Let's understand Social Listening

When it comes to enhancing customer experience, customer feedback has always been the number one sort after technique used by brands. Now that we have entered the digital space, just understanding if your customer is happy or satisfied is not enough. With brands being active on social media platforms to engage with their audiences, it’s become easier for brands to understand what their customers are more into, the type of content they like, and if their products are working well with the brands or not.?

Keeping a tab on how your customers are mentioning your brand, if your brand name is taken with your competitors or if it’s mentioned when they want something more off your brand, all of this cumulatively is called “Social Listening”!?

Let’s Understand Social Listening?

In simpler words, social listening or social media listening is the process of identifying, accessing, and understanding what is said about a brand or a company by the masses. The mood and tone in which the name is mentioned, how often it is mentioned, and/if the topic of discussion is negative or positive.?

With so much data being on the internet, most of which is unstructured and unfiltered, each brand must have an ear open about what is being said. It’s not necessary that you are listening just about your brand. One may even be listening and understanding what is being said about their competitors in the market as well.?

Seems a little too much and a little too nosy… doesn’t it??

However, one cannot deny the fact that we are living in a digital world. People believe and rely on information more on the internet than they would on anyone in person. Social media platforms have become a hub of information and with content available from reviews to try-ons to first look at new launches, the acceptance of your brand by people online is more vital.?

To have their brand name mentioned and create hype around their products, brands are already working on strategies from influencer campaigns to social media campaigns, giveaways, contests, etc. With so much being said, how would a brand keep track of whether its name is being written in the good books or the bad books??

4 Essential Tips For Social Listening?

1. Define your audience set?

?With millions of people online, and millions having millions of opinions, it would be much easier if you define your audience set. Understand, which set of demographics is your target audience, which tier are you targeting, where is your customer base located, and who exactly is your existing audience. Understanding what interests your audiences, what engages them, and what are they looking for is a critical step when defining your audience set. A defined set will be easier to handle and would be much easier to track in the insights as well.?

2. Study your social insights data

?If you are a brand that has been ignoring its social media insights, you need to get into them! The insights offer any brand huge amounts of data in the audience mindset. When it comes to social listening, your brand’s insights would be of utmost importance.?

3. Cancel the extra noise?

With so much data available on the internet, and with the data you get from your insights, it would be a sinking ship if you go on that boat! Hence it is necessary for you to refine the found data and select only the essential parameters. It is for you to cut the extra noise and only listen to the parts that are important and helpful for your brand. For example, you are a cosmetics brand and the internet is currently raging over a particular shade of lipstick this season. Now, this is a key insight into placing your specific lipstick shade around the trend and how you can use the trend to have your brand name come up.?

4. Build a strategy for your brand?

?Now that you have insights into what is being said about you, strategize as to what you would do with that information. If the data is in your favor, and people are liking your products, how are you gonna attract more customers? In case the feedback is negative, how are you going to turn the situation in your favor? It’s not just about collecting information and analyzing it. It goes beyond just information gathering.?

Social Listening is a key tool to be used for your digital presence. If you are a brand with active social media platforms in 2023, you cannot miss out on social listening.?

Will you be listening the next time you’re on social media??