Social Listening Guide: Examples, Tips & Strategy

Understanding what your target audience says about your brand and identifying the reasons behind it can help improve your marketing strategy.

Social listening provides meaningful insights into people’s conversations that could help you stay ahead of your competition. 

This guide covers social listening in detail, including its meaning, real-life examples, social media listening strategy, and best practices.

What is social listening in marketing?

Social listening is a strategy-based approach where you analyze conversations on social platforms to get actionable insights into your brand, competitors, or industry.

Think of social listening as a way to read your target audience’s mind. In this process, you proactively track mentions of your brand to find the root cause behind online conversations. 

So, you can use social listening as a strategy to understand your target audience (or customers), their needs, pain points, and challenges to inform your future marketing decisions.

Here are some characteristics of social listening:

• It is a strategy-based approach. Social listening involves gathering meaningful insights that can power future decisions. So, you can use it as a tool for strategic planning, especially before setting up your marketing campaigns.
• Social listening is a two-part process. The first phase involves monitoring brand mentions to understand the reason behind people’s conversations. In the next phase, you interpret and implement the insights gathered to inform your decision-making.
• It is proactive. Social listening involves active monitoring of social channels to spot trends or issues that could affect your brand. Hence, it helps you take action before any issue escalates into a crisis.
• Social listening is intensive. It involves a thorough investigation of conversations, discussions, and mentions to have a deeper understanding of people’s sentiments, trends, and themes related to your brand and industry.

How does social listening work? The process & components

Social listening works by collecting data, organizing it into metrics, and analyzing the metrics to generate actionable insights.

Social listening is an intensive process with a broad scope and involves the following steps:

1. Collecting data. You gather data (in the form of mentions) from various sources like social media platforms, blogs, websites, and forums.
2. Organizing data. Most social data is unstructured, so you need to organize it and remove the clutter before analyzing it.
3. Analyzing data. You can manually or automatically analyze the structured data to make sense of it.
4. Interpreting and using insights. After data analysis, you can use charts or reports to interpret it. Then, you will use the generated insights to drive your decisions.

Social listening also involves the following components:

• Analyzing the sentiment in conversations: Sentiment analysis is an essential aspect of social listening. It helps you understand the emotional tone behind people’s conversations.
• Spotting engagement and outreach opportunities: You can improve your engagement with your customers or target audience by identifying and responding to their concerns.
• Tracking industry trends: Social listening helps you keep tabs on the latest trends in your niche.
• Studying competitors: Competitor analysis helps you know how your brand compares to other brands in the same industry.
• Identifying influencers: Social listening allows you to spot influencers to collaborate wit to promote your brand.

What are social listening tools?

Social listening tools are software that monitor and analyze online conversations related to a brand, its competitors, and the industry.

Social media listening platforms work by monitoring conversations across multiple channels, like social media platforms, blogs, and websites. They detect mentions of your search query and examine them to provide actionable insights.

These tools help you understand the “why” behind people’s conversations. For instance, after launching a new product, you can use a social listening tool to know what customers think of it. Tracking mentions of the specific product or keywords related to your brand will provide useful insights into customers’ sentiments about your product.

Social listening tools have useful features to help you gather, organize, and analyze information from the monitored features. These most common features include:

• Keyword tracking lets you choose the search queries (keywords) to monitor. 
• Sentiment analysis shows people’s feelings about your brand, products, or services.
• Competitor analysis lets you benchmark your brand against competitors.
• Analysis and reporting help you understand generated insights and share them with your team (or stakeholders).
• Real-time alerts notify you of sudden changes in your brand’s mentions.
• Filters and widgets help you narrow search results to remove unnecessary information.

Many social listening tools are available on the market, so you’ll always find one that matches your needs, goals, and budget.

The most popular social listening tools are:

• Synthesio
• Sprinklr
• Talkwalker
• Brandwatch
• SproutSocial
• Mention
• Brand24
• Meltwater
• Quid

Social listening examples (case studies)

Social listening is a marketing strategy that can be used to achieve desired objectives, from improving customer experience to boosting brand reputation.

Here are real-life examples of social listening:

IKEA uses social listening to monitor brand health

IKEA, a global furniture brand, has a massive consumer base worldwide, with 460 stores in 62 markets. Its customers mention the brand on social media eight to 12 times every minute. 

Ferency Thuroczy, IKEA’s global social media director, wanted to keep tabs on these online conversations and gain meaningful insights to share with his team. So he looked for a social listening tool offering the following:

• Brand monitoring with comprehensive media coverage
• 24/7 monitoring of digital and traditional media channels
• Unified view of gathered, analyzed, and consolidated data
• Easy and quick sharing of generated reports

Thuroczy came across Sprinklr, which ticked all the boxes on his checklist. Sprinklr’s Media Monitoring and Analytics solution allowed the social media team to monitor and analyze brand mentions globally. Its AI crisis detector provided real-time alerts, helping the team spot trends and issues that could affect the brand’s reputation. 

Sprinklr also helped Thuroczy create the Media Impact Score Capability, a metric that would help him understand and measure the brand’s PR team’s efforts. This metric had these five measurements:

• Relevance: Higher relevance of IKEA’s messages showed a higher impact on social media.
• Domain Authority: A higher ranking of IKEA’s articles on search engine search results showed better visibility, higher relevance, and domain authority.
• Engagement: A higher engagement on IKEA’s content showed high relevance and impact.
• Global Rank: A higher viewership of IKEA’s articles worldwide showed better visibility and trustworthiness.
• Syndication: If publications picked IKEA’s original content, it had a high impact.

Quantum boosts its research and strategic capabilities

Quantum, a global insight, strategy and innovation consultancy, develops clients’ design strategies using data.

The consultancy had been outsourcing its research work to external consultants to get data for their clients’ projects. Unfortunately, the external consultants only provided limited results in the form of summary reports, which lacked essential details. So, Quantum couldn’t get the real picture of consumer conversations to offer strategic directions for clients’ projects.

Quantum decided to move its research work in-house. Cianan O’Dowd, the leader of Quantum’s digital social listening team, sought a social listening tool that would provide clean raw data. The team found Brandwatch, a social listening tool offering social listening and consumer intelligence solutions.

With Brandwatch, the in-house research team accessed clean, reliable data sets. They were also able to organize the data for better analysis and efficient workflow. Plus, the analysts and researchers were able to pick the right information that was relevant to specific projects.

Quantum’s digital social listening team improved its research capabilities by combining social listening with traditional qualitative methods. Through in-depth data analysis, the team:

• Spotted industry trends
• Developed new marketing strategies
• Researched a new type of product innovation
• Understood consumers’ perceptions of flavors for a Food and Beverage client

Cryptiony boosts its reputation

Cryptiony is a cryptocurrency platform. It provides a tax reporting system that automates the calculation and reporting of cryptocurrency taxes.

Hanna Milczarek, Cryptiony’s Chief Marketing Officer, manages the brand’s market activity and online reputation. Due to the massive growth in the cryptocurrency industry, Hanna found it challenging to keep tabs on emerging industry trends. Also, she couldn’t effectively track Cryptiony’s online reputation.

She turned to Brand24, a social listening tool that offers brand monitoring solutions. It helps brands track relevant mentions across multiple platforms, manage crises, and improve their online reputation.

With Brand24, Hannah and her team tracked mentions related to her brand across various channels using relevant keywords. The team managed to:

• Understand customer needs and improve service delivery
• Prevent and manage crises that could tarnish the brand’s reputation
• Increase Cryptiony’s brand awareness and engagement
• Identify influencers and collaborators
• Spot new market opportunities and stay ahead of competitors

Why is social listening important?

Social listening provides valuable information about your brand, customers, competitors, and the industry at large. It gives insights into consumers’ needs, challenges, preferences, and purchasing behaviors. You also learn what content types they like or what social channels they frequent.

We’ll cover the benefits of social listening in the next section.

The benefits of social listening

Social listening is a great way to conduct market research and adjust your marketing campaigns to gain a competitive advantage.

A social listening tool helps you track relevant keywords or mentions across different platforms. It then analyzes the data to provide insights into emerging industry trends and how they may affect your brand. Analyzing these insights will help you make informed decisions about improving your marketing strategy.

Here’s an example:

You’re a car manufacturer who’s been tracking mentions related to electric vehicles and green energy. Then, you notice a surge in conversations on renewable energy and electric cars. Plus, there’s a spike in positive sentiments related to these mentions.

This trend shows a shift to vehicles powered by renewable energy. As a car manufacturer, you can use this as an opportunity to invest in electric vehicle manufacturing and be a step ahead of competitors who’ll not take the leap.

Social listening helps you improve your brand reputation through web monitoring and crisis management.

