Social Listening for Online Businesses | Best Practices & Tools

Social listening is one of the biggest growth factors in terms of managing reputation, positioning a brand, and improving products and services. Businesses are more scaleable online.

Customers give numerous feedback in the form of likes, comments, shares, mentions, and written, video reviews on social media and other online communities about the products, and services of a brand.

From launching a product for a community, observing feedback, competition analysis, engagement tracking, and spreading brand awareness is possible at scale. Social listening gives clarity to improve the quality of products, and services, marketing and communication, and branding. 

Social media marketing is not only posting on multiple social platforms. Social media allows active social listening with trackable metrics. For Business owners, internet marketers, and social media marketers, we are solving questions for developing effective marketing strategies such as What are the benefits of social listening? What are the fundamental ways of Social Listening? Which are the best social listening tools, etc?

The practice of tracking online conversations about a specific phrase, word, or brand. A social listening platform provides the basic capability of systematically collecting online conversations about a specific phrase, word, or brand and is able to provide some degree of insights through the analysis of those conversations.

Below given 5 Steps will help you understand Social Media Listening in the most comprehensive way possible, so let us dig deep into those-

5 Steps to Learn Social Listening

1. Learn what is Social Listening

Social Listening is the process that helps you analyze Social Media Channels and users for the mentions of your brand, services, products, rivals, themes, and ideas applicable and relevant to your business, plus, it also helps you devise conversion-driven strategies that better influence your potential consumers and convert them be your loyal customers. See the definition of social listening in the img-1 below:

Social Listening lets you monitor the feedback, conversations, queries, or comments of your target audiences and then aids you curate engaging content for those audiences. The inclusion of actionable insights differentiates Social Listening from Social Monitoring-

• Social Monitoring is actually compiling of data in which you gather information about the things that have already happened, while in Social Listening, you use that information and insight for determining some future actions
• Social Monitoring mainly revolves around metrics such as engagement rate or the number of mentions, but in Social Listening, you get to know about Social Media Sentiments, as it tells you about the overall mood behind your Social Posts. It not only tells you what people think and feel about your posts but also guides you to take action to improve their experiences
• Immaculate analysis of the sentiments of your prospects guides you to channel messages and other campaigns that can receive positive responses from audiences

2. Discover 5 Reasons/Importance Of Social Listening

In case your marketing strategy does not include Social Listening, you will miss out on the opportunity to use actionable insights about the audiences who are talking about your brand. Not including Social Listening is ignoring the viewpoints of your customers that no one with business acumen would ever do. Below are the three reasons why you should include Social Listening in your marketing strategy-

1. Social Listening ensures better Customer Engagement and Offers Result-Driven Insights
2. Social Listening tells you about Wins/Missteps in Real Time via different social feedback and hence guides you to take needed action in real-time
3. Helps you know what people think about you and your Competitors, plus, by using Social Listening, you can uncover different paint points in your industry before your competitors can address those
4. Social Listening helps you monitor important keywords related to your industry that tell you about the complaints that people have about the services and products related to your kind of business
5. Social Listening guides you to find leads that you can convert via Social Selling, in addition, you can use Social Listening to identify influencers and advocates in your industry

3. Apply Steps To Set up A Business For Social Listening

To set up Social Listening for your business, you need to know what kind of information you should actually listen for. It is important to know topics and related keywords you should listen to and what kinds of insights are going to be most useful for your business. Below is the list of Topics & Keywords you should use Social Listening for-

• Your brand name and handles along with the product names
• Brand names, handles, and product names of your competitors
• Industry buzzwords along with your slogan and those of your competitors
• Keywords and Campaigns Names, plus, branded and unbranded hashtags related to your industry
• Names of main people in your company and your competitors’ companies such as CEOs or spokespersons, etc

To set up your business for Social Listening, it is also important to monitor common misspellings and abbreviations for all the aforementioned topics and keywords.

