What Does Social Media Listening Mean?
Social media listening, also known as social listening, is the act of tracking, sectioning, and assessing discussions across social media platforms to determine brand engagement, the performance of social initiatives, and inspire content development for target audiences.
Online discussions generate enormous volumes of unstructured data. When it comes to social listening, it’s crucial to establish what the organization’s goals are. Depending on the purpose, the proper tool may be a sequence of free Google Alerts or a costly software package that includes ad hoc analysis and complete interaction with historical customer relationship management programs.
The use of social media and one-on-one conversations as a source of consumer data has its place, but social listening is swiftly rising to the top of the list. The following are just a few of the numerous ways you may utilize social media to acquire insight:
- Keeping an eye on customer service forums on the internet
- The use of software tools to collect feedback from social media
- Encouraging consumers to propose new product features and vote upon their preferences
Using social media monitoring tools, you may search for certain terms on blogs, social networking sites, forums, discussions, and other social media platforms. Unstructured data is transformed into numerical values connected to structured data in a database using monitoring software. The data may then be evaluated using standard data mining methods.
Social Media Monitoring vs. Social Media Listening
Social media monitoring clarifies what individuals say on social media. Social listening elucidates why individuals speak what they say. Monitoring is tactical, while listening is strategic in nature.
Social Media Monitoring
A restaurant watches Twitter for talks of its new dish; a hamburger served on a bun with cream cheese. Once recognized, the company may or may not reply to the reference. The primary objective of monitoring is to collect data. There is not always an accompanying plan. The firm may monitor how their hamburger is mentioned in internet conversations.
Social Listening
The same restaurant watches social media for mentions of its new hamburger and collects the data to do sentiment analysis on what customers say. The restaurant utilizes the data gathered to construct a more comprehensive marketing approach. It may ascertain the following:
- If the hamburger is popular with the public
- What they find appealing about it
- What foods they like eating with it
- innovative concepts for the company’s next highlighted product
In the case of listening, the company does not respond to every product reference. It does not attempt to influence the dialogue or modify people’s attitudes about the product. Instead, it seeks to sense sentiment and gather data to establish a plan for improving sentiment in the future.
Social media listening and social media monitoring are not necessarily contradictory. A social listening approach goes beyond social monitoring to acquire a more profound knowledge of brand-centric social media discussions.
What to Gather from Social Listening
- An understanding of the audience: Get to know who your brand’s customers are and what they like. Know how to sell to your target demographic on their preferred platform.
- Determining what to listen for: There will be an abundance of data from which to form conclusions. To get the most from your data, you must know what your firm hopes to discover.
- A developed strategy: You must utilize your conclusions from an analysis of social media information to create a plan. It’s a good idea for a business to figure out what exactly it is that its consumers appreciate about the social dialogue.
At NetBase Quid, our objective is to provide AI-powered market and customer insight to help businesses reinvent themselves in an unpredictable and chaotic environment. Using artificial intelligence, our platform can process billions of indexed resources across all types of structured and unstructured data, allowing brands, advertising agencies, and consulting firms to make data-driven, accurate, timely, and cost-effective decisions.