Why social listening is important
- By Sarah Guenther
- Mar 3, 2017
- 2 min read
Social listening. It’s a phrase that is often used in the world of public relations and content marketing, but what does it really mean?
According to Sprout Social, social listening is “the process of tracking conversations around specific phrases, words or brands, and then leveraging them to discover opportunities or create content for those audiences.”
While social monitoring is often the de facto method of analyzing social media interaction between an organization and its publics, social listening goes a step further by providing analysis and reflection. Networked Insights CEO Dan Neely puts it simply: Monitoring sees trees; listening sees the forest.
The advent of social media has created new ways for companies to track what their existing (and potential) are saying about their brand. People expect a company to respond to them on social media in a timely manner – otherwise, they think that a company who ignores social media communications doesn’t care about its customers.
Before employing a social listening plan, it is important to first decide what you want the plan to achieve. Creating a goal and achievable objectives allows you to evaluate if the strategy is working and if not, go back to the drawing board to figure out what you’re trying to do with the strategy.
After you’ve decided what you want to achieve, you can formulate your social listening plan. According to Neely, a successful social listening plan does the following things:
Evaluates data and aggregates patterns: It takes too much time to sift through all the comments made about your company. An effective social listening strategy will find the themes and patterns throughout mentions of your company so that you can figure out the best ways to reach your target audience.
Doesn’t rely solely on keywords to find themes: While searching through keywords can sometimes be beneficial, it doesn’t help if the underlying patterns are left out. Social listening allows you to find what drives your audience
Creates automatic reports that record, analyze, categorize and visualize data: A lot of data is better than no data but what do you do when there’s so much data that it’s nearly impossible to decipher it? A social listening plan allows you to find what you’re looking for in an easy to read report.
Once the hard work of analyzing and categorizing online content is complete, you can use what you’ve learned to create better marketing campaigns, identify potential influencers for your brand, discover the best platforms to reach your target audience and uncover new insights that will fuel your marketing strategy.
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