What is Social Listening? and Why is it Essential? A Complete Guide for Beginners

In today's dynamic and interconnected market, active listening to the network and consumers has become a crucial element for the success of any business. In this context, social listening emerges as an indispensable practice for fully understanding the needs, opinions, and trends of your customers. But What is Social Listening exactly and why is it so essential for your company? Social listening is the ability to monitor and analyze online conversations in real-time, capturing users' opinions regarding a brand, product, or service.

In this post, we will analyze the social listening meaning, revealing its potential and highlighting why every company, regardless of size or industry, should embrace this active listening strategy. You will discover how social listening not only offers a unique opportunity to understand consumer needs, but also translates into a competitive advantage, allowing companies to anticipate trends, improve brand reputation, and make informed business decisions.

Social Listening- What Is It?

Social Listening, also known as social listening, is the process of identifying and evaluating what is being said about a company, individual, product, or brand on the web.

Conversations on the Internet produce a huge amount of unstructured data, which needs to be aggregated and analyzed. Depending on the objective that drives a company to undertake a social media listening activity, the most suitable tool varies. From the preparation of simple Google Alerts, i.e. automatic messages that are sent every time a conversation is recorded on the web that has the company or its products as its subject, to the use of specific software, capable of providing a very detailed analysis.

As anticipated, social media listening activity can be carried out in different ways. Depending on the objective and the tool used, more or less detailed unstructured data will be obtained.
How does social listening software work? First, it identifies a set of relevant topics to analyze related to the keywords entered. Through the use of algorithms and analytical models, the collected data is categorized and organized to perform sentiment analysis. Finally, the software prepares a dashboard with various infographics necessary for understanding and sharing the information collected.

Different Types of Analysis

Below are the main types of analysis and their relative advantages.

Campaign analysis - Campaign analysis provides important feedback on how a particular ad group is performing and what kind of conversations it is generating.

Competitive analysis - Competitive analysis reveals valuable insights into your competitors’ key performances based on social media conversations.

Event monitoring - Event monitoring allows a company to see how viewers are responding in real-time to a specific event, such as a virtual conference.

Industry trends - Trend analysis allows a company to learn about the latest trends by listening to and analyzing data collected through social features, such as hashtags.

Social Listening or Social Monitoring?

The substantial difference between social media listening and social monitoring lies in the objective of the analysis.

While social monitoring analyzes what users are saying on social media about your company, product, or service, Social Listening investigates why conversations are happening. The former can be used in defining communication tactics, the latter focuses on long-term strategic decisions.

Let's take an example to understand this subtle difference.

Social monitoring - A communications agency decides to monitor social media for mentions of its new social listening service. The main point of monitoring is to collect information, to understand how users talk about the service, so there is not necessarily a related strategy.

Social listening - Alternatively, the agency decides to monitor social media to analyze conversations related to the new social media listening service, aggregating the data to perform a sentiment analysis of users, and then using the information collected to develop a broader marketing strategy.

Through sentiment analysis, the web agency could determine for example:

• If users appreciated the new service
• What aspects do they find most interesting?
• What are the aspects that can be improved?
• New ideas for the next service

Why Is Social Listening Important?

Social Listening helps companies understand the conversations surrounding their brand and the products or services they offer. This provides valuable consumer insights that companies can use to gauge brand awareness and make informed decisions.

Listen to your users' needs - In addition to the ability to learn more about your customers, social media listening allows you to interact more consciously with your community. Customers like it when brands respond and want to feel heard on social media. 

By prioritizing social engagement, companies can positively influence consumer behavior to the benefit of the entire organization. It’s about using social listening to create thoughtful responses that provide real value.

Discover new opportunities - Your customers will often do the work for you when it comes to identifying problems, whether it’s with your product or service, or even your business processes. Through Social Listening, you may come across conversations with users outlining any issues they’re having and what they think about your business in general.

Users themselves will often also tell you how they want their problems solved, giving you an important advantage in ensuring that the changes you make directly respond to their wishes. The comparison, especially in these cases, is an essential value for the birth of a relationship capable of going beyond the single sale.

Face any crises with awareness - Your firm may be experiencing a communication crisis. Even a single misunderstanding can set off a chain reaction of hostility on social media. It's easy to dismiss a few unpleasant comments here and there, but a spike in unfavorable comments can indicate a problem. 

If this happened, it would be an excellent opportunity to practice social listening. Analyzing unfavorable conversations allows you to identify the main reason for the misunderstanding and choose the type of reaction your firm should make.

Are you curious about starting a social listening activity to find out what online users are saying about your company or products? Contact Creation Infoways to receive a personalized consultation.