University of Kwazulu-Natal

A Beginner S Guide To Social Listening Epolitics Com

Bonisiwe Shabane
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a beginner s guide to social listening epolitics com

Regular contributor Beth Becker has more for us today than just the excellent piece below; she’s also announced a series of two-day digital trainings taking place in cities around the world. Congratulations, Beth!! Savvy readers will want to get on her training announcement list right away. Look for other Epolitics.com authors (and your Loyal Editor) to be involved in the trainings as well. Who could ask for more? Unless it’s more about social listening.

In that case, be sure to go back and check out Jeanette Russell’s excellent social listening articles, including topics such as donor retention and rapid response. In the meantime, take it away, Beth! How many times have you sat in meetings and spent hours talking about messaging, but no one brings up the question of what your audience wants? What kinds of content do they respond to? What topics — both directly and indirectly relevant to your cause or issue — does your audience talk about? Have you ever chimed in and pointed out that your social media presence can help you create content that will really connect?

If so, pat yourself on the back. If not, you’re not using social media to its fullest potential. The most overlooked use case for social media is a concept called Social Listening. Social Listening may be defined as: The process of monitoring digital media channels to devise a strategy that will better influence consumers. (from Track Maven)

Do you want to know what people are saying about your business online? Social listening is an awesome way to find out what your customers think, how your brand is doing, and what your competitors are up to. But how do you get started? In this blog post, we’ll show you how to set up a social listening strategy. Before you dive into social listening, you need to have a clear goal in mind. What are you trying to accomplish with social listening?

Do you want to know how your customers feel? How your brand is perceived? How to avoid a PR disaster? By having a clear goal, you can focus your social listening strategy on what matters most. There are tons of social media platforms, but not all of them are relevant to your business. You need to find out where your customers and competitors are spending their time online.

This will help you decide which platforms to monitor and where to join the conversation. There are also tons of social listening tools out there, and you need to pick the right one for your business. Look for tools that can track conversations on the platforms you’ve chosen, and that can give you insights into how people feel (sentiment), who they are (demographics), and who influences them (key influencers). Once you’ve picked your tools, it’s time to set up what you want to monitor. This includes choosing keywords and phrases that relate to your business, keeping an eye on your brand and product mentions, and following relevant hashtags and topics. Social listening is a revolutionary tool for media monitoring and analysis.

It collects every piece of online content that can be relevant for you. This includes articles, blogposts, all sorts of social media content and comments. It can give you useful insights into what internet users think about you. But here is the trick: thanks to the automated process, it all happens without actually reading this huge amount of content. They say social listening is the future of media monitoring, but it is not the future anymore. Online content can now be collected and analysed without human intervention, but with human-level precision.

It means you can stay informed about everything that is published about your brand, company, product or competitors. And, again, you don’t even need to read the relevant pieces and mentions. Every important conclusion will be detected for you. Let’s say you are the social media manager of a well-known brand. Your new product seems a big hit on the market, and the management asks you to make a presentation about the online perception of this new product. Well, you have two options.

You either start reading all 3000 articles, posts and comments published about it and give up sleep for a couple days. Or you can be smarter than that. If you accept the help of a social listening tool, all you have to do is run an analysis on the name of the product, wait a couple hours and get the results shown... The dashboard will reveal how many positive or negative texts are found, what the related topics, names, brands, emotions or locations are and much more! As the expression ‘social listening’ itself says: listen to your audience! Because people in the audience listen to each other, too.

Today’s typical consumer doesn’t believe in advertisements or promotions. However, people are truly aware of the advantages of internet freedom. They listen to other people’s opinions while they are not afraid to publish theirs, either. It’s been clear that the most successful companies are the ones who let themselves be guided by their customers. And guess what: hearing what they want has never been easier in the era of social listening. Being aware of every relevant opinion helps you to be one step ahead of your customers.

You will know what they want even before they realise they want it. Once analysing their opinion isn't a burden anymore, all you'll have to do is focus on campaign and strategy planning. Most importantly, social listening saves you time and energy. Big amounts of textual data like social media posts with thousands of comments take a long time to process. This will no longer be a problem. With the help of this new approach to media analysis, you can get the necessary insights without actually reading what has been written about you on the internet.

Every mention and relevant piece of content about your brand, company, product, field or competitors is collected automatically. In addition, the results are shown on easy-to-understand charts. Most social listening tools show the results on simple but insightful charts, so everyone can get the gist of them without any experience in data analysis. You know people are talking about your brand online…but do you know what they’re saying? Do you know how those online conversations impact your reputation? If you’ve asked yourself these questions, then you need to up your social listening game.

To get ahead, you need to familiarize yourself with what social listening is, how to leverage listening insights to understand your audience and drive business results, and get the tool that makes it easy. Join over 1 million marketers to get social news, trends, and tips right to your inbox! In today’s ever-evolving marketing landscape, the pervasive influence of social media has transformed the way businesses engage with their target audience. Beyond social platforms, the vast expanse of the internet facilitates many forums and online communities where individuals openly share their opinions, be it showering praise on a beloved brand or voicing concerns. It’s worth noting that these voices, whether they belong to loyal customers, potential clients, or even rival companies, wield significant power in shaping the success of your business. This is where the practice of social listening becomes paramount.

Social listening involves the systematic monitoring of online conversations, providing invaluable insights into discussions related to your brand, products, or services. It equips your social media strategy with a potent tool to navigate this dynamic landscape effectively. In a 2022 report by Social Media Today, a surprising 61% of businesses have already harnessed the power of social media listening, acknowledging its crucial role. In this blog, we’ll take you on an in-depth journey into the world of social listening, exploring what it is, why it is important, and tips on how to do it right. Social listening, in simple terms, is like having your ear to the ground in the digital world. It involves closely monitoring online conversations and discussions across various social media platforms, websites, forums, and blogs to gain valuable insights.

This practice helps individuals and businesses understand what people are saying about their brand, products, services, or anything related to their industry. Social listening provides a unique window into the thoughts, opinions, and sentiments of your target audience, customers, and even competitors. It’s a powerful tool for making informed decisions, improving your online presence, and building stronger connections with your audience. It is not a secret that the social media platforms we have today isn’t just about connecting to friends and family members. For entrepreneurs, these websites are part of their tools in successfully getting insights about their audiences. With the right strategy and execution, they can make the necessary actions to be triumphant in funneling new customers in.

What exactly is social media listening? Many are confused about the difference of social listening and social monitoring since both terms/activities are quite related. Social monitoring is the act of observing your page and actively replying or participating to polls and queries of your audiences. Social listening, on the other hand, is the pro-active attempt to cater to your audience’s needs by analyzing the data derived from your past social conversations. To have the most effective strategy in listening to your engagements, you need to track your notifications and see where and what trends these notifications are coming from. However, you just don’t stop at the topic-level of the trend; you also need to carefully read and understand the thread to have a grasp of the whole picture.

Beyond the data, you will try to go over your brand’s presence manually, and it may take some extra effort on your part. However, this can provide you the answers to some of your business’s unsolved problems. There are a lot of insights that you can derive from manually learning your customer’s pain points. One is that you will have an idea about your brands health online. Based on the carefully derived data, you can then create contents that can address your customer’s requests. This improved customer experience may then bring in more audience to funnel in.

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