1. Monitoring
Social listening begins by learning from your own by looking at posts on your sites and your hashtags, pages, and handles. Think about asking a question or raising an issue on one of your social media sites and then gathering the comments received on that page. These Twitter, Facebook, or Instagram posts can give you a fast idea of how your audience views a given issue at a given time.
To start monitoring, track your brand in every way you can. You'll want to examine your online content, any mentions of your brand that you find online, as well as mentions of your company's leaders. You're trying to discover how far your company's reach extends and which forms of content perform best. Most importantly, what kind of content do your followers respond to most eagerly? Do they prefer long or short form, video or print, case studies, or short blog posts? When doing your monitoring, try to catch every way that you might be mentioned on different types of social media, such as Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, and Youtube.
The next step is to track your competition. Where are they? What activity are they generating? You can use Google or other search functions to find your competitors, including those you don't already know. Once you know which of them is active online, consider the social networks they use and how often they post. Does their work engage their readers; does it engage you? Are they responsive? Examine the forms of content they post and the content they link to and promote. If you track views, shares, and follows for their material, compare it to your own performance. In the end, listening tells you what your users want; monitoring lets you find out why they want it.
2. Analyzing
Social listening involves keeping track of mentions of and content by you and other brands. You’re keeping an eye on the ways people are talking about each brand and what they think, feel, and say about these brands and their products and services. At the same time, you’re comparing your performance against that of your competitors. Once you’ve monitored your social channels, you’ll be able to use that data to analyze it and gain insights, such as customer sentiments, gaps in your service, and so forth.
3. Decision making
Monitoring and analyzing information on your social channels are key components of any social listening strategy. Together, they can give you great insight into how people feel about your industry, specific industry topics, and industry brands, including yours. But you can go one step further to discover who your audience is, not just what they talk about. This focuses on the lifestyles of your users and provides a depth of knowledge that can be used to make strategic marketing and business decisions.
Using a social listening tool can help you bring together data from a broad selection of social channels and use that data to identify behavioral patterns or brand engagement in your target audience. You’ll then be able to better understand your consumers for who they really are and connect with them on a more personal level. Not only can you know them, but you can also sort them based on your chosen data ports. For example, you can find out who your most profitable followers are and find ways to increase revenue with groups that aren't yet so profitable.
You can also use information gathered through social listening to make other important decisions, such as product or service improvements, enhancing customer service, revamping marketing campaigns, and more.