Question 1

What is Social Listening?

Accepted Answer

In brief, social listening is the continuous, two-part process of monitoring and analyzing.

1. Monitoring Your Social Channels

Monitoring your social media channels provides the useful feedback you need. This can include product or service perceptions, unbranded mentions, discussions on specific subjects of value, and more.

2. Analyzing Feedback

Analyzing said feedback helps you acquire concrete insights and allows you to act in response to them. This can include pattern recognition and evaluation on the front of analysis, and any appropriate actions on the front of responding.

Question 2

Why Does Social Listening Matter?

Accepted Answer

Even with that definition, however, you may not immediately see the value of social listening. Or, you may find that your existing social monitoring suffices for your purposes. To address these possibilities, then, here are a few of the benefits of social listening:

1. Increased Engagement Quality

Initially, social listening enables you to “thoughtfully craft responses that provide real value”, as HubSpot asserts in the above article. That’s because it offers a solid overview of your brand’s image online, and a deeper understanding of discussions around it.

2. Enhanced Customer Journeys

By the same token, social listening enables you to identify unseen pain points. Where social monitoring would only uncover metrics like engagement rates, social listening will delve deeper into exact customer journey paths. This will allow you to craft more accurate buyer personas as well as refine their journeys from promotion to conversion.

3. Competitor Tracking

Similarly, your audiences may discuss your competitors as they, too, attempt to court them. Listening to such discussions adds another layer to your competitor analysis practices by focusing on what actual audiences say. They may, for example, discuss a new product launch you have missed and will need to respond to.

4. PR

Finally, social listening also enhances PR teams’ arsenals by providing additional information. By gauging the overall sentiment around their brand, they can react more swiftly to crises as they emerge. At the same time, it can help quantify positive and negative reactions for more calculated actions – as it’s often easy to mistake minor, isolated outbursts of negativity for much larger crises than they really are.

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