Social Listening: Definition, Benefits, and Strategies

Digital marketing is a primary need for every brand today, which is why it is also important to understand social listening.

The role of social media for marketing is increasing. Not only as an advertising medium, but social media is also a place to evaluate and review your brand's performance.

Through social listening, you can get information from conversations that occur on social media.

Whether it is good or bad for your brand, social listening can help map potential and problems better.

So, what is social listening and how does it work? Read more below, okay!

Definition of Social Listening

Quoted from HubSpot, social listening is the process of reviewing or monitoring your business brand's social media accounts to find out customer feedback, messages left, or conversations between customers.

Well, through this social listening process, a brand will get a lot of input with specific topics and keywords about the brand.

It could be a comparative comment with competitors or the industry that includes the brand.

The social listening process will be followed up with analysis to get input and find new opportunities.

This method is often used to improve products and services by listening to customers both directly and indirectly.

Social listening has a wider scope than social monitoring.

Some of the scopes of social listening are brand mentions, customer feedback, industry trends, and other social media conversations.

Social listening has two approaches, namely by paying attention to mentions and conversations on social media.

Social listening is a method used to find the roots of media conversations that can then be applied in long-term business strategies.

Benefits of Social Listening for Brands

Reporting from Coursera, from the Hootsuite Social Media Trends survey in 2022, 65.6% of 18 thousand participants said that social listening is an important and valuable element.

One of the main reasons is that social listening helps understand customers and target audiences better, making marketing decisions easier.

Rather than making assumptions about what customers will like or dislike, it is important to understand the needs of the customers themselves.

Here are some of the benefits you can get from social listening:

1. Customers Will Feel Heard

Quoting HubSpot, from a survey conducted by Sprout Social, 46% of customers consider listening to audiences on social media to give a good impression of the brand.

Staying relevant and responsive on social media helps brands understand customer behavior better.

How a brand responds to customers or followers on social media can influence customer behavior.

If you use social listening well, you can respond appropriately and give a positive impression to followers on social media.

By conducting further analysis, it is not impossible that this can affect your brand's brand loyalty and have a long-term impact.

2. Facilitates Brand Growth Review

Every issue or problem that arises from a brand must have a big influence on the brand's social media.

It is not impossible that one incident can have a big negative impact.

Ignoring negative and rude comments is indeed necessary once in a while, but an increase in this can also be said to be a bad sign for a brand.

If this happens to your brand, social listening can be used to map the problem.

You can analyze the root of the problem and determine what steps to take to save the business.

3. Creating New Opportunities

When using social listening, you often find both the problem and the solution they want from the brand.

This is because often, customers also use social media to express what they think about the brand.

This will be input as well as evaluation to the brand regarding customer needs and create new opportunities from the completion of the information.

4. Increase the Number of Customers

There is always an opportunity to increase the number of customers coming from social media.

Creating content for marketing that is in line with trends and customer needs will increase your number of customers.

This can happen because your customers are not only followers but also enjoyers of your brand's content on social media.

Strategy in Social Listening

To ensure that your social listening is optimal, here are some strategies that you can follow:

1. Identify the Problem

To get accurate results from social listening, the first thing you have to do is identify the problem.

First, understand the gaps between your product and what customers feel.

Social listening will provide data on customer habits, demographics, to trends and phenomena that are currently occurring related to your brand.

By seeing the problems and needs of your customers directly, it will be easier to solve these problems.

2. Identify Objectives and Topic Keywords

A wider social listening coverage is also often a problem of not focusing on the topic to be reviewed.

Social listening will be easier if you choose the keywords and topics you want to review from the start.

To get accurate and relevant information, it is important to choose keywords and topics that are related to your brand.

3. Use Analysis Results to Improve Feedback

The main purpose of social listening is to respond to customer feedback and evaluate it.

Whether negative or positive, it is important to use the information you get from social listening to improve customer service.

For example, if a customer comments on the shipping process taking too long, you can evaluate and respond quickly to customer complaints.

You also don't need to hesitate to follow the results of social listening. The reason is, according to a survey from the Social Intelligence Lab, 89% of respondents said that data from social listening provided useful information for brands.

Well, that's all about social listening that you should know.

Social listening is part of an effective digital marketing strategy to see customer needs.

It is important to understand digital marketing strategies to develop a brand.

So, don't hesitate to learn more about digital marketing by taking the Digital Marketing Fundamental class at prasmul-eli!

For better brand development, don't forget to register yourself, okay!