Marketing is essential in every industry. Using social media monitoring and listening is one of the best marketing strategies businesses can take to gain valuable insights from their customers and prospects. The article will give you some insights on social media listening and tell you how to read social media.

What is Social Media Listening

Social listening is a practice that involves capturing information from social media platforms by extracting critical insights about your business’s target audience’s thoughts on your product or service and discussing the findings with your team.

Social media listening is a powerful tool used to understand your audience’s behaviors and preferences. In social listening, you capture relevant information based on keywords and topics and then share the information with your team through reports. The reports that you create will help your section to make more informed business decisions, including how to meet the needs of their customers better.

Social Media Listening vs. Social Media Monitoring

Social media monitoring is not the same as listening. Although both involve observing conversations about your brand, social media monitoring is a process that only involves recording information to track performance. In contrast, listening involves extracting meaningful insights that can help you improve your business.

Social Listening Platforms

Social media listening can be done through various platforms, such as:

1. Google Alerts – Google Alerts is a service that sends you an email every time new content featuring topics or keywords you specify is published online. Using Google Alerts, you can receive alerts on topics and keywords related to your business.

2. Hootsuite – Hootsuite is a social media management platform that helps you monitor, schedule, and share content across Facebook, Twitter, Yammer, and LinkedIn. You can also use Hootsuite to schedule social media posts before publishing them on the networks. You can review the details of each post that you publish in the Dashboard feature of Hootsuite Dashboard.

3. Tailwind  – Tailwind is a listening tool that helps you monitor tweets about your competitors and your brand. You can use the tool to find influencers and critical opinions on social networks, including YouTube, Flickr, Blogger, Tumblr, and Pinterest. You can also use the tool to track search engine traffic to monitor competitors’ SEO campaigns.

What to Gather From Listening

You can gain several insights from media listening. The things that you can gather from listening include the following:

1.  What your target audience is saying about your brand or product?  Social media platforms enable you to see what people think about your brand or product without filtering their views. The insights that you obtain from social media listening may include complaints about your products or services, suggestions on how to improve your products and services, praise for your products or services, and more. 

2.  What are the key issues your target audience is currently facing?  You can use media listening to get insights into the problems people face in their daily lives. You may find out that people want to know about your business’s latest products, how you can improve your service quality, how to get help from your customer support team, and more.

3.  How does your target audience perceive your competitor?  You can use listening to find out what your competitors are saying about you or your business. You may find out that the competitive landscape is changing with time and that other brands have been better at promoting themselves on social media.

4.  What are your competitors’ weaknesses?  You can use listening to find out what your competitors’ strengths and weaknesses are to target them more effectively. You may find that your competitors have a specific niche market, and to grow, they need to expand their services or products.

About Netbase Quid

Netbase Quid is a consumer and market intelligence platform that enables people to search through hundreds of free and premium sources that provide a wealth of information in business, finance, technology, and marketing. Through Netbase Quid, you can understand your marketing campaign performance, track your competitors’ marketing campaign performance, and uncover new marketing opportunities.