Table of Contents

•    Introduction to Social Listening

•    7 Benefits of Social listening and how to leverage them

•     7 Social Listening Tools

•    Conclusion

 

Social Listening sounds like a vague and boring concept but is actually quite the contrary.

“Social Listening can be explained as the process of rectification in the functioning of the business after performing an analysis on the issues addressed by the customers.”

If business expansion giants like Elon Musk can find the time to reply to tweets concerning the matter personally, we think it answers the question of whether Social Listening is essential or not.

7 Benefits Of Social Listening And How To Leverage Them

Social listening is a delicate subject and must be handled with care. Therefore, we have narrowed down 7 commandments you need to keep in mind while engaging with your customers.

“Social media is not about the exploitation of technology but service to community.”

 

1. Active Listening to Find Customer Pain Points and Deliver on-time Response. 

Social listening lets you to know if you are getting negative or positive feedback online. This is one of the straight-forward benefits of social listening.

You can generate content which directly addresses the pain point. Further, among the many benefits of social listening, taking full advantage of the favorable comments is probably the easiest one.

Zomato handled the negative video (in 2018) which showed its delivery boy tasting the food before delivery in the right manner. Zomato wrote a blog letting the world know how they are fixing their packaging issue and restored faith of their consumers.

2. Sail in the Trending Wave and Promote Your Brand

If you observe a sudden surge in the keyword which you have kept an eye on, it only means that there is breaking news in your domain. Don’t be left out of the conversation and cleverly promote your brand while honestly taking part in the discussion. Spotting and leveraging trending topics is one of the benefits of social listening.

3. Find Related Phrases and Streamline Your Campaign Accordingly

You need not limit your listening to keywords or phrases that are mentioned in your brand page. However, you must listen to all the conversations that are happening in related topics too. Among the wide range of benefits of social listening, observing how your competitor is faring online without actually following them is arguably the cleverest one.

4. Capitalize on (positive) User Generated Content and Incentivize Them

User-generated content (UGC) is the most honest and authentic impression of your brand. If there is not enough UGC about your brand, try offering discounts and incentives for getting it out there.

5. Perform Brand Analysis and Weave Strategies / Counter Strategies

If you are the type who wants to get to the core of an issue, social listening could be your new best friend. This is one of the benefits of social listening. It also lets you weave strategies to combat bad reviews.

6. Listen to Your Ever Increasing Audience and Reach Out to Them Instantly

 Whenever there are a lot of people using your brand, they will start speaking about you –  good and bad. Social listening makes managing your large audience - easy.

7. Listening Leads to Discovery Which in-turn Leads to Innovation

“Necessity is the mother of invention,” and social listening would lead to the discovery of important insights which would lay the foundation for pioneering innovation. This is one of the underestimated benefits of social listening. 

Social Listening Tools

Missing out on any issue raised by the customer is like overlooking the prenuptial agreement and now facing a horrible divorce. In both cases, you could lose a lot more than you expected. Thus, the reliance falls on the shoulders of trustworthy social listening tools.

“It's fine to have social media that connects us with old friends, but we need tools that help us discover new people as well.” – Ethan Zuckerman

The following are 7 free / paid social listening tools that aid in monitoring data:

1. Awario

Awario is a handy tool that crawls more than 13 billion web pages every day. It is a very beneficial social listening tool. Plus, you can sign-up for free.

2. Hootsuite

Hootsuite is another social listening tool that could be used for social media streaming and monitoring the keyword. It is one of the most popular social listening tools.

3. Mention

Mention is yet another social listening tool that allows you to generate leads, analyze competition and search for potential influencers. This tracking and monitoring social listening tool also offers a convenient brand monitoring facility.

4. Audiense

Audiense offers a unique customer segmentation from all around the globe. You can know your reach on Twitter with an amazing analytical depiction of engagement statistics. Audiense is one of the best functioning social listening tools when it comes to social engagement monitoring.

5. Synthesio

Synthesio is one of the best tracking tools when it comes to the specificity of conversation topics. Synthesio also enables you to tag mentions based on demographic segmentation.

6. Sprout Social 

Sprout Social’s dashboard is unique and very efficient in handling and analysing Twitter presence. It offers rich social listening and engagement.  It generates leads too.

7. Brandwatch

Brandwatch analyses conversations by utilizing its 95 million data sources. It also allows you to set e-mail alerts for important online discussions on your topic of interest.

In a Nutshell

Providing your customers with transparency and timely response is the key to win unwavering trust and loyalty. Reebok and Tesla are prime examples of good online engagement using social listening platforms. This is the best way to understand your customers and stay ahead of your competition.