Social media can no longer be a tool used to witter on about yourself - you need to listen to that noise too!
Social listening is a technique designed to go one step further than simply monitoring your social media. With active social listening you can extract key insights from social conversations - yes you'll be engaging with those interactions your brand receives and collecting the data you discover!
What is social listening?
Sprout Social defines social listening as: "The process of tracking conversations around specific topics, keywords, phrases, brands or industries, and leveraging your insights to discover opportunities or create content for those audiences." (Source: Sprout Social)
This makes it more than simply 'monitoring' the conversations around your brand, as you are analysing and reflecting on these interactions and mentions - and acting upon them.
By adopting social listening you can:
- Create content your audience is looking for
- Generate new ideas for wider campaigns
- Improve your customer experience and engagement rates
- Analyse the overall public feeling about your brand
How do I implement social listening?
It's a lot easier than you might think! A key part of ensuring you are listening to the online noise around your brand is to ensure your notification alerts are switched on.
Whether you're doing your social media for yourself or you have an agency doing it, one or both of you should be monitoring what the public is saying about your brand.
However, social listening requires you to take this to the next level - act upon every piece of feedback that comes your way - and react to relevant keywords and topics for your business/industry/customers.
A great way to get started is set up streams in Hootsuite - most other social scheduling platforms have similar streams.
If you don't use Hootsuite, why not bookmark web pages that have search results on Facebook/Twitter/Instagram etc., for your brand phrase, industry-relevant keywords and similar content? Then you just need to keep checking back - and delivering actions based on your findings!
Why not read more posts like this or discover our social media management services?
