Marketing Concept | Social Listening

Social Listening helps companies to efficiently track what’s being said on Social Media in real-time and track social media mentions across platforms. This helps the company identify what people are talking about their products, competitors and their experience with it. 

For example, You open a bakery shop in the neighbourhood and you sell different sort of cookies, cakes and whatnot. One day, you listen to your consumers talking about your product. You listen and understand the positive and negative experiences related to your product. This is what is called Social listening and it gives you insights about your business. You can analyse if other consumers also feel the same and then you can take some measures to improve your product based on social listening. 

Consumer listening involves a dual step process where you monitor your brand across social media and then analyse the insights to take some action. 

This is more than just measuring your social media engagement rate or measuring different metrics associated with your page. It is to understand what consumer is feeling about your product or service. This is to analyse social media sentiment and take actions based on them. 

Sentiment Analysis

Sentiment Analysis is the process of determining whether a piece of writing is positive, negative or neutral. It is used to gain an understanding of the attitudes, opinions and emotions expressed within an online mention. Many Social Listening Tools have a Sentiment Analysis built into their solution. 

How to use Social Listening

• Engaging with consumers: 

Brand engage with consumers on social media handles by answering their questions or by sharing visual content. It could be to solve a consumer problem or by acknowledging their mistakes. Active social listening helps the brand to drive more engagement.

• Prevent a brand crisis

Brands can use social listening tools to avert PR crisis. For example, if the consumer sentiments are negative, they can look for the cause by analysing what consumers are sharing/tweeting about and can solve that in real-time. They can analyse if the issue has been created by their post or tweet and they can take that down immediately. 

• Competitive Analysis

Brands can also analyse what people are talking about their competitors. They can find about competitors new product launch or new promo schemes and thus can adjust accordingly. It also helps the brand to pitch in their own product if the consumer is really unhappy with the competitor brand. For example, an Indian celebrity posted on Instagram that how she was unhappy with the trolley bag that she purchased from a particular company X.  Now, a competitor brand Y used this opportunity to deliver their trolley bag to the celebrity’s place within the next 2 hours. This was a marketing move to promote their new range of trolley bags which happened because of real-time social listening.

• Provide better customer service/Collect feedback about your product

Brands can understand what their customers are complaining about and if many consumers are complaining about the similar issue, then the company can change the product and improve them. New features can be added to address the issue. 

• Identify influencers

Brands can identify those influencers who naturally like their product and talk about them. Brands can collaborate with them. Social listening also gives a sense of who the important influencers are.  These influencers can have a huge impact on how your consumers feel about your products. 

You might also like to read about the BCG Matrix or Ansoff Matrix