The Importance of Social Listening

As a business, there are many different facets of your business that you want to track. You track your website visits. You track your marketing return on investment. And, ideally, you track your brand’s reputation on social media. Tracking your brand’s reputation and brand sentiment is called social listening and it’s critical to your success.

HubSpot defines social listening as “The monitoring of your brand's social media channels for any customer feedback and direct mentions of your brand or discussions regarding specific keywords, topics, competitors, or industries, followed by an analysis to gain insights and act on those opportunities. ”

Based on this definition then, you probably notice that you're tracking several different things. You’re tracking customer satisfaction for your customer service strategy and department. You’re tracking keywords and audience problems for marketing and development. And you’re tracking brand sentiment or how people feel about your brand.

Let’s start by looking at how people feel about your brand or brand sentiment. If you’re marketing on social media then chances are, you’re spending a good amount of time and energy on social media and creating and strengthening your brand message. But how do you know that your message is being received as you intend?

The only way to know is to pay attention, to track brand sentiment and to create a social listening campaign. Social listening takes brand monitoring a step further and actually engages with those talking about your business online. SO, you’re doing more than track, you’re participating.

Consumers like it when brands engage. In fact, the media often likes it when brands engage with their consumers, especially if they do so in a unique and authentic way.

You can control the message (as much as possible). Let’s say that you receive some negative feedback. You can prevent this feedback from becoming a bigger deal if you are engaging in social listening. You can turn the story around with the customer or the person leaving negative feedback and control the message about your brand. (This can be quite powerful to grow your business.)

You discover new opportunities. By monitoring your brand sentiment and engaging with others via social listening you create conversations and conversations uncover opportunities. From discovering a new problem your audience is struggling with finding new partnerships, social listening opens doors.

Set up social monitoring with one of the many exceptional tools available to you like Hootsuite. Create a strategy for responding to comments, both positive and negative. Create a strategy for collecting and assessing the information you learn about your audience. Social listening isn’t complicated and it can be invaluable.