Social Listening

According to the latest Digital Stat report by We Are Social, for the first time – 3.96 Billion people in the world, more than half of the world’s total population uses social media. Social media has become the go-to platform for expressing opinions – good or bad and making a wider audience aware of your sentiments, thoughts, feelings, and views. 
In light of this, organizations have awaked to the need to tap these opinions and cull out insights to shape their strategy on brand management, product innovation, competitive approach,etc. 

What is Social Media Listening?

The process of continuously monitoring social media conversations to get more insights on a  brand, product, industry, or any other relevant topic is known as social listening social media monitoring.  Some of the most beneficial things to keep an eye on are:

• Brand mentions
• Customer Comments
• Relevant hashtags
• Competitor insights
• Trends in the industry

The whole process can be broken down into three steps, as shown below

How does social media listeing tools work?

Like search engines that send crawlers to the far reaches of the Internet, social media monitoring crawls sites and continuously indexes them. Depending on the importance of the source, frequently can be adjusted to more or less frequent crawls.  E.g., every 10 minutes or every day.
Once these social sites are indexed, they can be searched based on queries or strings ( called keywords).The keywords can be a combination of one or more terms, with the flexibility to exclude feeds with unwanted words. 
These results ( known as  “mentions” ) can then can be viewed, filtered, sliced, diced to arrive at the insights that you are looking for.

Sources for social listening:

The name’ social listening’ can be a bit misleading as most social media monitoring tools crawl a wide range of websites. This includes forums, blogs, news, reviews, and major social networks such as Facebook, Twitter, Google+, YouTube, and so on.

• Forums – Gather insights from millions of forums and bulletin boards specific to your industry.
• Blogs – Information from hundreds of millions of professional and consumer blogs
• News – Leading international and local newspapers, wire services, magazines/journals, and news aggregators etc.
• Social Networks – Access content spoken on the social channel such as Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram, Pinterest, Tumblr, Google Plus, Flickr etc.
• Reviews – Ratings and reviews sites across various industries such as Retail Shopping, hotels & restaurant reviews, and more 

Why is it Important? Whys should you care?

Social Listening, when used effectively, can help you get access to information to help you stay ahead of the curve. Whether keeping a tab on your competition, knowing your target audience’s pulse, or managing your brand reputation; Social listening can help you create differentiation. Read on to know the different applications of social listening

Protect Your Online Reputation

The customer’s view of your brand is based on their interactions with it. It can change over time and isn’t always dependent on a client purchasing or using your products and/or services. Because customers’ perceptions of your brand can differ, it’s critical to work hard to create a consistent brand image.
Brand image monitoring is highly crucial as it helps curb reputation crises. It informs the company about the negative opinions of the people in order to contain the escalation of hatred for the brand. We never know when one single comment can turn into a social media outrage if not tackled at the earliest. The option to set alerts can help you seat back and relax knowing you will get alerted when something ccritical needs your attention.

Competitive Insights

Social listening entails more than just listening to what others have to say about you. You can gather interesting insights by listening to what is being said by and about your competition. It has become a necessary part of your growth strategy. The more you find out about your competitors, the more you learn, adapt, and become more successful. 
Listening enables you to discover competitors’ flaws and leverage them as unique selling features. You may also utilize them to emphasize your strengths in your marketing efforts.
However, it’s not just a one-time thing. Continuous social listening on the competition can give you real-time insights into the activities of your competition. Are they coming out with new products? Is there a new marketing campaign?  Have they changed their marketing approach?  Are they receiving negative press? Etc.

There are tool (Refer section below) which gives you full access to your competitors’ strategies. You can spy on competitors from different angles – know what products are being marketed, type of content being used, focused audience, kind of response generated, etc. and then use the information to fine-tune your own strategy.

Product Innovation: Product development teams can tap into social media to understand what customers like or dislike about a product. This information can be used to fix defects in the next iteration, trigger new ideas, revisitexisting ideas under development.  The analysis can be done by region to understand the regional variations in product acceptance. The popular features in other competitive products can also give valuable insight to the Product Innovation and R and D team for prioritizing feature upgrades and product development.

New product Launch Analytics

 Social media channels can help companies identify potential customer service issues before they spiral and inflict damage to a brand’s reputation. This can save massive costs in production by preventing the problemfrom slipping in further production.  This can also help customer service proactively reach out to customers to fix glitches and prevent too many negative sentiment on social media.

Customer Expereience Analytics

Social Media Analytics can be leveraged to know how happy or unhappy your customers are with your brand or your product. This analysis can be taken one step further to analyze what specific features are being discussed and whether those features are liked or disliked by performing advanced text analytics on the comment.
This analysis can be used to manage experience by directly reaching customers to address a specific issue or concern before it gets momentum on social media.