, it’s important to develop a strategy before embarking on a new marketing activity especially one you have never done before. Developing a strategy for social listening helps you measure its success and ensure you don’t miss any key steps.  

Without a strategy, you’re simply gathering results without any plan to take action with them. 

This article will tell you the best ways to conduct a social listening strategy and what you can do with the results. 

1. Determine your goals. 

Your Social Listening Strategy needs to begin with a clear goal in mind. This might look like Increasing Engagement, Strengthening Community Engagement, or Building Brand Trust. 

Whatever your goal is, make sure it is a S.M.A.R.T. one; meaning that it’s specific, measurable, achievable, realistic, and timebound. This is the first step in setting your social listening strategy up for success. 

2. Choose your platforms 

Where do your customers engage the most? 

This might be something you have yet to discover, thus your decision to start social listening. If you don’t know where your customers and competitors' customers typically interact, choose the most popular platforms like Instagram, TikTok, Facebook, Snapchat, and LinkedIn. As you go through the social listening process you can start to narrow it down to platforms that are most relevant to your customers. If you already know that your users primarily use Instagram and Twitter, then go ahead and start listening. 

3. Choose your tools. 

There are many tools that allow you to conduct social listening. Some of these tools let you schedule and post your content within them as well, whereas others simply track mentioned and tags of your brand.  

We’ve compiled a list of social listening tools, categorized by price and simplicity: 

Low cost, high effort 

Weekly intakes of what people are saying by searching the same tags per social network. 

Buffer: Free 

Features: 

• Measure audience discussions and engagement using reports and analytics tools. 

• Monitor stories to determine the best-performing content. 

BuzzSumo: Free 

Features: 

• Discover highest-performing content across social media channels. 

• Better organize content based on its relevance to your daily work. 

Medium cost, medium effort 

These apps require you to do some digging, but provide more information than their cheaper counterparts. 

Awario: $24/month 

Features:

• Social Selling tool allows you to compile ongoing list of leads and identify posts of competitors that are like yours. 

• Software connects with blogs and forums. 

Iconosquare: $49/month 

Features:

• Listen and engage with your audience by using the Conversations feature 

• Simultaneously cross-post social content on multiple profiles 

High cost, low effort 

These apps are some of the most expensive but require little to no work on your end. 

Falcon.io: $108/month 

Features:

• Meet all of your social media management needs in one dashboard, allowing you to conduct social listening, publishing, engagement, reporting, audience data management. 

Create custom response templates for your FAQs 

Keyhole: $79/month 

Features: 

• Track hashtags with the Hashtag Analytics feature and determine how your branded hashtags are performing. 

• Predict hashtag performance using AI features 

4. Plan 

As conversations start pouring in, you’ll want a plan for how and when to respond to your customers. Around 80% of customers expect a brand to respond to them within a day, according to research. So having a plan for how to respond to certain inquiries will help you meet this expectation. 

Another reason to increase your brand’s responsivity is that it builds brand trust and is a great way to intrigue future prospects. 

5. Measure 

One of the most important parts of your Social Listening Strategy; measuring is where you compile all of your data. Start off by measuring conversation volume, mentions, sentiments, and engagement. Then add more as you see fit; maybe your brand needs to focus more on competitors, or understand which of your content is most effective. This is why stating your goals beforehand is important so you always know where you want to be headed. 

6. Apply 

After you’ve compiled your data, it’s time to analyze and apply any insights. 

Your list of prospective customers and dissatisfied competitor customers is now a list of leads to give to your sales team.  After monitoring competitor content and measuring its success or failure, you can apply this knowledge to see if you need to make adjustments to your content.

 Conclusion 

According to Hootsuite, social listening is in the top 10 emerging trends of 2022 and should be done and its results considered before you decide upon your social media content.  

Social listening was cited as a vital tool for avoiding PR mishaps and understanding customers changing preferences. It’s also a great way to foresee emerging trends and get on top of them before your competitors. 

We hope you’re ready to start your brand’s social listening strategy; if you need any help our team is always here to offer our social listening experience and consultation. 

Written by Morgan Law