Customers use social media platforms and review sites to discuss their experiences with different products or services. Social listening allows you to gather information about what people think or feel about your brand, its products, and services. The nature of customers’ sentiments towards your products or services will inform your next course of action.

Here’s an example:

You’re a fabric softener brand that actively tracks mentions related to your brand on social platforms and review sites. Then, you notice customers’ questions about a fabric softener variety you recently released into the market. Most consumers want to know why the fabric softener’s packaging differs from older varieties. 

You can respond quickly to these questions and assure the customers that the packaging doesn’t affect the product’s quality. You can also ask them to recommend their preferred packaging for the next batch of the same fabric softener. 

Responding promptly and frankly to these queries is a great way to build customer trust. They’ll recognize you as a trustworthy brand that understands and responds to their concerns. 

Social listening is a great way to identify and understand your customers’ needs and preferences.

Understanding how customers interact with your products and services will help you know how to improve their experiences. It also boosts customer relations by staying in touch with them through conversational marketing.

Here’s an example:

You’re a fast food restaurant in a busy town. You want to know how customers feel about your services, so you conduct social listening on all your channels. The search results show that customers are not happy with your serving time. Most of them have complained about waiting for up to an hour before receiving their orders. Some have even planned to boycott your restaurant.

The scenario shows how you can use social listening to understand customers’ unmet needs. In this case, you should apologize to the customers immediately and improve the serving time at your restaurant. You can also start a campaign to show how your restaurant is now utilizing technology to serve customers better.

Social listening is a great strategy for studying your competitors’ marketing or social media strategies.

A social listening tool allows you to monitor and analyze mentions related to your competitor. It then provides insights into:

• Customers’ sentiments about your competitors
• How they engage their audiences
• Their marketing strategies’ strengths and weaknesses

With the above insights, you can identify gaps or new market opportunities.

Here’s an example:

You’re a brand in the smartphone niche and want to stay ahead of your competitors. So, you use a social listening tool to track mentions related to your brand and competitors. From the search results, you’ve discovered that customers have complained about a specific phone brand from one of your competitors. They claim its storage capacity is too low compared to other phones in its category. From these insights, you’ve decided to use a new marketing strategy to tell competitors about your phone model with a higher storage capacity than your competitors.

You can identify influencers and brand advocates to collaborate with using social listening.

Many brands use influencer marketing to reach wider audiences and promote their products or services. You can also look for influencers to boost brand awareness and increase sales.

Social listening tools have influencer discovery features that help you locate potential influencers and brand ambassadors. They analyze social platforms and detect people who talk well of your brand or genuinely love your products or services.

They also analyze their performance metrics like the number of followers and engagement rate to help you narrow down to those who best fit your brand.

Others have advanced features like fake influencer detectors and influencer management tools.

Social listening helps you find new ideas to improve your content marketing strategy.

Here’s how:

• Understanding your target audience: Your audience’s conversations and sentiments reveal their pain points, content preferences, and favorite social channels. They also help you identify user-generated content you can build on during content creation.
• Identifying content topics: Analyzing industry trends helps you stay ahead of the latest themes and trends. You can use this information to craft content that is relevant to your target audience.
• Improving content distribution: Identifying your audience’s favorite content forms and social channels guides you on how to distribute your content. For instance, if your audience frequents Instagram, create more visual content like reels and short videos.
• Monitoring content performance: Social listening helps you know how your target audience interacts with your content. High-performing content will have many comments, likes, and shares (and vice versa). These metrics allow you to adjust your content creation strategy accordingly.

Here’s an example:

You’re a digital marketer working for a SaaS brand. You’ve been monitoring the company’s channels and noted that most people don’t understand how your latest product works. With this information, you can adjust your content strategy to include more educational content, including guides and tutorials, to inform your target audience about the product.

You can use social listening to gain intelligence to inform your product development decisions.

Social listening provides information about consumers’ unmet needs and how they feel about the products in the market. If a product doesn’t meet their expectations, they’ll talk about it on their social media platforms and review sites.

You can use these insights to determine what features to improve or if you can introduce a new product to satisfy consumers’ expectations.

For example:

A clothing label has been manufacturing pants that cater to specific women’s body sizes and shapes. After conducting social listening, the brand has noticed a spike in conversations about diversity and inclusion in the clothing industry. So, the brand can decide to introduce pants that fit women of different body sizes and shapes to meet the needs of consumers who feel left out. 

What is a social listening strategy?

A social listening strategy is a guideline that helps you determine what course of action you’ll take to achieve your social listening goals. 

