What is it?
Social listening means social listening, in other words, monitoring or tracking the occasions when your products or services or your brand are mentioned on social networks. Once these mentions have been located, they should be analyzed to extract all the valuable information they contain, such as opinions, reviews and data that the audience has about the brand, product or service and act accordingly.
How can I do social listening of my brand?
Easy, follow these two steps, search for the name of your brand, hashtags or labels key that you use or the name of your products, services in social networks. Once you have searched them, collect mentions and analyze the information it contains.
The most important are direct mentions of your brand, product or service, no matter how many times it has been mentioned, the truly important is the information that the mention contains. With this information we can find out our consumers’ opinion
or our audience from us, indeed competitors. The purpose of social listening is to find out whether the right decisions are being made or whether a change in strategy is needed.
Thanks to social networks we have access to these types of comments which are very valuable information for companies. In networks, users express themselves more freely and without filters than in any kind of survey we can do, so we will obtain
truthful information. Knowing this, it is easier to make the necessary decisions to please our consumers, increase sales or even positioning in the consumer’s mindset.
In addition, with this network inquiry into the opinions of your audience, we recommend that you take the opportunity to respond to users who have mentioned you, either with a negative or positive comment, demonstrating engagement with
your audience.
Benefits of social listening
Have truthful opinions from your audience
Social listening allows us to know consumer’s opinions in a completely natural and honest way about our brand and what we offer. It is not necessary to imagine or suppose, as we have that information directly.
With this valuable information we should be able to identify our weaknesses as a brand, because customers will comment on problems they have had with us. As well as comments that mention what they like about our service or product. All this information should not be ignored, we should use it to change or emphasize our key points and offer a better service in the near future.
Identifying brand ambassadors
In this search through the networks we will find many profiles of many types giving their opinion about our brand or services. When searching the networks, we should pay attention to the people who are staunch defenders of our brand, and interact in a
positive way with that person, offering them a collaboration and even more so if they have a considerable number of followers. This is a way of thanking them for mentioning the brand and also a way of reaching a larger audience.
Interacting with users
As we mentioned before it is recommended to exploit this search of comments of our brand in the networks to answer as many as you can, and if not, to the most highlighted.
It would be helpful to keep your audience satisfied, to appreciate the positive comments. And the negative ones apologize and communicate that you are already trying to fix the problem.
Get to know the competence
Social listening helps us to know what the public thinks of our brand, it also helps us to know what the audience thinks of us and what they do. This allows us to know where to direct our campaigns, to know what points we should highlight or what opportunities we have to win customers or increase customer loyalty.
Get new customers
Replying to the comments of our audience, we will gain authority, add value to the brand and even gain positioning.
The audience likes to get feedback from brands, furthermore if we solve a problem. These interactions allow us to create closer bonds with our potential customers, as
well as giving an image of greater engagement with our customers. Replying to these comments that we believe new customers can be gained, being a source of reliability and honesty with the audience.
How to implement it in your company
Knowing all the advantages that social listening offers you, you have probably thought about implementing it in your strategies. But it’s not an easy task to do without help. That’s why we offer you a list of the tools you should use.
- Hootsuite and Hootsuite Insights
They are perhaps the best network management and administration tools, allowing you to track comments and respond and communicate with your audience from within Hootsuite. The difference between the two is that Hootsuite Insights offers the possibility to use filters to track more precisely.
HubSpot has a network management software that, together with the previous ones, is one of the best tools to use. It serves to monitor everything related to the campaigns launched in networks, also to detect trends related to the selected keywords.
- Sprout Social
You can integrate this tool within HubSpot. Making it very easy and intuitive, making social listening very easy, fast and simple.
- Falcon.io
It can also be integrated into HubSpot and allows you to filter by selected keywords, unusual activity or complete phrases.
- TweetReach
One of the best tools to find out what the audience thinks. It’s based on the social network Twitter, where opinions, positive and negative, are expressed par excellence. This way you can analyze the mentions received, the reach of those tweets and know who has the greatest influence.
- Review trackers
It helps us monitor reviews from more than 50 different websites and even respond to those posted from Google and Facebook.
- Google Alerts
Google Alerts It is a service offered by Google that allows you to generate alerts around the topics of your choice. This way you will be alerted when a conversation is created around your name, your brand or your product.
Techniques for active listening in social networks
As we have already mentioned, it is not about piling up mentions of your brand or product, it is about analyzing what was meant. Francisco Isuani, CEO of Socialand determines that for this we must take into account four aspects:
- Interpret what people say
Have a team of professionals in this area. A team of psychologists and sociologists will help you determine in greater detail what is being said about you.
- Know your audience
The opinions you post will be based on each user’s experience and situation. That’s why you should respond to those requests or opinions in the most individualized way possible. Knowing your audience will allow you to act more specifically.
- Qualitative reporting
It is not only important the quantity of comments received. We must focus on quality as well as quantity, analyze the characteristics of those comments in order to provide solutions.
- 24/7
The ideal is to always be aware of the networks, with the intention of reducing the response time to your comments. This shows real interest in your audience. By listening to your audience and taking their opinion into account, they will bevery satisfied and you will be able to build customer loyalty or get leads.
In conclusion, social listening has become a very important marketing strategy for any company, and it offers the company real feedback from the people who know or consume. It is the key to strengthen your weak points and always offer a better service.
Are you willing to listen to your consumers?