4. Explore the best Social Listening Practices

To get the most from your Social Listening efforts, you need to follow below given Social Listening Practices-

1. Along with knowing what people say about you, you should also identify the network and places where people talk about you. When you analyze places where people are talking about you then you will get to know how conversations on different channels differ. Conversations on LinkedIn differ from what is going on Facebook or on Twitter, and knowing this will help you ensure conversion-driven engagement
2. You should know what audiences of your competitors think about them, as this will guide you about their missteps, plus, you will get insights about what kind of strategies work and what do not
3. Social Listening provides you wide range of actionable information from the posts of your customers and you should respond to that via befitting customer service, product development, and content marketing
4. You should have a sense of the amount of conversation and social engagement, which is normal for your brand, and then accordingly you should establish a benchmark for your business, as this will help you improve the needed numbers
5. You should also have eyes upon the changes because changes in engagement or sentiment help you know the overall perception of your audiences that has changed. Social Listening helps you understand why the perception has changed and accordingly, you can adapt your strategy to ensure positive branding
6. Evaluate the Social Listening Data and take action as per that. Taking action is an inevitable part of Social Listening and if you do not do that then you are doing Social Monitoring not Social Media Listening. Insights taken from Social Listening help you better address the needs of your customers

5. Know the best Social Listening tools

Below given list of 5 Social Media Listening Tools will help you automate the Social Listening processes, so let us dig deep into those-

1. HootSuite & HootSuite Insights

• HootSuite Social Listening helps you set up social media streams to monitor Social Media conversations and related keywords across different Social media Channels
• By using HootSuite as a Social Listening Tool you can reach out to potential customers, Social Advocates or Social Influencers, you can directly respond to them or you can assign someone to respond to your target audiences
• HootSuite Insights provides you the graphical reports with the help of which you can monitor 25+ social networks along with news sites, forums, blogs, and other online channels where people interact
• HootSuite Insights will help you find real-time updates on unusual spikes or drops in Social Media engagements, plus, it will help you know the audience sentiment as per the location, gender, and language

2. SproutSocial

• It lets you get Social Listening and analytics capabilities along with Social Media Scheduling to comprise different engagement and conversation sources including blogs, videos, forums, news, social networks, and review sites
• You can use SproutSocial to analyze and categorize the conversations that matter for your business. This will offer you customized feeds of specific keywords, locations, and hashtags across different social platforms

3. Buffer

Buffer is a popular tool for social media management and scheduling. It helps businesses manage social media activities in one place. 

Using Buffer, we can leverage- 

• Social media post-scheduling 
• Work Flow management
• Content Planning and Optimization 
• Campaign success analytics 

4. Hubspot 

For increasing leads, and sales or doing effective marketing at scale, Hubspot is one of the top-rated hubs for business owners.

Business owners can leverage-  

• CRM
• ROI management
• marketing solutions
• statistics and content 

Hubspot has free and premium solutions for users. For social listening and understanding consumer behavior Hubspot is an amazing source. 

5. Answer The Public

Answer The Public is one of the most popular tools to find long-tail questions around a topic or concept. It is a hub of questions around a topic, industry, and business model. 

Answer the public provides- 

• Long tail question around a topic or keywords 
• Questions and keywords alphabetically as well 
• Multiple variations of the same keywords 
• Ability to export and download the whole list of keywords and questions 
• Various filters such as Google, YouTube, Bing, TikTok, Amazon based sites question personalization with location, and languages as well 
• 3 Free searches daily 

Final Words

Social Media Listening helps you analyze the Social Performance of your business, comprehend conversations going around about your industry, monitor your competitors, get insights, and use those insights to take actions that can help you establish relationships, increase credibility, and optimize conversions.

Social Listening improves Social Conversations and helps you optimize the advantages of existing relationships to convert Social Media Presence into ROI.

I hope the aforementioned 5 steps have helped you understand how to use Social Media Listening for your business, but in case you wish to know more about it, the Social Media Marketing Course would be the best fit for you.

What Social Media Listening Practices you consider best for your business- Update me in comments.