An effective social listening strategy should have the following elements:

• A well-defined target audience. Who will you target in your social listening campaign? What are their unmet needs, preferences, interests, and challenges? 
• Clear goals, objectives, and KPIs. What do you want to achieve? How will you know that you’ve achieved it?
• Suitable social platforms. What social channels will you monitor your brand mentions?
• A suitable social listening tool. Which social listening tool aligns with your goals, needs, and budget?

How to build your social listening strategy

Here’s how to build an effective social listening strategy:

1. Define your target audience

A well-defined target audience is an important element in a social listening strategy.

Identifying your target audience allows you to be specific with your social listening campaign— after all, you’re not selling to everyone. You can define your target audience by their behaviors, interests, or demographics.

Below are some considerations to make:

• Behavior: Do they purchase products from online stores? Do they rely on reviews from previous users to make their buying decisions?
• Interests: What social platforms do they frequent, and at what time? What are their favorite content formats? How do they follow online?
• Demographics: Are they male or female? What’s their age bracket? Are they students or working class? If working, what’s their income status?

2. Set clear goals and objectives

What do you want to achieve with your social listening strategy? Do you want to know what your competitors are doing? Or do you want to stay on top of industry trends?

Your social listening strategy should have well-defined goals or objectives. Do you want to understand your target audience better, stay ahead of your competitors, or gain product intelligence?

After identifying your goals and objectives, list your key performance indicators (KPIs). Each goal or objective should have a corresponding KPI. Clear KPIs will help you measure or analyze the search results to know if you’ve achieved your objectives.

Here’s an example:

If your main objective is to know how your target audience feels about your new product, the corresponding KPI could be “positive or negative sentiments.”

3. Identify the social platforms to monitor

You can monitor as many media platforms as possible. 

But it’s crucial to first focus on the platforms where your target audience mostly hangs out. So, defining your target audience will also help you determine the ideal channels to monitor. That way, you’ll have a clear picture of all their conversations.

Identifying the social platforms to monitor will also help you choose the most suitable social listening tool.

4. Choose the right social listening tool

A social listening tool will help you automate the social listening process. The ideal tool should collect, organize, analyze, and interpret data from various media channels.

It should also offer automatic alerts to notify you when there’s a sudden change in your brand mentions. The social listening tool should provide actionable insights to help you make informed decisions.

Since there’s a wide range of social listening tools in the market, choosing a suitable one can be challenging. But the right social listening tool should align with your goals, needs, and budget. You can also have a checklist of the essential features to look out for in your ideal social listening tool.

Some vital features to look out for include:

• Keyword tracking
• Audience targeting/segmentation
• Sentiment analysis
• Competitor analysis
• Trend analysis
• Analytics and reporting

5. Choose your search terms/keywords

Choosing the right keywords (search terms) helps you gather meaningful insights. Remember, you only want to monitor relevant mentions of your brand or industry.

You can first create a list of the following:

• Your brand name
• Keywords related to your products or services
• The names of your competitors
• Keywords and hashtags related to your niche or industry
• Slogans your brand uses
• Trending topics

You can also use features like AI assistants on your social listening tool to brainstorm relevant keywords to monitor.

6. Collect, segment, and analyze the data

Your social listening tool will help you collect data using your preferred search terms. 

Segment this data based on relevance, importance, and priority. For instance, you can prioritize conversations that directly mention your brand’s name or products. Also, use filters and widgets to refine your results by sieving out unnecessary information.

Once you have organized the data, visualize it using features like charts, tables, and graphs. Then, analyze all the metrics to gain valuable insights. At this point, you could use the help of a data analyst to interpret the metrics.

7. Act on the insights gathered

After data analysis comes implementation. The meaningful insights you’ve gathered from social listening should help you take the necessary actions. 

Most social listening tools allow you to create custom reports based on the insights you obtain. Use these reports to influence decisions that matter to your business, such as your content or marketing strategy and customer service.

8. Measure your efforts and refine your strategy

After you’ve implemented the insight-informed decisions, note how they impact your business. For instance, if you have introduced a new product following consumers’ positive sentiments, monitor their reactions thereafter and adapt accordingly. 

Social listening best practices & tips

Following tried and tested practices can help you improve your social listening strategy.

Here are some social listening best practices and tips to consider:

Use keyword variations

While it’s important to use specific keywords to track mentions, remember that people don’t always spell names right. 

