Social Listening What It Is And How You Can Apply It To Your Business

Social Listening is an increasingly important strategy in monitoring the company’s image and improving its online reputation. If communication between brands and customers is today more horizontal than ever, detecting user attitudes towards a business on social media can make a difference in any company’s strategy. Social Listening seeks to detect these attitudes and provide information to improve the digital reputation of a company. We will tell you how.

What Is Social Listening

Social Listening is the monitoring of social networks in search of comments, mentions, and other types of messages that allow us to determine the opinion of customers about a brand.  It is thus about obtaining information about what the users of a business think to later analyze this data and act accordingly.

Although it resembles a certain extent the practices of Social Monitoring, Social Listening provides a broader point of view in which not only a specific marketing campaign is taken into account, but also, among others:

• Mentions about a brand.
• Collection of testimonials and customer feedback.
• Trends about the industry to which the brand belongs.

In addition, Social Listening incorporates, as we have already said, analysis tools to conclude the data to improve the company’s reputation. In short, Social Listening is understood as a long-term strategy and goes beyond specific campaigns.

How Does Social Listening Work And What Is It For

Social Listening can be implemented in two steps:

2.1. Network Monitoring

First of all, it is necessary to monitor the social networks in which a company is present and even those in which it is not. You should look for elements related to the brand (the name itself and keywords about its products, for example), to the sector or the competition, in the form of mentions, hashtags, comments, messages.

This step can be carried out manually or through tools such as Sprout Social, depending on the exhaustiveness and volume of data that you want to achieve. The objective is to understand what is being said about the business and what is the attitude of users towards the company (the so-called “social media sentiment”).

2.2. Analysis Of The Information

As a second step, it will be crucial to analyze the information obtained so that the company can take concrete measures to improve its reputation in networks. Through Social Listening, it is possible to obtain information for:

• Provide a better user experience in areas such as customer service through social networks (replying to their messages, mentions, comments.).
• Get ideas about business opportunities or optimize the products or services of a company, according to what users are demanding on networks.
• Improve the content on social networks, following the expectations of followers and customers.

Benefits Of Applying It To Your Business

• Improvement of the company image and relationship with customers: today, users expect close and immediate communication with brands through social channels. What’s more, 46% of consumers believe that the right interactions with users make a difference to a company’s reputation, according to Sprout Social.
• Discover new opportunities: Social Listening is a powerful tool to discover what exactly users demand from a business. What’s more, according to the same Sprout Social report cited above, 90% of marketers say this type of data is what allows them to differentiate themselves in the marketplace.  
• Detecting through Social Listening that many users complain about the same problem or demand the same type of solution is to discover an opportunity for improvement for a business. Then, you just need to take the steps to get it up and running.
• Perfect crisis management (and anticipate them): in the age of social networks, brands must listen to what users say about them, also when they criticize them, and especially during reputation crises. With the right Social Listening tools, brands can quickly detect when there is a reputation problem and put measures in place to tackle it.

Social Listening is, in short, a crucial part of managing a company’s online reputation, which complements others such as obtaining positive reviews on Google.