How important is it to listen to your target in developing a communication project? We believe that listening is of the utmost importance - the foundation of any creative strategy and project. Read this article and discover a list of the main Social Media Listening tools, why you should use them and to what advantage.
What is social Listening?
Social Media Listening is a series of activities aimed at finding and tracking online conversations around specific keywords, phrases and events, as well as around a brand, sector or competitor. Listening to these “conversations” will help you decrypt behavior patterns and market trends so as to give you a remarkable competitive advantage.
The four main areas where Social Listening can make a difference in marketing and communications are:
- Initial analysis: competitors, sentiment, scenario
- Strategy and creativity development
- Problem solving
- Reporting and results monitoring
1 – Initial analysis
With our social listening tools we can get a clear picture of the scenario where the brands operates. These tools help us define how competitors speak and what our target tells about them - their sentiment - but also understand how our reference target talks about a brand. In this way, we can identify critical areas, avoid pitfalls and create original content, while being sure that we talk about what our target is interested in.
The initial analysis goes further beyond in providing insights: data also tell us when and where our target talks positively about a specific topic that is related to our brand. In a nutshell, this introductory analysis aims at drawing the overall scenario where our brand lives or will live.
2 – Strategy and creativity
The information collected in the first stage will also help us for strategy and creativity. Thanks to our social listening capabilities, in fact, we can identify the keywords or the general sentiment towards ideas or concepts. For instance, we could find that, when talking about a specific product, our target associates it to – let’s say – a childhood memory or a particular concept, such as friendship, pride or other. All these data, if properly collected and interpreted, will inform our strategy and give us interesting creative insights, a path to follow. Or, in other instances, they will tell us what direction is better NOT to take.
3 - Problem solving
Our social monitoring might also show some issues: customer dissatisfaction, issues with a specific product or message, etc. It’s here where we can add value to our clients, by notifying them about the issue and offering targeted actions, possibly involving different areas and departments: customer service, product development, marketing and communications, etc. Each time the actions will have a different objective: creating exchange with the reference audience (e.g. by introducing a Messenger client service), improving a product or service, or redefining a message.
4 - Reporting
Last but not least, social listening will help us monitor our campaign progress more in depth. Our reports will not only include quantitative data, but also qualitative data, which are an important source of information to actively listen to our community.
Here’s a limited list of some social listening tools we useTwitter:Brand 24: https://brand24.comMention: https://mention.com/en
Google:
https://www.google.com/alerts
https://trends.google.com/trends/?geo=US
https://www.youtube.com/feed/trending
Facebook & Instagram:
https://www.netbase.com
https://sysomos.com
https://crowdanalyzer.com
https://talkwalker.com
