Everything You Need to Know about Social Listening

As you know Social media is a versatile and powerful tool, especially for brands seeking to grow on the platform or to grow their customer base. If you are staying updated about social media marketing trends, you must have heard a buzz about social listening. If not, we will help you explain the term and some of the best social listening practices to adopt for your brand.

As one of the top branding companies in Delhi, we decide to share some of the insights with you about the new buzz word. For Instance, Social listening is the same as social monitoring, but it is different. Let’s just get into the concept of social listening already:

What is Social Listening? How is it different from Social media Monitoring?
Social listening is the process of hearing or observing what is being said about you or your brand on social media. Basically, the role of social listening is as follows:

• Know what’s said about your brand, as it happens.
• Track social media mentions on top social media platforms.
• Evaluate the tone, influence and revert to social messages.
• Analyse relevant data and identify trends.
• Create aggregated reports to understand the big picture and share it with your colleagues and clients.

There is a difference of thin line between social media monitoring and social listening. Social media monitoring observes, record, or detect with instruments that have no effect upon the operation or condition. Social media monitoring is about collecting quantitative data:

• How many times was your brand mentioned?
• What is your overall brand awareness?

In short, social media monitoring will tell you what’s happening, while social media listening will give you an explanation as to why something is happening.

Now that we are on the same page, let’s dive into the practices of social listening. Consult some of the top Social Media marketing companies in Gurgaon for the top social media optimisation & listening services.

The Guide to Listening your Social Media

Step 1: Set your Goals
Social listening has an unlimited potential of hearing about your brand. You can derive all sorts of actionable and valuable insights from social media data depending on the objectives you set. There are many objectives such as audience research, trend research, reputation management, raising brand awareness, social customer care and many more.

Well, you have to choose one and incorporate into your digital marketing strategies. However, it’s vitally important to have a clear understanding of what you want to achieve so that you know how social listening can help you with it.

Step 2: Set your Priorities
To do social listening you will need a social listening tool. The main thing to do here is to define your priorities based on your goals. Ask yourselves some of the questions and you will get your answer. Here are some:

• Do we need to respond to individual mention or we need historical data (i.e., conversations that happened one week/month/year ago)?
• Do we need to work on analytics or content creation?

This will help you figure out what exactly you need from the tool. Hire some of the top 10 Facebook ad agencies in Gurgaon for handling your customer base in the best way.

Step 3: Selecting a Tool
There are many social media monitoring tools that offer everything from free tools suited for certain platforms to working with analytics and managing mention. Some of the examples are Hello, Tweet deck, Hootsuite and more. You need to try individual tools and experiments which serve your business objectives the best.

Step 4: Choose a range of keywords
Select a range of keywords for which your brand is popular. Monitor your brand on the basis of these keywords. It is essential to select a range of keywords as it will help you in determining the insights you will get about your brand; be it specifically targeted to a niche market or audience around your industry or product.

Step 5: Work with Social Media Results
There are two ways to approach the collected social media data:

• Looking at conversations themselves
• Diving into analytics

You can manage the found mentions that your social media listening tool has found and has displayed in your mention feed. Here what you can with them:

• Respond to mentions from the tool.
• Tag them and assign them to different groups.
• Sort mentions in your feed by date, sentiment, reach, engagement and so on.
• Filter the feed by sentiment, source, date, language, location, etc.
• Set notifications to receive new mentions by email.
• Export these conversations in a CSV file.

If your goal is to increase brand awareness, you should respond to relevant conversations discussing the topic related to your brand. Reach out to some of the best digital marketing companies in Delhi NCR for developing top-quality and engaging content for your customers.

Step 6: Measure the Analytics
Talking to people on social media is really fun, but one needs to pay attention while having conversations with them. Social listening provides you a picture of where your business is headed or where it should be heading. As far as it is concerned, to understand and use social listening, here are some of the main points that you should pay attention to:

• The share of positive and negative mentions and the changes in it.
• Sudden peaks and drops in the volume of mentions.
• Demographic and user behaviour data- where do conversations come from in the world and on the web.
• Related topics
• Share of voice
• Most influential voices for each source.

Conclusion
Here are the six steps with the help of which you can design your social listening strategy and set up a workflow that works best for your brand. Social listening is a regular process as your goals will regularly change with time and lead to changes in your strategy. The Marcom Avenue is one of the top 10 digital agencies in Gurgaon which will help you in adopting the social listening practices for your brand.