What is Social Listening and what is its importance for digital marketing

Listening to consumers should be a priority for brands and companies in all sectors. Those who invest in a process of digitalizing communication and tracing digital marketing strategies have the opportunity to collect valuable information from users, by using methodologies such as Social Listening.

With Social Listening, it is possible to monitor user conversations in digital media, using Big Data and Artificial Intelligence, in order to guide the digital strategy of the brand or company. If you are not yet using Social Listening, you are missing the opportunity to know the real opinion and needs of your company's customers.

What is Social Listening?

Social Listening is a methodology used to monitor your digital platforms (social media and websites), in order to find all mentions and conversations regarding the brand. After the information is collected, it is analyzed to discover opportunities that can be incorporated into the marketing strategy.

It is a concept that is often confused with Social Monitoring, which consists solely of reviewing a set of metrics such as brand mentions, relevant hashtags, and industry trends. Social Listening goes beyond these metrics and considers the hidden moods behind the data, trying to understand how consumers feel.

Human beings are programmed for socialization

Considering that human beings are programmed for socialization, direct interaction is still important for many people. According to a survey conducted by Axios and SurveyMonkey, 42% of adults in the United States prefer in-person communication over other forms of social interaction such as emails or phone calls.

To better understand this phenomenon, complementary strategies such as Social Intelligence are also used during the Social Listening process, a market research tool that offers multiple opportunities to identify trends and the needs of our target audience, to achieve a competitive advantage within the sector.

The psychologist Edward Thorndike was the one who coined the term Social Intelligence in 1920, referring to the ability to understand, manage and participate in social interactions. The concept was expanded in 1987 by social psychologists John Kihlstrom and Nancy Cantor, who focused on the individual's knowledge of the social world.

Social Intelligence offers a broad understanding of customers, allowing brands to have a strategic vision of their corporate activity. In this sense, Social Listening together with Social Intelligence play an important role in innovation, allowing trends to be explored and market opportunities identified through Insights analysis.

What is the importance of Social Listening?

With social listening it is possible to obtain interesting commercial advantages. All the Insights and metrics collected with the different tools, will help the company to evaluate its activity, feed its digital marketing strategy, improve its campaigns and find ways to interact with customers to offer immediate responses.

According to the 2020 social media trends report provided by the Hootsuite platform, 43% of internet users use social media to research a product they want to buy, while 30% of people between the ages of 25-34 years, use them to share opinions, including their opinion about brands or products.

In this way, instead of making a phone call directly to the brand, users prefer to ask questions on social media, look for opinions, recommendations and complaints in the profiles of the brands, and also, complaining immediately through the same means when the product or service does not meet their needs.

Beyond collecting brand mentions, with the different Social Listening tools it is possible to improve the quality of customer service

Social media is often used for product launches, marketing campaigns, and to support brand communication. However, with social listening you can go one step further, truly connecting with your audience.

In 2015, Twitter revealed that 60% of its users expected an answer to their questions or complaints within the same day they mentioned the brand, while Oracle found that 43% of consumers interact with brands, seeking direct answers about a problem or doubt.

Identifying influencers favorable to your brand

Everything that is shared or commented on social media is important to those in charge of marketing strategies. However, the opinions of the well-known influencers are highly significant for brands, as they have an important base of people who listen to them.

During 2016, the microblogging platform Twitter, analyzed the value contributed by influencers and reported that 40% of users on its network trusted the recommendations made by these characters, making purchases as a direct result of an influencer's comment.

Monitor keywords, hashtags and phrases

If you are working on a new marketing campaign, you can use Social Listening to find the best phrases, keywords and hashtags to create better content, as well as monitor everything that is said about the brand throughout the campaign.

This allows you to find those weak spots and address the problem immediately. In this way, consumers will understand that the brand supports them, cares for them and is attentive to their needs.

Get real-time feedback

Thanks to Social Listening tools, it is possible to know the comments and opinions of the public in real time, obtaining data to improve business processes and even develop new products or services, looking beyond ‘vanity metrics’.

The greatest benefit of social listening is to improve the quality of the products and services offered by the brand, respond assertively to criticism to prepare the correct statements and manage crises appropriately.