What is Social Listening? Quick, Easy Guide for 2023

You may have heard the phrase social listening before, but what does it actually mean? At its core, it is the process of monitoring online conversations to understand what people are saying about your brand, products, services, and anything that may be relevant to your business. It can be a game changer in your social media strategy.

According to the State of Social Listening 2022 by Social Media Today:

• Almost 61% of businesses now have a social media listening system in place and are monitoring for keyword mentions,
• More than 82% of businesses view social listening as a key planning element,
• The main purposes of using social listening are to track and analyze sentiment analysis, increase brand awareness, and follow industry trends.

Sounds interesting?

In this post, we’ll discuss everything you need to know about social listening.

So read on to learn more!

• What is social listening?
• Social listening vs. Social monitoring
• Can social listening help find leads?
• 5 key purposes of social listening
• How to do social listening? 6 steps
• Social listening metrics
• 12 key benefits of social listening
• Social listening case studies
• Final thoughts

What is social listening?

Social listening is about finding all those online discussions that matter for your business and analyzing them to take accurate action. You can, for example, get feedback and insights about your product and then improve it according to customers’ needs.

It consists of two parts:

Part 1: Monitoring social media channels to find mentions about your brand, product, service, competitor, and any keywords related to your business.

Part 2: Analyzing gathered mentions so you’re able to draw actionable conclusions that will help you achieve your business goals.

Check the video:

Social listening vs. Social monitoring

Those two terms might seem to be the same thing. But they differ.

Social monitoring is a process of collecting publicly available mentions across social media. It is the process of tracking social media metrics to measure your campaign’s performance. 

Key purposes:

• Measure campaigns,
• Hashtag tracking,
• Monitor brand reputation,
• Prevent PR crises.

Social listening has a broader scope. Social listening is the process of understanding online conversation. Thanks to that, you can perform a sentiment analysis around your brand. The goal is to gain insights that can be used to improve your marketing strategy or product development. 

Key purposes:

• Conduct sentiment analysis
• Measure estimated reach
• Measure share of voice
• Discover the context of a discussion

Social listening can help you better understand your audience and their needs, while social monitoring can help you track the success of your marketing efforts. 

True or false: Social listening can help you find leads

Can social listening help me find leads? This question our Customer Success Team frequently receives from new customers.

To give you a correct answer, I asked a customer service expert with over 3 years of experience.

“Lead generation is a very popular area of social media listening tools usage. Many of our clients want to reach mentions with queries about companies dealing with particular issues, such as “I’m looking for a social media agency,” “Who offers the best social media audit?” etc.

Yes, social listening can help you find leads, but you need to remember two things. First, you must set up a project correctly. Monitoring a general keyword such as “social media agency” might not work. You will receive thousands of mentions. It will be difficult to find lead queries. Second, you need to use filters smartly. The biggest challenge while looking for leads is dealing with the mass of mentions in different contexts. Of course, our Customer Success Team willingly helps with those tasks.”

Katarzyna Fryc, Customer Success Manager at Brand24

As you can see, social media listening helps gain new clients by generating sales leads.

The key is to listen for mentions that are relevant to your goals and find mentions posted by potential leads who have an active interest in your product or service.

Step 1: In this case, it’s a good idea to monitor several types of keywords, including:

• Your product or service,
• Particular product features,
• Specific industry terms related to your business,
• The name of your brand or company,
• Your competitors.

Step 2: Filter the data using Boolean Search. Here’s a universal formula that works in most projects:

looking for{or}look for{or}recommend{or}who offers{or}who deals with{or}who deal with{or}I need{or}we need{or}which best{or}which company

Tip: To save time, you can save these filters and use them anytime you want.

Here you can see a mention found by the Brand24 tool:

In just one month, Brand24 collected almost 45,000 mentions that included the question “where can I buy.” There is enormous space for brands to join in on the conversation and suggest their products to prospects who really need them.

We use Brand24 to find people looking for recommendations for good listening tools.

Our customer service team then steps in, interacting with these users to let them know about Brand24. 

This is one of our best methods of identifying new leads and has one of the highest conversion rates, too.

Why? Because we reach out to people with a real need for our product.

Purposes of social listening

According to the State of Social Listening 2022, businesses mainly use it to: 

1. Track and analyze sentiment analysis,
2. Increase brand awareness,
3. Follow industry trends
4. Conduct competitor analysis,
5. Crisis management. 

There are many possible use cases of social listening.

Imagine having unlimited access to your focus group! 

