Social Listening: Tips and Tricks for Business Owners
Social media has become an integral part of our lives. Billions of people use social media platforms daily to share their thoughts, experiences, and opinions. As a business owner, leveraging this wealth of information to understand your customers better is essential. In this blog, we'll share everything you need to know about social listening.
Read my guide, How to do Market Research for your Business, afterward to learn about more market research methods you can leverage to drive business outcomes.
What is social listening?
Social listening is monitoring social media platforms for mentions of your brand, competitors, and industry-related keywords. By analyzing online conversations, you can gain valuable insights into what your customers say about your business and use that information to make informed decisions.
What are the pros of social listening?
Social listening provides several advantages as a market research method, including:
- Real-time data: Social listening allows you to collect real-time data on customer opinions, attitudes, and behaviors. This data can be more up-to-date than traditional market research methods, which may involve studying groups conducted over an extended period.
- Large sample size: With social listening, you can analyze a large amount of data from various sources, including social media, online reviews, and forums. This can provide a more comprehensive understanding of customer attitudes and behaviors than a small-scale survey or focus group.
- Cost-effective: Social listening is often less expensive than traditional market research methods.
- Unbiased data: Social listening provides unbiased data, as it reflects the opinions and behaviors of customers in their own words.
What are the cons of social listening?
While social listening has many advantages as a market research method, it also has some potential drawbacks. Here are some disadvantages of social listening:
- Lack of context: Teams often need more context to interpret social listening data accurately. For example, drawing meaningful insights without understanding the context in which a comment was made can be challenging.
- Limited data quality control: The quality of social listening data can vary widely, depending on the source and the accuracy of the data collection tool. For example, automated tools may miss important nuances in language leading to inaccuracies in sentiment analysis.
- Over-reliance on social media: Social listening is often limited to social media platforms, which may not represent the full range of customer opinions or behaviors.
- Lack of representativeness: Social listening data is often self-selected, meaning that it may only reflect the opinions of a particular group of people more likely to post online. Some demographics may be underrepresented on social media, skewing the data.
- Incomplete picture: Social listening may provide insights into customer attitudes and behaviors, but it only tells part of the story. Other factors, such as customer demographics or previous interactions with your brand, may also influence customer decisions and behaviors.
- Privacy and ethical concerns: Social listening raises privacy and ethical concerns, considering you are collecting and analyzing personal data from social media users for commercial use.
Common use cases of social listening
Here are some everyday ways businesses use social listening:
- Brand monitoring and customer feedback: Social listening can help businesses monitor mentions of their brand on social media and other online channels, allowing them to respond quickly to customer complaints, address negative sentiment, and promote positive feedback.
- Competitor analysis: Social listening can help businesses keep tabs on their competitors, track their social media activity, and analyze their marketing strategies. This can help companies to identify gaps in the market and opportunities for differentiation.
- Product development: Social listening can provide valuable feedback for product development, helping businesses identify opportunities for new products or improvements to existing ones based on customer feedback and preferences.
- Campaign and content optimization: Social listening can help businesses optimize their marketing campaigns and content by providing insights into what types of content and messaging resonate with their target audience.
- Crisis management: Social listening can help businesses identify potential crises before they escalate, allowing them to respond quickly and mitigate the damage to their brand.
- Influencer marketing: Social listening can help businesses identify influencers and thought leaders in their industry, allowing them to target their marketing efforts and engage with key stakeholders.
What are the steps to conduct social listening?
Step 1: Define your goals
Before conducting social listening, defining your goals and objectives is important. What are you hoping to achieve? What questions are you trying to answer? Having clear goals will help you stay focused and guide your analysis.
Step 2: Choose your social listening tool
Various social listening tools are available, each with its features and capabilities. Choose a tool that aligns with your goals and budget. Here are my recommendations:
- Zoho Social: best overall
- Hootsuite: best free trial
- Sprout Social: best for small businesses
Step 3: Select your platforms, keywords, and filters
To conduct social listening, you must choose the relevant social media platforms, keywords, and filters to monitor. This will help you focus on the most relevant conversations to your goals. Use a mix of branded and industry keywords, and consider adding filters for sentiment, location, and other factors.
