Social listening consists of these three key elements: Analytics, metrics and insights. It may seem a little complicated, but once you get the basics of it right, it is easy! Often, businesses think that social listening is just meant for monitoring comments, replies and messages about their brands. But in fact, you practise social listening because you want to be able to monitor and analyse the data coming from the various social conversations that are happening. It is indeed a two-pronged approach: monitoring and analysis. Analysing this data allows you to understand your audience better and refine your overarching strategy.

The Basics

By using social listening tools, you can then set up your social listening dashboard and think about what you want to focus. Would it be your competitors and their customers, brand health and reputation, event monitoring, or all of the above?

Competitor Review

If competitor analysis is part of your ongoing business strategy, then the data and social intelligence that you get from listening is very valuable. From measuring brand health metrics to benchmarking them against your own, to learning what your competitors’ customers are raving about their products - these are all valuable data which are readily available to you and would really help in your strategy.

Brand Reputation

You have the opportunity now to consolidate the social conversations through hashtags and keywords and gain insight into what your customers (or non-customers!) actually think about your business. The hard truth is your customers’ perception is your brand’s reality. Social listening is required to stay on top of your customers’ ever-shifting preferences and help you spot problems early. This can significantly improve your business’ brand reputation, giving you a chance to connect with customers directly if needed.

Event Monitoring

With the major shift from offline to online events, there is now an abundant of data that you might miss out if you’re not social listening. Yes, you can track the use of hashtags for your event or conference, but without social listening, you’re going to be missing out on valuable data like mentions of your event, key industry themes, or even your speakers! By setting up these components on your dashboard, you’re able to monitor feedback and mentions about your event.

In summary, you can develop many other social listening strategies that will best suit your brand or business. Social listening is a powerful tool that is rich with insights relevant to every area of your business and you’re leaving a lot of valuable data on the table if you’re not.

If you’re interested in knowing more and need help in your social listening strategy, you can reach out to one of our specialists here at Agency X.