One that consists of users from all backgrounds and every corner of the market who openly give you candid feedback — about your brand, product, and strategies.

This is how you get candid feedback without disturbing your customers.

That’s why there are many more reasons why companies implement a social listening strategy:

• Reputation management
• Increasing brand recognition
• Social media analytics
• Improving your customer experience and service
• Building customer engagement
• Getting customer feedback
• Tracking the progress of a marketing campaign
• Identifying brand ambassadors & candidates for influencer marketing
• Content creation and distribution

Take a look at the fragment of opinion posted on G2.com: 

How to do social listening? 6 steps

The listening process is quite simple – but you’ll need the right brand monitoring tool. Of course, you can do it manually, but it’s much more time-consuming and less effective. 

Here are 6 steps that will help you set up your social listening strategy.

Step 1: Define your goals

In the beginning, take some time to define your goals. As I already mention, there are lots of social listening purposes. It’s easy to lose focus.

That’s why I encourage you to describe your aims. Of course, with time, your aims can evolve. We will talk about it later.

So, what do you hope to learn from social media listening? What kind of information are you looking for?

Step 2: Pick a social listening tool

You can do social listening manually and research social media channels to identify valuable mentions, but is it effective? I don’t think so. It will take lots of time, and the chance you will miss important posts is high.

Tools research social media data automatically and help you identify the most popular and important mentions.

So, once you have your goals in place, it is time to pick the right tool that will do most of the job for you. Usually, you can sign up for a trial to test a tool before you buy it.

When looking for the right tool, check those 5 factors:

• Number of monitored sources
• Features that will support your goals
• Cost-effective pricing
• Opinions posted on tools review websites (G2 and Capterra)
• Customer support solution

Check: The 11 Best Social Listening Tools

Step 3: Choose the keywords you want to monitor

Social media listening tools can track mentions containing brand names, hashtags, specific keywords, and phrases.

Now, define what you want to monitor. Pick the keywords that match your goals.

Think about:

• The name of your brand, product, or service
• Your company hashtag
• Your campaign-specific hashtag
• Your CEO’s name or any other prominent employee
• Keywords related to your business niche.

Check: 8 Keywords You Should Track

Step 4: Set up a monitoring project

Setting up a monitoring project is relatively easy. Most social media listening tools are based on a similar premise, so I’ll discuss the process based on Brand24.

Below, you can see the project creation wizard. To run a project you need to set up one thing:

• Keyword – the main keyword, hashtag, or phrase for which your project will collect data.

Additional advanced settings:

• Project name
• Required keywords (Additional keywords) –  Each of which must appear in order for the mention to be collected (option)
• Excluded keywords (Additional keywords) –  None of which can appear if the mention is to be collected
• Language
• Source
• Notifications and reports

Step 5: Work with social listening data

After setting the project, it is time to explore social listening data. In the Mentions tab, you’ll start seeing results whenever someone mentions your keywords on social media platforms.

Here is an example of a mentions stream:

From there, you can engage with them directly or take action based on what you’re hearing. It’s best to monitor the results on a regular basis and respond as necessary.

From now on, you can:

• Click on mentions to be redirected to the social media platform, where you can directly respond.
• Discover sources that deliver the widest number of mentions, so you will be able to pick social media platforms that are the most effective.
• Find the most popular and important mentions and treat them as a priority.
• Check the sentiment of each mention so you can respond to negative ones quickly.

That’s just the tip of the iceberg. There are many more benefits and use cases. You will find them in the next chapter. 

To gain comprehensive knowledge on how to do social listening, check the webinar hosted by Monika, Customer Success Manager at Brand24. 

You will learn how to:

• Create a project,
• Interpret social listening data,
• Take advantage of Brand24’s features to benefit your business.

Check the video:

How can brands use social media listening to identify and engage with their target audience?

“Social media listening gives you all the information you need about the right channels, topics, people, and hashtags to connect with your audience. All you need to do is use this data and go out there!”

Justyna Dzikowska, Head of Marketing at Brand24

Step 6: Optimize, expand and continue

At this stage, you have probably tested your social listening strategies. It’s time to maximize your results and reach even further. 

How to do it? 

Take a look at the tips written by Adam Górnicz, Customer Success Manager at Brand24, who is an expert in optimizing social listening projects. 

Optimize

Using the brand’s Twitter handle, domain, or Facebook URL as additional keywords may boost your results significantly. Remember, some posts may contain one of those forms, instead of the full brand’s name, and you gotta catch ’em all, right? 

