Glossary
Social listening
customer experience
employee experience
Social listening is a strategy that involves paying attention to activities across social media channels that have to do with your brand. Alongside monitoring direct mentions or interactions with your brand, it involves monitoring competitors, keywords, conversations, and other elements across your brand's specific industry.
Social Listening FAQs
What's the Difference Between Social Listening and Social Monitoring?
Social listening can be said to be a broader version of social monitoring. While social monitoring is reactive and only involves micro-observations of direct mentions of and interactions with your brand, social listening additionally involves macro-observations of your entire industry. Social listening also takes customer interactions with competitors, discussions of general topics, and industry keywords, among others, into account.
Why Is Social Listening Important for Brands?
Generally, utilizing social listening strategies allows you to gain broader insight into problems around your industry. You improve your marketing and customer service campaigns through high-level information gathering.
More specifically for your customer servicing, social listening allows you to identify problems and form responses or solutions to these problems before your customers directly bring them to you. With this, you improve your customer service experience, which ultimately and drastically increases your customer lifetime value and loyalty.
For your customer acquisition, social listening allows you to improve your inbound and outbound marketing strategies. By paying attention to topics, conversations, and interactions around your industry, you understand just what your customers want and even what works for your competitors. You find opportunities to improve your marketing strategies, product, or service when you monitor general customer conversations.
What Are Social Listening Tools?
A social listening tool is simply software through which you can monitor conversations about your brand, competitors, topics, and any other factor that is relevant to your business. They automate the whole monitoring and analysis process, helping you eliminate the workload and staffing requirements associated with manual social listening.
The best social listening tool is software like Medallia Go which extends beyond social media platforms and incorporates machine learning, comprehensive dashboards, and real-time data reporting to give you a high-level view into your industry.
How Does Social Listening Work?
Effective social listening involves a three-step process, with this process flowing from monitoring to analysis and response.
Monitoring: Monitoring involves identifying your social platforms and frequently gathering data about your brand and industry from your customer interactions and conversations.
Analysis: Analysis is the stage where you convert data gathered during monitoring into actionable insights about your products or trends in your industry. Through automated tools, you easily identify customer satisfaction levels and sentiments, telling you where your brand can make improvements.
Response: Response is where you make those potential improvements identified during the analysis stage. These improvements may include either tweaking marketing messages, adapting to industry trends, or even changing parts of your service offering. Social listening is never effective if you skip this response stage.
What Are Some Use Cases of Social Listening?
Some common purposes or uses of social listening are to analyze micro and macro sentiments, monitor brand reputation, manage public relations, and analyze marketing campaigns, among others.
Although social listening can be used by any business, it is more effective and actionable if you have an online presence. Through social listening, E-commerce businesses, for example, can come across negative conversations about a competitor (micro sentiment analysis), identify the reason for this negativity, come up with a solution, and immediately incorporate details of this solution into direct outbound campaigns to these affected individuals.
What Are Some Examples of Social Listening?
A great example showing how you can implement social listening can be seen in Fitbit's use of its social media community to identify emerging issues and drive product improvements. Fitbit's popular and effective "Reminder to Move" feature is one of its solutions that emerged from listening to user conversations across social media platforms.
Another great example of social listening is Wendy's quick use of negative customer sentiment against McDonald's to create positive sentiment for its brand and increase customer engagement.
Other Terms Related to Social Listening
