Have you ever wondered what your users on social media are saying about you? You may have tried to figure it out on your own, but you'll find that it's difficult to keep track of all the mentions of your brand on these digital platforms.

Luckily, social listening tools are there to do this for you. 

Here, the team at amaSocial explains:

What is social listening?

The term refers to the act of monitoring or 'listening' to social media conversations about your brand online. This service tracks specific keywords, phrases, topics or brands. With further analysis, these little snippets can, together, create a bigger picture of what is said about your brand.

But this offering involves a lot more than just keeping record of what others are saying about you (or others) in the digital sphere. Its real value lies in that the process uses gathered information to offer more than just raw data to a client. It refines that data into tangible insights and strategies that the brand can implement to gain a better ROI.

Overall, the offering is a powerful marketing tool that offers clients instant insights straight from their consumers' posts. Who wouldn't like to have instant and relevant brand insights that are reliable?

What does social listening offer?

Social listening involves more than just the collection of posts; the solution applies AI-powered algorithms to data in order to process it, and then the results are handed over to humans for further analysis.

In a nutshell, social listening uncovers insights such as:

  • who is discussing your brand, product, industry or topics of interest
  • sentiment analysis, which allows you to see whether your brand’s mentions are being perceived as positive, negative or neutral
  • the most frequent customer complaints about your brand
  • topics of interest for your target market specifically
  • conversations that users have about your brand, and
  • your social media campaigns and their engagement on social media.

The data pulled from users' social media posts can be used in many ways. The way that information is collated and used is dependent on the client's social media strategy and objectives. The desired outcome can be anything from improving their business and marketing strategies, to managing their brand's reputation (but more on this later).

Furthermore, a period of social listening is not limited to any time-frame. With this solution, you can allocate a monitoring period; this refers to the tracking period of a particular keyword, campaign, event or hashtag. It can be both long or short-term, each of which has its own set of unique benefits.

How can brands benefit from social listening insights?

Here's where brands will hit gold with social listening. The service identifies only the most relevant keywords, which provides the client with actionable insights for their business strategies.

The insights this solution gives you can include anything from:

  • creating a better social media strategy
  • discovering changing consumer demands
  • finding ways to retain customers
  • developing targeted products
  • outsmarting industry competitors
  • managing a brand image
  • nipping a PR crisis in the bud, to
  • building a killer marketing strategy.

Social listening can be used in a marketing sense to plan out new and improved strategies. For example, with this solution, you can track a competitor's keyword to see how they are being mentioned and use these insights to improve on your own strategies.

As a public relations tool, with sentiment analysis, you can keep a close eye on any negative mentions surrounding your brand to better manage your reputation. For example, if someone says "I hate [insert your brand's name]", you will immediately be notified of this post, allowing you to manage the crisis instantly.

The solution is also a powerful solution in the media and social space; it can track news, content and events as they happen in order to keep brands up to speed. 

For more information, visit www.amasocial.co.za. You can also follow amaSocial on Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn.