Social listening is one of the best components of branding — it helps business owners and marketers analyze, track, and respond to conversations about your brand. It is also considered one of the main components of audience research.

You’re missing out on important and valuable insight if you’re not making the most out of social listening strategy in place. Social listening allows you to determine what your customers think about your brand and what they think about your competitors.

What is social listening?

Social listening works in conjunction with social monitoring — but do keep in mind that these are two different things, doing two different jobs and often used together. Going back, it is a detailed analysis of your audience, what they care about, and what they say about your brand.

It uncovers all the information that are beyond the number of likes and mentions about your brand. It is a broader take on the overall look of your brand’s social landscape.

What is the importance of social listening?

Social listening keeps you aware of the bigger picture. Instead of focusing on issues and individual tweets what you get are aggregated view which highlights themes and trends that you can make us for your brand strategy planning and execution.

It helps you keep a tab of on-going issues and will give you a solid solution to solve the root cause of the problem instead of coming up with a quick fix for it. On the other hand, social listening offers valuable information that you can apply to any aspect of brand operations.

What are the benefits of social listening?

1. Customer engagement

Social listening helps you determine different opportunities to help you engage in conversations about your brand — this could be anything about how people feel and think about your brand and even customer service requests.

2. Improve your brand strategy in real-time

Keep in mind that customer engagement is excellent but it should come together with a positive social sentiment. Social listening comes in by allowing you to spot changes in social sentiment in real-time, therefore, giving you a sense of what triggered that change. By looking and going back to your recent posts, it gives you a sense of what has gone right or wrong.

3. Know what people think about your compared to your competition

Social listening is also about comprehension and understanding what people say about your brand — it allows you to have an insight on where to stand on the marketplace. It also allows you to know what your competitors are doing and what is their latest products or if they are developing a new digital marketing campaign.

4. Develop new sales leads

Social listening allows you to identify people that are interested and asking about the industry that houses your brand. You’’ find excellent leads that you can build good relationships with for your social selling. Reaching out, making a connection, and sharing valuable information help you establish your brand as the most efficient source when it comes to helping customers with their purchasing decision.

5. Uncover problems needed addressing

Monitoring important industry keywords will help you uncover conversations made about your products or services or features that don’t work for your customers — this is considered problems that need your attention and need addressing. Having this information is an important element for your development team because it helps them tweak an existing product or make changes to your services to come up with solutions. This part of social listening helps you address problems even before it leads your business down the drain.

Conclusion

Social listening is also about making your bran authentic — this is crucial for building your brand on social media by making an authentic connection with your customers. It is a tool in your branding that gives information that can make a huge difference. You have to keep in mind to come up with clear goals for what you want your business to achieve, the ability to focus your attention to your customer and what they have to say, and you should have the desire to keep on improving your performance based on the results of social listening.

For more information about social media listening, download our Brand Identity ebook.

If you have more questions or are looking for professional help with your social listening planning for your brand, talk to one of our brand identity specialists now!