What Is Social Listening and How It Can Help in Social Media Marketing (Plus Tools to Try)
Traditional media such as TV, Print, and Radio have always had that difficulty in being able to know for sure what their customers are saying in real-time. Thankfully in this day and age, social media has made it possible to create a two-way street for communicating with our customers. Social media has become an important place for brands to communicate with their audiences. It is therefore important to understand what our audiences are saying about our brand. By understanding what people are saying about your brand online, you can improve your marketing efforts by addressing negative sentiment, engaging with customers who have a good experience with your company/brand, and posting communication that mirrors with your target audience. Therefore it’s important to constantly include a social listening capability in your marketing ecosystem. What is social listening? Social listening is the process of monitoring online conversations to understand what people are saying about your brand, product, or service. It can also help you identify potential customers and influencers. What is the difference between social listening and social monitoring? Social monitoring is the process of tracking mentions of your brand on social media. Whereas social listening goes beyond brand mentions to include all conversations about a topic or keywords that you’re interested in. Benefits of social listening 1. Increased brand awareness By tracking what people are saying about your brand online, you can identify new customers and followers. You can also determine which marketing campaigns are resonating with people and adjust your strategy accordingly. 2. Improved customer service Social listening allows you to track feedback about your product or service and quickly address any issues that arise. This contributes greatly to the positive addition to customer satisfaction and loyalty. 3. Greater insight into customer needs By understanding what people are saying about your product or service, you can get a better understanding of what customers want and need. This intel can be utilized to further better your propositions. 4. Enhanced marketing campaigns Social listening can help you develop more targeted marketing campaigns that are more likely to resonate with your audience. 5. Increased sales By using social listening to identify potential customers and improve your marketing efforts, you can ultimately increase sales. 6. Relevance By constantly having your ear to the ground, you will be able to identify trends and viral content that can be capitalized on. How social listening helps social media marketing Social media provides an ideal platform for social listening. There are several ways you can use social listening to inform your social media marketing: 1. Monitor brand mentions Use social listening to track when people mention your brand online. This will help you identify who is talking about your brand and what they are saying. 2. Identify key influencers Use social listening to identify influential members of your target audience. This can help you develop relationships with key influencers and expand your reach. 3. Monitor competitor activity Use social listening to track what your competitors are doing online. This can help you stay ahead of the competition and develop strategies to differentiate your brand. 4. Analyze engagement Use social listening to analyze how people are responding to your social media content. This can help you determine which content is resonating with people and adjust your strategy accordingly. Indeed, social listening can be a powerful tool for understanding your audience and improving your marketing efforts, but it can also be challenging if you don’t know how to use it properly. Some of the common challenges people face with social listening include: Not knowing where to start – It can be daunting to try and track all of the conversations happening online about your brand. start by identifying the platforms where you want to focus your efforts and keywords that you’re interested in monitoring. Not having the time or resources to track all conversations – Social listening can be time-consuming, especially if you’re trying to track all conversations manually. The different tools and platforms that offer social listening services There are various Social Listening tools available that can help you to manage and monitor your social media channels. It is important to select a tool that will meet your specific needs and requirements. Some of the key factors to consider when selecting a Social Listening tool include: ● The type of channels that you want to monitor ● The languages that you want to monitor ● The type of data that you want to collect ● The size of your team Some several different tools and platforms offer social listening services. Some of the most popular include: 1. BuzzSumo BuzzSumo is a tool that allows you to track brand mentions, analyze engagement, and identify key influencers. 2. Hootsuite Insights Hootsuite Insights is a platform that offers social media monitoring and analysis. It provides users with insights into how their content is performing and who their audience is. 3. Sprout Social Sprout Social is a platform that offers social media management and analytics. It helps users optimize their social media campaigns and track their performance. 4. Facebook Insights Facebook Insights is a tool that provides insights into how your Facebook content is performing. It includes data on engagement, reaches, and demographics. 5. Twitter Analytics Twitter Analytics is a tool that provides data on the performance of your Twitter account. It includes information on impressions, engagements, and followers. 6. Google Alerts Google Alerts is a free service that allows you to track brand mentions online. You can set up alerts for specific keywords or phrases and receive email updates when they are mentioned online. The benefits of social listening are vast and can be extremely beneficial to businesses who use it correctly. By monitoring online conversations, businesses can understand what people are saying about their brand, product, or service and adjust their marketing strategy accordingly. This can help increase brand awareness, sales, and customer loyalty. Recommended social media tools you can try After you’ve done some effective social listening, you’re going to have to implement those key changes, catchy marketing campaigns as well as respond to a lot of what your customers are saying. On top of the social listening tools, you need an arsenal of tools that can help you make the most out of your newfound intelligence. 