What Is It, And How To Do Social Listening

Listening to everything that happens around the brand is essential to interact perfectly with users. Here’s how to do Social Listening in the best way.

Listening, analyzing, improving. This is the essence of Social Listening, the social monitoring activity that allows companies to improve their results and intercept the right customers.

Which social networks should I listen to? And how should I listen to them? Which tools are best to use? Here is an article that can help you answer all these questions and can show you how to do Social Listening in the best way.

What is Social Listening?

Literally, Social Listening means listening to social networks. In practice, it manifests itself with a set of techniques useful for listening to everything that happens and is said about the brand, its sector, its competition, and its users.

Social Listening also allows us to understand how our brand is perceived externally. This is possible by analyzing our posts, competitors’ posts, comments, shares, and sector pages. The result is a sentiment that can be positive, neutral, or negative. If positive, it is clear that the commercial strategies adopted work perfectly. When you start to receive particularly critical comments or negative or neutral feelings in return, then it is better to investigate each strategic step more carefully, to understand where users are not so satisfied with the brand.

How is Social Listening done?

The world of social listening has a very wide range of actions. This practice includes a wide range of operations to be put into practice on a daily basis. Let’s see them in detail.

sentiment analysis

What do users think of us? What do our followers want? And the industry enthusiasts? It is very important to understand the sentiment regarding our brand. And it is equally important to try to understand the industry trends to attract new followers.

Customer Care Service

Customer Care Service is the ability to respond promptly to requests from followers and increase their value over time. On any social channel, users can come into contact with our brand. They ask questions, observations, and comments. It is crucial always to respond to make the brand’s strong presence perceived.

Competition study

Competitors are a basic element of social listening. After carefully analyzing the competition, it is necessary to understand what they say, how they operate, and how they interact with users. Perceiving their strengths or weaknesses is essential to be able to set up more effective marketing strategies.

Crisis management

When does a crisis occur? Simple, when there is an error, macroscopic or slight. The strength of a brand is also manifested in the ability to cope with any popularity crisis quickly. Users, as is well known, do not have half measures. When there is a mistake, it is easy for the brand’s social media to be assaulted by negative comments or for viral memes to arise that put the brand name in a bad light. Responding to these errors quickly and, as far as possible, stopping any crisis in the bud is one of the primary tasks of Social Listening.

Good words and less good words

Words are important, even on social networks. This is why Social Listening must highlight those words that may be related to the brand. Through special tools, it will then be possible to understand the flow of searches, verify the sentiment linked to those words, and understand how they are linked to your brand.

Usually, during the setting up of Social Listening, a black list is created, including offenses and blasphemous expressions. Any comment on your pages that contains a term belonging to this list will be blocked automatically. On the other hand, some words must not have anything to do with the brand.

Social Listening: which tool to use?

There are several very good online tools for the perfect listening to social media. You can find both free as well as paid items, with the latter undoubtedly equipped with many more features. The most important and currently used are the following:

• Hootsuite (also very useful for programming editorial plans);
• Talkwalker
• Mention

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