The Concept of Social Listening

Friends, Thank you very much for taking out time from your very busy schedule to read my blog(s). Sharing PR knowledge with you has become my passion now. I feel encouraged after reading your feedback in the comments column. Today I’m happy to present my 90th blog “The Concept of Social Listening”.

Friends, while doing online courses on Digital Marketing & Social Media from HubSpot Academy I came across the term or say concept of  “Social Listening” which appeared very interesting to me therefore, I decided to share the concept of social listening with you all, hence this blog.    

Let’s understand the concept of Social Listening………

Social Listening, which is also referred to as social media listening, is the process of identifying and assessing what is being said about an individual, group, product, brand, or an organisation and or company / corporate on world wide web (www) i.e. the internet.

Friends, Social Listening also refers to analyzing the conversations and trends happening not just around a particular brand, but around a particular industry as a whole, and using those insights to make better marketing decisions. Social listening is where you track conversations and mentions related to a chosen on social media platforms, and then analyze them for insights into what you can take that will improve the experience. More specifically for brands, social listening is the process of understanding the online conversation about your brand as well as your products and services.

Friends, Social listening helps us in understanding why, where and how these conversations are happening, and what people think not just when they’re tagging or mentioning our brand which greatly helps us in planning and designing our future communication campaigns, improving the content strategy and messaging, outpace our competition, construct an effective influencer program and even build more impactful brand partnerships. Therefore, social listening is also the process of monitoring digital conversations to understand what customers are saying about our brand and the industry online. An organisation’s marketing teams can use social listening for community management, such as identifying main reasons of customer’s grievances, and providing direct response to the questions, complaints, and comments of the consumers / customers.

Friends, objective of social media listening is to monitor relevant conversations on social media platforms, understand the underlying mood or sentiment and respond with an effective marketing strategy that can influence the minds and sentiments of the target audiences favorably. The social listening process consists of three main steps:

1. Monitoring: This entails monitoring multiple social media channels for mentions of brand names, topics, competitors, keywords and products in social conversations.

2.  Analysis: This is to analyze information gathered by the companies during monitoring to identify what customers like and don't like about a product or service and look for patterns and trends.

3.    Response: This is to respond e.g. communicating with a customer or group(s) of customers online, or repositioning the entire brand strategy in a given circumstance. 

Social listening can help an organisation in understanding the conversation surrounding their brand and the products and services they offer as social listening provides valuable consumer data that the organisations can use to gauge brand awareness and improve their products and services. Organisations can have the following benefits from social listening………

·     Campaign analysis provides feedback on how a particular marketing campaign resonates with audiences on social.

·     Competitive analysis reveals insights into how competitors are doing based on conversations on social media.

·  Event monitoring enables an organisation to see how audiences respond in real time to a specific event, such as a virtual conference.

· Industry trends surface when an organisation listens for discussions mentioning its industry, using social functions like hashtags.

Friends, to conclude, conversations on the internet produce massive amounts of unstructured data. Because of that, it's important to know what an organization wants to achieve with a social media listening initiative. Both, social media listening and person-to-person information gathering have value, but social listening is quickly becoming an important customer intelligence tool. Among the many ways to use social media to gain insight are the following:

·         Monitoring online customer support forums;

·    Using software tools to gather comments from social outlets, such as Facebook and Twitter; and

·         Encouraging customers to suggest new product features and vote on their favorites.

Social media monitoring tools can mine text for specific keywords on social networking websites, blogs and in discussion forums and other social media. Monitoring software transposes specific words or phrases in unstructured data into numerical values linked to structured data in a database. That way the data can be analyzed with traditional data mining techniques. Some of the social listening tools are………

·        Clarabridge: A customer experience (CX) management artificial intelligence (AI) platform.

·        HubSpot: Provides marketing, sales, customer service and CRM software.

·        Lately: Social AI content and social media software.

·        Sprout Social:  Social media management software.

·        Hootsuite: Social media management and marketing dashboard.

Some free social listening alternatives are also available e.g. TweetDeck  and Google Alerts which enable its users to monitor social conversations on a single social media platform for simple topics and keywords and schedule automatic posts.

Social listening can be immensely useful for an organisation’s different departments, from customer service, to marketing, to human resources, to product development. When collecting and analyzing the data that comes in, this means that it is vital that the relevant insights are disseminated to the right decision makers in a timely and contextualized manner so that everyone from all departments should be taking advantage of the insights that social listening offer.

Thank You for reading the blog.

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