Step 4: Analyze your data
Once you've collected your data, it's time to analyze it. Look for trends, patterns, and insights to help you achieve your goals. Use sentiment analysis tools to understand the tone of the conversation and identify opportunities to engage with customers.
Step 5: Check context and manually review
While social listening tools can provide valuable data, it's important to check the context of conversations and manually review your data to ensure accuracy and relevance. Look for trends, patterns, and insights that may take time to be apparent, and consider the context of the conversation to avoid misinterpretation.
Step 6: Take action
Based on your analysis, take action to achieve your goals. This might include engaging with customers, adjusting your marketing strategies, or improving your products or services.
What social media platforms should you monitor?
Prioritize the monitoring of platforms where your audience likes to hang out and is most active. For example, my target customer is stay-at-home moms. In this case, I might focus my monitoring efforts on Nextdoor instead of other social media platforms with more total users, like TikTok or Instagram.
What metrics should you be tracking with social media listening?
Some standard metrics include the number of mentions, sentiment analysis (positive, negative, or neutral), engagement metrics (likes, comments, shares), reach and impressions, and followers. In addition, you should track business-specific metrics such as customer satisfaction, brand awareness, or sales conversions.
Tips to get the most value from social media listening
- Look beyond your brand name: Don't just focus on mentions of your brand name, but also listen for mentions of your competitors, industry trends, and related topics to gain a deeper understanding of your audience and market.
- Don't focus on the wrong metrics: It's easy to get bogged down in vanity metrics like the number of mentions or followers, but it's more important to focus on metrics that align with your business goals.
- Not all feedback is created equal: Some input may come from people who are not representative of your target audience or have unrealistic expectations.
Common mistakes with social listening
- Relying entirely on automated tools: While social listening tools can be helpful, they're not perfect. For example, automated sentiment analysis can be inaccurate, so manually reviewing the data is important.
- Overreacting to negative feedback: Less than good feedback is inevitable, but keeping it in perspective is important. Overreacting to negative feedback can damage your brand's reputation and lead to knee-jerk reactions that aren't productive.
- Ignoring the context: Social listening can provide valuable insights, but it's essential to consider the context in which the conversations happen. Understanding the context can help you interpret the data correctly.
Companies using social listening to drive business outcomes
1. H&M
H&M ranks as one of the top 100 brands in the world. It has achieved this success not by luck but partly because it uses market research methods to drive business outcomes. For example, to keep up with the millions of impressions they get each day across their social media channels, they use social listening tools to monitor customer sentiment to understand how their brand is perceived, what types of clothes their customers are talking about, and what people are saying about their competitors. The millions of data points they collect and analyze each year help the H&M leadership team make vital decisions that impact the direction of the business.
2. Tesla
Most brands use social listening to understand their customers better; however, some businesses monitor different audiences. For example, Tesla paid a PR firm to use various social listening tools to better understand employees' sentiments in a Facebook group and on social media during Tesla's employees' push to unionize in 2017 and 2018. While Tesla received some heat from the general public for this story, it is not uncommon for big companies to monitor the behavior of employees on social media. A 2018 Gartner report revealed that of 239 large corporations studied, 50% observed the content of employee social media accounts.
3. Apricotton
Apricotton uses Hootsuite's social listening tools to monitor their social media accounts for mentions of its brand, competitors, products, etc. But, more importantly, it allows them to monitor their customers to understand better their preferences and how to serve them best. During the experiment, Apricotton tracked 66,000 impressions and saved over eight hours of their team's time in only two weeks.
Conclusion
In conclusion, social listening is a valuable tool that business owners can use to gain insights into their customers' wants, needs, and opinions. By actively monitoring social media conversations, businesses can identify opportunities for improvement, track trends, and develop effective marketing strategies. However, to make the most of social listening, it's important to approach it strategically and clearly understand your objectives. Following the tips and tricks outlined in this article, business owners can use social listening to build stronger customer relationships and stay ahead of the competition.
