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What is Social Listening?

People have always been sharing opinions about products and services. In recent years, they have been given powerful weapons such as smartphones and social media. As a result, information exchange has become easier than ever. Surely you will agree that it’s good to know what your customers really think about your brand. Today we write about Social Listening, thanks to which you will be able to extract mentions not only about your own products or services but also about competition from the huge hype on the Internet. This is just one of the reasons Social Listening is important.

Definition of Social Listening

Simply put, Social Listening is listening to – or rather reading – what is being said about your brand on the web. But not only that, because you can also research content related to your competition. We are talking about comments on social media, reviews of products or services on the Internet, and any other mentions. There are technologies available on the market, thanks to which “listening” happens automatically. People step in when it is necessary to interact with satisfied or dissatisfied customers. The Internet is the meeting place for billions of people, and that’s where it is best and easiest to start listening. After all, we often make purchasing decisions based on opinions found on the web. Once you get the information and draw the right conclusions, you will understand your customers better and offer them even higher-quality products or services.

Social Listening vs. Social Monitoring

Social Listening is not Social Monitoring. The latter means collecting and analyzing statistics on the activity of social media users in the context of your brand. And that’s basically it. Social Monitoring is therefore primarily about collecting data. Social Listening is something more because apart from collecting data and analyzing it, its goal is to help you thoroughly understand customers and meet their needs.

Social Listening – why is it worth it?

People who write on the internet are more honest than in a face-to-face conversation. This makes them willing to say what they really think. It’s worth listening to it, and if you don’t, you can lose a lot. You will not find out, for example, that customers prefer a competitor’s product because it is a bit more ergonomic. You also won’t learn that if your coffee shops had slightly larger portions, people would be more likely to go there. You will also miss the information that in the electronic equipment that you offer, a minor, but troublesome breakdown occurs quickly, etc.

Thanks to Social Listening, you can get information that will help you better meet the expectations of customers and prevent them from choosing your competitors! If you are wondering whether it is worth investing in Social Listening tools, think that your competitors have already done it and they are learning something new about customers every day – including yours.

A few advantages of Social Listening

And now the specifics. In points, we have listed what, in our opinion, is the most important thing in listening to what is said about your brand (and not only) on the Internet.

Social Listening will allow you to:

  • get to know your customers and their needs better,
  • observe emerging trends,
  • keep your finger on the pulse in the context of competitors’ activities,
  • plan marketing activities and development of products or services,
  • reach out to influencers and brand advocates,
  • find out what customers really like about your product or service,
  • communicate with specific clients on social media and more,
  • respond quickly to comments, answer questions and “put out fires” promptly,
  • build a competitive advantage – the better you get to know your customers and your competitors, the more effectively you will be able to distinguish yourself from other brands.

Conclusion: how to do Social Listening

To effectively listen to the Internet buzz around the issues that interest you, you need the right tools. One of them is Social Studio, which is one of the elements of Salesforce Marketing Cloud.

The main advantage of Social Studio in the context of Social Listening is that your consultants can keep track of specific mentions and react to them in real-time. Regardless of whether they work on computers, smartphones, or tablets.

Thanks to this solution, you can:

  • look at reviews and comments on a selected topic, broken down by regions or keywords,
  • analyze the effectiveness of your social media campaigns thanks to transparent dashboards,
  • interact with users of different social platforms and add new content using one tool.

These are just a few of the advantages of Social Studio. Contact us and we will tell you a lot more about this product, thanks to which you will take your online marketing activities to the next level.

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