Polish

One of the few things that may improve your results in terms of their relevance is the skillful use of the excluded keywords section. With the help of this function, mentions containing excluded keywords will not appear in your data pool ever again.

But hey, you don’t have to meditate trying to figure out what are the words that appear with your mentions the most, to choose the irrelevant ones. 

The context of a discussion tab, in the Analysis tab, will do it for you:

Extend your point of view

Instead of monitoring the brand or the competitors only, try to look at the bigger picture. Keeping your social listening eye on the industry itself may be very beneficial. It can translate into more potential clients, valuable information about trends, or data you wouldn’t even expect to find!

But how exactly are you supposed to do that?

Step one:

Create a project with the topic and its variations as keywords, choosing the language you are interested in.

Step two

Analyze our good ol’ context of a discussion tab (man, I really love that feature!). Even the first glance gives you an overall view and shows the brightest points, like the biggest problems, the biggest players, or even clues to hot discussions around the subject.

Step three

Learn about the most influential social media profiles in the industry, with the help of the Top public profiles tab, and track their posts and opinions. After all, it is their opinion that often influences setting trends.

Step four

Keep tracking the most popular mentions manually. The more popular the post, the bigger impact it may have on the industry, so it is worth keeping up at least with the most popular ones.

Following those steps and using all of the tips above will surely improve your results, and make you feel like a ninja of social listening!

Social listening metrics

Social listening metrics will help you understand how customers feel about your brand and how engaged they are.

Here are the 9 key metrics you should pay attention to:

1. Sentiment analysis – this metric gives you an idea of the emotional tone of mention. Is it positive, neutral, or negative? It will reveal how positive or negative the target audience feels about your brand, products, hashtag, competitors, etc.
2. Share of voice (SOV) – this metric helps you determine the visibility of your brand and the percentage of online conversations around it. The higher the SOV, the more authority you have within your business niche.
3. Social media reach – is an estimated number of social media users that could have contact with a social media post containing a monitored keyword. It’s helpful to track your social media efforts and measure performance and social media brand awareness.
4. Non-social reach – is the estimated number of contacts (impressions) with a piece of content containing a monitored keyword beyond social media. It is helpful to estimate the overall reach of a brand, product, campaign, hashtag, or any other keyword on the web.
5. The volume of mentions – tells you how compelling and engaging your content is. It will show you a general idea of how often people are talking about a particular topic, brand keyword, etc.
6. Presence Score – allows you to measure brand/topic online popularity (presence) at a given time. It will help you to understand awareness of your company, competitors, or topics of your interest.
7. Reputation Score – measures brand reputation at a given time. It’s based on sentiment and reach analysis. It will help you to understand whether the target audience perceives the brand/topic in a positive or negative way.
8. Advertising Value Equivalency (AVE) – helps to estimate the value of collected mentions. It is an approximate amount of money that would have to be spent on paid advertising to achieve a similar exposition.
9. Earned Media Value (EMV) – this metric allows you to measure the ROI of content gained through PR and marketing activities. It will help you to demonstrate the impact PR and marketing have on the company’s success and KPIs.

12 key benefits of social listening

Social listening is a powerful marketing tool. Here are the benefits that show how it can help you improve your social media marketing and brand strategy.

Let’s take a look at the table of contents and find the most beneficial solution for your business.

1. Improve your customer service
2. Track and measure your marketing efforts
3. Increase customer engagement
4. Access customer insights
5. Identify influencers
6. Protect your brand reputation
7. Reveal purchase decision factors
8. Prepare content tailored to your audience’s needs
9. Find top talents for your company
10. Back up your marketing and competitors’ research
11. Measure the value of your organic search
12. Measure social media presence

01 Improve your customer service

Customer service is a very popular application of social listening. The Internet has become the place for people to rant about poor experiences with products and services. Furthermore, they look for solutions to problems and commend brands on good service.

It’s just easier for customers to tweet at a brand on Twitter instead of trying to reach an automated call center… and then get put on hold for hours.

Social listening gives brands a big leg up when taking care of clients who’ve encountered problems with their products.

It’s simple: people hate waiting almost as much as they hate being ignored. The sooner you can provide service to your customers, the better.

Social media monitoring software (like Brand24) collects questions and complaints about your brand as soon as they’re posted. So your customer service team can handle any problems as quickly as possible.

people who have a real need for our product.

