The social listening is an important and very powerful tool, it already offers valuable information about what customers do, feel and expect from our brand.
If you want to know what the social listening and what it is for , in this post we will not only talk about its usefulness for companies, but we will also address the necessary techniques and tools to make the most of it.
What is the social listening ?
The social listening or social media listening is the technique that allows to know everything that is commented on social networks and other 2.0 media on brands, whether corporate or personal. But it also includes other aspects such as what your competition says, as well as products, ideas or topics that are related to your brand.
monitoring tools are used or the data directly from the same social networks, blogs or public forums are extracted. Monitoring what is said of each concept to analyze in the digital ecosystem, the real impact of the brand, the feeling of affinity, the level of interaction, the associated keywords or even the most active users in each conversation can be measured among several factors.
What is the social listening ?
The concept goes far beyond detecting mentions and comments . The main difference between the social listening and monitoring, is that the latter is only rebuking a list of public instances on the Internet, while the social listening identifies and analyzes of each of the instances the unitary scope and importance, the semantic content and the relations between other instances.
Also, through social listening you can understand the demands that your customers ask for, the expectations of your services or products, or how to improve them, what are their most common complaints and why there are returns or changes in home deliveries. In addition, it allows you to learn from competition in your sector, knowing what actions are fruitful to you which are not. With this information, you can also perform a DAFO analysis (weaknesses, threats, strengths, opportunities) from your business, to see how you can differentiate and provide your followers with better products and services.
Techniques in Social Listening
You can use commercial technological tools or even direct collection from the same social networks, forums and blogs, to be able to extract and then analyze data such as:
· Mentions of the company's name, brand, product or concept.
· The feeling (positive, negative or neutral) with respect to them.
· Influencers , ambassadors or detractors.
· Licked hashtags
· Level of importance or credibility of references.
· Value of profiles on social networks or websites involved in conversations.
· Scope of the content distributed by users.
· Direct and indirect interactions between the different sources and their audience.
Tools in Social Listening
There are tools in the market that help us identify information and monitor, some of them free or with partially free versions, such as lists , Google Alerts, Tweetdeck, Social Sprout, Conversocial or Hootsuite.
However, for a deeper study and analysis of social mentions, it is necessary to resort to commercial tools for the social listening . We find some such as Brandwatch, Netbase, Digimind, Sprinklr or Talkwalker, you with a high update rate thanks to the novelties that include in their functionalities,