1. Postplanner This social media marketing software helps you develop and publish the most appropriate material for your area of expertise. It finds and promotes viral content from Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and other social networking sites to help you boost audience interaction. You may also use it to plan your postings. Postplanner is a great tool that can help your social listening campaigns in a few ways. First, it can help you find content that is already popular and share it with your followers. This will motivate your audience to interact and engage with relevant content. Second, Postplanner can help you plan your postings, so you’re always ahead of the curve. This will help ensure that your social media campaigns are always on-point and relevant. The basic version of Postplanner has a free trial, but you may also try the paid versions, which start at $19 per month. 2. Drawkit DrawKit is a free, high-quality, and user-friendly illustration program that may be used for a variety of reasons. You can quickly produce graphics for your social media feeds, blog entries, presentations, and more with DrawKit. DrawKit also has several customization choices available to allow you to personalize the visuals to your specific requirements. DrawKit is a great tool that can support your social listening plans through its ability to quickly produce high-quality graphics. These graphics can help to break up your posts and make them more visually appealing to your followers. In addition, DrawKit’s wide range of customization options will allow you to create visuals that are unique and specific to your brand or business. DrawKit is completely free to use, making it a great social media tool option for digital marketers. 3. Design Stripe DesignStripe has a large library of high-quality and royalty-free vectors, designs, and icons that you can use in your social media posts, blog articles, and other content. This website allows you to quickly discover the ideal design while also allowing you to customize it to meet your specific demands. Design Stripe contributes on its own to your social listening plan by providing you with a wide range of quality visuals that you can use in your posts. Additionally, it allows you to quickly and easily customize these visuals to make them more appealing to your followers and target audience. This will help increase engagement and reach. Design Stripe is free to use for individuals, making it a great resource for small businesses and digital marketers on a tight budget. 4. Outplay Outplay is an all-in-one sales engagement management platform. Its scope of features span email campaign tracking, dialers, chat functionalities, lead outreaches, and even SMS campaigns. It’s a tool that can supercharge a lot of your sales functions. Outplay can help improve your social listening strategy by making it easier for you to interact with customers. You can use Outplay to manage sales and reach more potential customers. Additionally, Outplay makes it easy to use and navigate, which will save you time and hassle. Outplay is not free, but it does have trial periods available. The premium pricing plans begin at $99/ user billed monthly with options for annual payments for savings. 5. AI Writer One of the most accurate content rewriters on the market is AI-Writer. With this program, you may quickly and easily generate unique content for your social media postings or blog entries. This software will ensure that all of your material is unique, so you don’t have to worry about plagiarism. It also produces SEO-friendly content, ensuring that your search engine ranking improves and traffic to your website increases. AI Writer is useful for social media listening in the sense that it can help you quickly create unique content based on the keywords and phrases that you’re tracking. This can be a great way to generate new ideas for blog posts or social media campaigns. The premium version of A-I Writer is available at a cost of $29 USD per month. 6. Pixelixe This tool helps marketers, bloggers, and small businesses create unique images in minutes. You can use this tool to design images for your campaigns and promotions on social media and digital platforms. Pixelixe can help with social listening by creating visuals that are attention-grabbing and promoting. By using this tool, you can ensure that your images stand out from the rest, which can help increase engagement and reach. Pixelixe offers a monthly subscription fee from $9 to $249. 7. Text Blaze Text Blaze is a tool that can help you save time when typing. You can use it to save text snippets that you can easily insert into whatever program or website you are using. It has templates that are easy to use and customizable, so it will work with all of the programs and websites that you use. Text blaze is helpful with social listening because it can help you quickly and easily create text snippets that you can use in your social media posts and other marketing materials. This can save you time and energy, allowing you to focus on the important tasks at hand. You can subscribe for free if you just want the program’s most basic functions, but you may also purchase their premium services, which start at $2.99 USD. 8. Removal.AI Remove.ai is an automated AI-powered software that uses sophisticated math to automatically remove the background of photos. You may use this tool to rapidly and simply remove the background from photographs, allowing you to create graphics and visuals more quickly and easily for your social media posts. This is great for social listening because it can help you create visuals that are attention-grabbing and informative. By using this tool, you can ensure that your visuals stand out from the rest, which can help increase engagement and reach. If you simply require its basic functions, you may subscribe for free. However, if you want to use their more sophisticated features, such as watermarks and captions, you’ll have to pay around .15$ per image/monthly. Learnings and Takeaways In summary, social listening can be a great way to improve your social media marketing campaigns. By using the tools and resources listed above, you can create high-quality visuals, find popular content, and plan your postings. In addition, social listening can help you better understand your followers and target audience, which can help you create more relevant and effective content. Author’s Bio: Shelly Solis is the co-founder of SaaSLaunchr.com. She currently works with several companies for their SaaS guest posting services. When not online, Shelly enjoys travelling and reading a good book.