Social listening finds trends and insights within the public data created by social media users. Companies, organisations, and public entities use this information to identify areas for improvement and strengthen their position within the market.

The media update team recently wrote about the basics of social media monitoring in an article, BLOG: Three ways your brand can use social media monitoring.

Social listening builds on the results of the social media monitoring process. Social listening tools use the data that was gathered during the monitoring phase and  process it to draw insights from the information.

This delivers actionable insights that brands can use in a variety of ways. During media update’s exploration of the social media tracking and reporting service amaSocial, we’ve discovered the many uses of the service’s social listening tools.

Here’s what we’ve learnt about social listening and what it can be used for:

1. Building a stronger business strategy

Innovative developments: Social listening offers you the information you need to grow your business. By tracking a topic or even a competitor, you can tap into conversations that reveal your target market’s pain points and their most pressing needs. Outsmart your competitors by knowing what the target market truly wants, and delivering on that need.

Customer insights: Customers also complain on social media. Use this to your advantage by listening to their feedback. Whereas social media monitoring tools can make you aware of complaints, social listening helps to highlight the issues consumers complain about most.

Once you know what your customers’ top issues are, you can take action to improve the way you do things – whether it’s as drastic as improving your offering or as basic as refining the way your employees interact with your customers.

2. Boosting your marketing initiatives

Better social media marketing results: Social listening is one of the best ways to improve your marketing strategy – and especially your social media marketing strategy.

The monitoring side of social media intelligence, i.e. social media monitoring, provides you with metrics that keep you informed about what’s happening with your social media posts. Social listening then makes sense of these metrics and delivers the insights your marketing team needs to improve results.

amaSocial’s reports feature is a perfect example of a social listening tool that provides insights for marketing teams. Its reports combine your social media data from the various social networks you use and then breaks this information down into actionable insights.

Relevant channels and content: You can use social listening tools to discover the main topics your target audience is talking about. Let this information guide the content you create.

These tools can also show you which of the social media networks you are active on is producing the most engagement. If engagement comes from social media users who fall within your target market, you’ll know which platforms are worth investing in.

3. Elevating your brand reputation

Public perception: Social media tracking services like amaSocial helps brands determine the sentiment of the social media posts they’re tracking. This feature is very valuable because it provides you with an indicator of your brand’s health on social media.

Positive sentiment is found in posts that pay a compliment to your products or topic of interest. Negative sentiment is displayed in posts that express unfavourable emotions toward your brand or the topics you are monitoring. Armed with this knowledge, you can take steps to change or improve public perception of your brand – whether it’s through more marketing and PR or improved customer service.  

PR crises: Some of the most damage to brand reputation often happens during a PR crisis. The public responds negatively to an incident involving your business, or a campaign you’ve launched, and suddenly consumers stop supporting your brand.

Social listening tools can alert you when a growing amount of social media users are talking about your brand in a negative way. With this information, you can address their concerns before the negative information spreads.

Social listening provides brands with unique data-driven insights.  Use it to determine the health of your brand, the success of your marketing messages, and opportunities to improve your business.
Read more about social listening in our article, The difference between social media monitoring and listening.
Music image created by Kjpargeter - Freepik.com