So, consider using keyword variations to ensure that you don’t mis out on relevant mentions. For example, you can have misspelled versions of your brand name or products in your search. You can also try abbreviations of your brand name, a competitor, or an industry buzzword.

Monitor the right channels

Identifying the right channels for brand monitoring is crucial. 

Apart from the social platforms your brand uses, consider listening to conversations on forums and discussion sites like Quora and Reddit. You can also cast your net wider by monitoring news sites, podcasts, and websites.

Analyze the right metrics

Knowing what metrics to measure will ensure a specific social listening strategy. For instance, if you want to measure your brand’s social performance, choose metrics (or KPIs) like:

• Engagement rate on posts
• The number of followers on social media
• The number of email subscribers
• Rate of community growth

Study your competitors

Benchmarking your brand against others in your industry can help you identify gaps or new opportunities.

So, use social listening as a strategy to study your competitors. How do they engage their audience? How are their marketing strategies? What can you borrow from them? What can you improve?

Share social data

The data generated from social listening is an asset to different departments in an organization, from marketing to PR and customer service.

If you’re a social media manager tasked with conducting social listening for your company, it’s good practice to share the insights with other departments. Use the analytics and reporting features offered by a social listening tool to visualize and export the data into shareable forms.

Use insights in decision-making

Social listening yields actionable insights that can help power decisions. Be action-oriented by implementing these insights in your content and marketing strategies. Also, measure the impact of these decisions on your company from time to time.

Challenges associated with social listening

Although social listening is an effective marketing strategy, it faces several challenges, including:

Data volume and quality 

There’s a lot of data on social media platforms that brands can collect from online conversations. But most of it may be irrelevant or outdated and not add value to your brand. Plus, some social profiles are fake, while some users give false information (especially on review sites).

How to solve this: Use a social listening tool with advanced filters and widgets to remove irrelevant data from your search results.

Inaccuracy

Although social listening tools help with data collection, analysis, and interpretation, they’re not always accurate. Social media data is mostly unstructured since people use sarcasm, irony, and slang in their conversations. Social listening tools may misinterpret the sentiment or emotional state behind conversations.

How to solve this: Find social listening tools with advanced sentiment analysis features. For instance, Talkwalker has an AI-powered sentiment analysis feature that uses Natural Language Processing (NLP) to pick the tone in people’s conversations.

Contextual understanding

Conversations on social media have different contexts, depending on the users’ location, age group, occupation, or situation. Sometimes, social listening tools may not understand the context of discussions. For example, a customer may complain about buying expired bread. The problem could be the shopkeeper who didn’t inspect their goods, not the bread manufacturer.

How to solve this: Brands can use human analysts to investigate the context behind conversations more deeply. For instance, they can analyze a customer’s purchasing behavior and online interactions.

Language barriers

Brands with customers worldwide may find it difficult to understand conversations in some languages. Also, some social listening features have limitations on supported languages.

How to solve this: Look for a social listening tool that supports multiple languages and offers translation features.

Actionability

Turning some insights into actions is another social listening challenge. Although some tools recommend how to utilize the insights, some may be inaccurate.

How to solve this: Have clear objectives of how you will use the insights generated from social listening. Also, have in-house data analysts to help interpret data and align recommendations with the brand’s goals and objectives.

FAQs

What’s the difference between social monitoring and social listening

In social monitoring, you track mentions to respond to customer queries, but in social listening, you focus on getting actionable insights from monitored mentions. So, social monitoring is a reactive process where you want to know “what” people are saying, while social listening is more proactive and helps you know the “why” behind those conversations.

What are the objectives of social listening?

The main objective of social listening is to gather actionable insights from online conversations. But you can split this into smaller objectives like understanding customers’ needs, studying competitors, identifying industry trends, and managing crises.

What is the best social listening tool?

The best social listening tool is one that matches your business goals, needs, and budget. An ideal social listening tool should offer essential features to help you collect, organize, analyze, and interpret data. Plus, it should notify you of sudden changes in the volume of your brand mentions.

How to improve social listening?

You can improve social listening by:

• Having clear goals and objectives
• Using advanced social listening tools
• Only monitoring relevant social platforms
• Using filters and widgets to sieve out unnecessary results
• Analyzing insights regularly to identify patterns, trends, or topics that can influence your marketing strategies
• Integrating social listening with Customer Relationship Management (CRM) systems to improve customer support and engagement

• Social listening and sentiment analysis
• Social listening statistics
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