Social Media Listening: What Is It and How to Make the Most of It

Social Media Listening: What Is It and How to Make the Most of It

These days, social media monitoring and management can be a tedious job. With so many established and new social media platforms, it can be tough to know what your audience is talking about.

Do you often wonder what your competitors are up to or if there is a risk for an ongoing marketing plan? Well, by practicing social listening, you can instantly know and own any conversation regarding your industry on different platforms.

Here, I will let you know the importance of these practices and how you can implement them.

Social Listening 101: What Is It


In nutshell, social listening is referred to a holistic practice of tracking, analyzing, and responding to all kinds of conversations that take place on different social media platforms.

The concept might seem familiar to social media monitoring, but both principles are simply related to each other. Social media listening is all about gaining insights from our audience or competitors and taking data-driven decisions based on various metrics. On the other hand, social monitoring provides a reactive and responsive strategy for managing multiple platforms.

Social Monitoring vs. Social Listening - DSers
Source: Pinterest

Listening to social platforms can help you gain insights into how your brand is perceived, what are the ongoing marketing trends. Besides that, it can also help you track your customers, identify risks, perform sentiment analysis, and so on.

Why Is Social Media Listening So Beneficial


If you are not sure whether you should invest your time in social listening, then you should certainly have a look at its following advantages:

· Customer Engagement

It is a known fact that customers love to engage with brands on social media. From having a conversation about an upcoming product to resolving their queries, you can track all kinds of conversations with these practices.

Customer Engagement - DSers
Source: Twitter


· Crisis Management

Risk analysis, management, and prevention are some of the most vital benefits of listening to social media platforms. You can identify all negative conversations right from their origin and can take tactical measures to contain them.

· Competition Tracking

Do you want to know what your competitors are posting on Twitter or how they are managing their Facebook accounts? Then consider setting up their analysis metrics on any reliable social listening tool.

· Getting New Leads

It is one of the best ways to identify the pain points of your customers or get to know about people who are unhappy with your competitors. In this way, you can easily reach out to more leads without making too much effort.

Getting New Leads - DSers
Source: Twitter


· Identifying Trends

Most importantly, by tracking related keywords, you can easily know what’s in and what’s not in your domain. You can also identify key influencers and industry-specific experts for future collaboration.

Social Media Listening Tips and Strategies to Follow


Now when you know how social listening works and what are its key benefits, let’s quickly learn how to implement this technique and make it a vital part of your social media marketing strategy.

Tip 1: Know What you Want to Track in Advance

At first, you need to know what are the major things that you wish to track or listen to on various social media platforms. To start with, you need to handpick the platform that you wish to track like Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram, Reddit, Quora, and so on. I would recommend picking some platforms where your audience is most active.

Ideally, most of the brands consider tracking the following things on numerous platforms:

  • Brand mentions (Brand name and handles)
  • Branded and industry-related hashtags
  • Tracking of competitors
  • Industry trends and influencers

Tip 2: Come up with a List of Strategic Keywords

Social listening is an art, and your keywords could be your biggest weapon for gaining all kinds of insights. There is no one right way to do keyword research and analysis. You would have to follow a hit-and-try approach and should manually look for various keywords related to your industry.

Come up with a List of Strategic Keywords - DSers
Source: Wordstream

Apart from listening to keywords related to your brand name, you should also track event and product-specific terms. There are also all kinds of hashtags and long-term keywords that you can dig up. I would recommend using a dedicated keyword research tool that can help you obtain insightful details related to your domain.

Tip 3: Use a Reliable Social Media Tracking Tool

There are so many ways to do social media monitoring and tracking out there. While some platforms like Twitter have an inbuilt feature for social listening, others only have restricted options.

Tip 3: Use a Reliable Social Media Tracking Tool - DSers
Source: Awario

If you are using Twitter, then you can just visit its Analytics section to get insightful details about your brand’s activities. Besides that, you can also consider trying some of the following platforms to meet your professional social media tracking needs:

  • Hootsuite
  • HubSpot
  • Lately
  • Sprout Social
  • Awario
  • AdView
  • Audiense

Since most of these tools offer a free trial version, you can first get a hands-on experience of using them before buying their premium subscription.

Tip 4: Discover the Pain Points of your Audience

One of the most vital applications of social media tracking is related to identifying the pain points of your customers. Apart from providing customer support regarding their queries, it can also let you know what kinds of things your audience is talking about your brand.

Tip 4: Discover the Pain Points of your Audience - DSers
Source: Twitter

Not just that, you can also implement these practices to track the overall performance of your competitors. For instance, by finding the existing unhappy users of your competitors, you can find an opportunity to lure them into trying your services instead.

Tip 5: Come up with a Risk Management Plan

Crisis detection and aversion can also be implemented in a far better way with the help of social media monitoring practices. Every digital marketer is recommended to come up with a dedicated risk management plan to have a quick response for any unwanted crisis.

Tip 5: Come up with a Risk Management Plan - DSers
Source: Twitter

To further implement your strategy, you should already have readily available templates and content that you can easily customize. With the help of social listening, you can be a step ahead of your competitors and various media outlets. As soon as a crisis would happen, you will be informed about it and can take immediate tactical measures to handle it.

Tip 6: Take Data-driven Decisions

Last, but most importantly, social listening would help you make data-driven decisions related to your sales and marketing practices. Let’s say you have come up with a product or service and you would like to know more about its performance. With social media monitoring, you can track how it has been perceived by your audience what is the further scope of improvement.

Tip 6: Take Data-driven Decisions - DSers
Source: TweetBinder

There are also tons of sentiment analysis tools out there for platforms like Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram. Using them, you can quickly understand the overall sentiment of your target audience regarding specific keywords (brands or products). In this way, you can easily check how any brand or product is performing and what measures you should take to market it in the right way.

With these practices, you can not only know more about your brand’s image or its perception, but can also track the activity of your competitors, and use social media as a source for lead generation.

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Over to You


Now when you know how social listening works and why it is so important, you can implement it to own any conversation on social media. Social media monitoring has now become the most vital part of any company’s marketing tactics and you should certainly make the most of it too.

Keep your eyes and ears open to check what your audience is talking about and never miss out on an opportunity to market your products. Besides that, if you want to manage your dropshipping store like a pro, then a tool like DSers should be your go-to option.

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