What Is Social Listening and Why Is it Important for Your Business

Find out all about social listening

The majority of marketers will tell you that they measure and monitor their social media efforts in order to check what’s working and what’s not. While this is great, it still doesn’t mean that they do social listening, which is an entirely different thing.

What Is Social Listening?

Social listening means tracking the conversations around specific words, phrases, or events to see what your target audience is truly interested in. This helps marketers reveal new opportunities to create relevant content, join conversations, increase their brand’s visibility, and, of course, generate new qualified leads.

Be careful, though, social listening means more than checking your notifications frequently and monitoring your @mentions. For instance, did you know that 30% of the tweets mentioning a brand don’t use their Twitter handle? If you’re only tracking your @mentions, you’ve just lost 30% of the opportunities to create meaningful relationships.

Why Is Social Listening Important?

Aside from not having to worry about missed opportunities, there are plenty other reasons why you should spend more time listening than posting on social media.

  1. Social Listening Can Help You Improve Your Strategy

Markets and constantly evolving and so are customers’ needs and wants. Even if you’ve created a content and social media calendar in the beginning of the year, this doesn’t mean you have to stick to everything in it no matter what. Be fluid and look at what people are really interested in when you post something.

This doesn’t just get you more followers and fans. It also shows the ones you already have that you’re connected to what they need and that you are on top of everything in your industry.

  1. Social Listening Can Give You the Right Content Ideas

You may have a great idea for a blog post to publish on social media, but if your public’s attention is directed at a different trend, it’s going to be unnoticed and barely read. Instead of writing about what you want, write about what your followers and fans really want to read about.

Before writing your next post, look at what’s hot on social media. What are people raving about? What are they dissatisfied with? What questions do they have? Offer them solutions in a blog or a social media post and you will have won the day (and their hearts!).

  1. Social Listening Makes Measurement more Accurate

As previously stated, not everyone speaking about you on social media takes the time to mention you in their post. Thus, whenever your create reports about engagement and brand awareness, you’re clearly missing something. Start tracking social posts that speak about you in order to get the complete picture.

  1. Get New Customers with Social Listening

You don’t just have to monitor posts about your company. Take a look at people discussing the type of services you offer and swoop in with a link to a helpful blog of yours. That’s a qualified lead that you can later on approach with an offer. Yes, it’s that easy!

  1. Steal the Thunder from Your Competitors

Handles or no handles, most social media messages to brands go unanswered. If you start tracking your competitors and see they left such messages pass by them, use this opportunity to save the day and even be their clients’ hero! Answer with a solution and they’ll definitely start appreciating you more than their current provider.

 

Adriana Tica is an expert marketer and copywriter, with 10 years in the field, most of which were spent marketing tech companies. She is the Owner and Founder of Idunn. In October 2019, she also launched Copywritech, a digital marketing agency that provides copywriting, SEO content writing, and strategy services to companies in the tech industry.

4 Comentarii la “What Is Social Listening and Why Is it Important for Your Business”

  1. […] Social listening is a good place to start. At the digital marketing agency I run, we spend roughly 80 percent of our time researching social media trends for our customers and only 20 percent creating posts according to them. […]

  2. […] Social listening is a good place to start. At the digital marketing agency I run, we spend roughly 80 percent of our time researching social media trends for our customers and only 20 percent creating posts according to them. […]

  3. […] written about social listening in the past. If you didn’t get a chance to read the article, let me summarize it for […]