The landscape of digital marketing has changed significantly in recent years. Brands, marketers, entrepreneurs, and even influencers can no longer rely on basic tactics like posting content and hoping for virality or content discovery by a large audience.

How do we stay ahead of the curve in the competitive digital landscape?

Customers tend to build trust in products based on the experiences of other customers shared on social media, blogs, or discussion boards rather than blindly trusting the messages in advertisements. This is where social media listening comes into play, to understand what the customers think or experience about certain ideas, products, or brands and then react accordingly.

This article explains the benefits of social media listening and shows you practical examples of how brands have used social listening for better customer engagement. With deeper understanding of social listening and the related tools, you can stay ahead of the competition by continuously building on insights about your customers, competitors, and industry trends.

Now let's take a look at the 5 major benefits of Social Listening.

1. Brand Monitoring: Social listening allows you to monitor your brand reputation, online presence, and how customers perceive your products and services. This helps you stay ahead of potential negative publicity and respond proactively to maintain a positive brand image.
2. Lead Generation: By listening to what people are saying about your brand and industry, you can identify new business opportunities, reach out to potential customers, and generate leads. Social listening can help you identify the specific needs and interests of your target audience.
3. Customer Feedback: Social listening provides a centralized platform for collecting and analyzing customer feedback, both positive and negative. This data can help you better understand your customers' needs and pain points, and inform product and service improvements.
4. Competitive Intelligence: You can set up keyword monitoring and get a wealth of information about your competitors which can be used to track their online presence, including what people are saying about them and what they are doing to stand out in the market. This information can inform your own branding efforts and help you differentiate yourself from your competitors.
5. Talent and Influencer Identification: By monitoring social media, you can identify talented individuals in your industry and reach out to them about potential job opportunities or collaborations. On top of that, this can help you identify influencers who are actively talking about your brand and are generating high levels of engagement with their content. This information can help you build stronger relationships with influential individuals in your industry and reach your target audience more effectively.

The important question is how can you implement social listening effectively? There are several tools that you can use for social listening such as Brandwatch, Brand24, or Brand Mentions to a name a few.

Brandwatch is a social listening mostly targeting enterprises. It can be used for various purposes from market research, social media management, brand management, crisis management, stakeholder management, content marketing, influencer marketing, and customer care. To use Brandwatch for social listening, you need to specify keywords, which can be your brand name, and then let Brandwatch find the mentions of the keywords across several social media outlets that it monitors.

Brand24 is another social listening tool that helps brands and companies monitor mentions for keywords across social media. Brand24 provides mentions feed and analytics, discussion volume chart, alerts, data export, influence scoring, and sentiment analysis through its dashboard. Brand24 has been providing social listening tool since 2012 and serves customers from more than 150 countries.

Brand Mentions offers similar features for social listening that are found in other tools such as brand monitoring and management, media monitoring, reputation management, and crisis management. Additionally, the dashboard displays results of data analysis, the business intelligence, that may help brands and businesses identify new business opportunities.

An interesting approach is taken by Sociograb, a social listening tool with social network analysis capability. Besides providing features commonly found in similar tools such as tracking keywords mentions, Sociograb empowers users to discover interaction patterns between audiences and influencers. Not only does this help identify customer groups, this also helps deliver instant insight on the key influencers among the audience.

Figure 1: Insight on audience interaction provided by Sociograb

The presence of new-generation social listening tool like Sociograb can help you better understand your brand and audience. Follow Sociograb on Twitter, Instagram, Facebook or LinkedIn to get the latest news about the product and sign up on sociograb.com!