Social listening: Monitoring conversations for better marketing

There’s no denying that listening to your prospective and current customers is one of the best ways to know which aspects of your business need to be enhanced. Engaging with customers begins with understanding their opinions and the things that drive these insights. If you want to build stronger connections with your customers, you need to monitor consumer behavior effectively.

Businesses that have taken their marketing strategy to social networking sites can leverage their online presence through social listening. This practice aims to let brands gain valuable knowledge about their customers’ problems and motivations by monitoring their activities on the social web.

How does social listening work?

Social media monitoring often involves the use of online tools that enable brands to keep track of what their customers say online. Most listening tools operate by crawling websites, especially social media sites, and indexing them. Once indexed, the tools allow brands to analyze, monitor track online activities with the use of search features. The parameters that are commonly measured include statistics about the reach, impact, share, and derived actions of conversations about the brand.

Aside from keyword monitoring, other features of social listening tools include extraction of metadata, topic and trend analysis, query comparison, influencer profiling, sentiment analysis, and charting or visualization of results. Most features vary depending on which social media platform the listening tool was made for.

How does it lead to better marketing?

The result of knowing what your customers feel about your brand is faster correspondence. It helps take advantage of your social media coverage to connect with your customers and solve their problems immediately. With social listening, you can build strong online communities where every member can act as brand ambassador. From there, you can track conversations and identify prospective leads, and influencers in your industry.

With easy access to the conversations of your target audience, you can now have a better overview of the market. This can help you measure how great the demand for your product or service is. Social listening can be used to filter content across several platforms to know what buyers of similar products wish to change from the items that they buy. This not only lets you improve the features of your own product and market them better; it also lets you become aware of how your competitors are doing in terms of market reception.

There are many social listening tools that you can choose from. The goal before picking a tool is always knowing what your business wants to measure. Any social media campaign must have measurable outcomes. Once identified, you can now select the tool that can best lead you to the kind of information that you need.

Social listening lets you gather valuable insights that are essential to every aspect of your business, including your marketing strategy. This knowledge lets you create positive interactions and make changes based on data provided by social listening tools. The best thing about listening to conversations on social media is that you don’t even have to ask people what they feel about your brand. You just have to choose the most suitable listening tool for your brand and use the gathered insights in managing your brand’s reputation and delighting your market.