02 Track and measure your marketing campaigns

Nowadays, it is pretty common to see dedicated hashtag campaigns. Especially since it has proven to be one of the most effective ways to increase reach and user engagement.

Monitoring online conversations on social networks will help you gather the data that could benefit your brand’s marketing campaigns.

Social media tracking tools automatically calculate reach, engagement, sentiment, and other metrics helpful in assessing your marketing efforts.

Moreover, you can easily export the data to show your customers the value of social listening.

03 Use social media listening for customer engagement

Nowadays, more brands are engaging in online conversations with their fans and clients. Once a user posts something on the Internet that is related to either a brand or an entire industry, social media managers are there to interact with the audience.

This is a great way to increase customer engagement on the Internet, extend your online reach, and win over your audience. 

You can easily grab your audience’s attention if your response is timely, intelligent, and humorous – yet consistent with your brand image (you should not be making jokes if your company’s profile is very formal).

Uber or Starbucks, you should have engaged with this lovely customer, but you left them waiting for your response.

04 Access customer insights

Today’s consumers are more open to sharing their opinions and reviews about the products or services they use (or maybe they just have more avenues of doing so now).

Naturally, the easiest way to share is on the Internet, where social media users can post about their experiences using different products and brands — and automatically share these posts with many other consumers. This is where users frequently provide candid suggestions and feedback on these goods and services. The Internet is a powerful source of valuable customer insights.

05 Identify social media influencers

Collaborating with influencers can bring you measurable results. Of course, it’s best to work with influencers who are genuinely interested in your company or its value proposition.

How to find them? With the social listening tool, you’ll be able to discover influencers who would be a good match to work with your brand.

If you are listening for mentions of your brand/topic across the Internet, you can see what kind of people post about these topics inside the Brand24 Analysis Tab. The top profiles talking about your brand are your potential influencers. Some of them may have cultivated significant followings.

However, just because someone may have mentioned your brand in their posts doesn’t necessarily mean that they will resonate with your brand.

When searching for influencers, it’s important to also refer to the data from at least one more column inside the Analysis Tab – Share of Voice (Voice Share in the image).

This metric considers the social media reach and the total number of mentions of each profile. These factors inform us how big the role of these profiles is in discussions about a brand on the Internet.

If a user has a high Share of Voice for your brand mentions, it means they generate many discussions about it. This indicates that they could be good potential brand ambassadors or influencers.

You can also filter by Influencer Score in the Mentions (or Sources) Tab to view profiles according to influence.

Read: How to Find Influencers?

06 Protect your brand reputation

It is the most common and obvious social listening use case and a significant one as well. Very often, fast responses to a negative review or fake comment can prevent a brand reputation crisis.

For instance, brandjacking is when someone impersonates a brand online, often with malicious intent. This can cause a lot of damage to your reputation if not spotted early on.

These virtual imposters can post anything they want to hurt your business and make you look bad in front of your customers.

If you discover a fake profile like this early enough, you can immediately rectify the situation and nip social outrage in the bud.

This also concerns unsatisfied customers who complain about your service or product. If you can spot their public comments before too many people see them, you can try to solve the problem before it gets out of hand.

07 Reveal purchase decision factors

Learning which factors have the greatest influence on customer purchase decisions is possibly the most valuable customer insight you can derive from social listening.

Recommendations left on forums and other online platforms often include detailed, first-hand descriptions of a user’s experience with a product or service which can influence consumer decisions.

08 Prepare content tailored to your audience’s needs

One of the main challenges of bloggers and writers alike is to find ideas on what to write about. Social listening is widely used for content inspiration. 

Social listening tools can help you by providing insights into what is trending on the Internet and what people want to read about.

It’s a fairly simple process. You just need to monitor relevant keywords. Naturally, keyword selection depends on your industry and the topic of your blog.

For example, let’s take a blog that helps companies find solutions to develop their business. In this case, you should think about the catchiest key phrases related to this topic. Which tags and hashtags do they use? What are the most common words in this field?

In this case, you are interested in phrases like “growth hacking,” “grow your business,” and “business growth” (separated with commas), which often appear as buzzwords.

Don’t forget to include these phrases also as hashtags!

One of our clients, Veeu Network, a digital video company, uses social listening precisely for this purpose. Before writing any scripts for new videos, they first dig into recent social media discussions to find the most relevant topics of the moment according to their fans.

Check out this social listening case study: Veeu Network’s video strategies.

09 Find top talents for your company

Human Resources is another department that can benefit from this research method. People post about everything on the internet, including when they’re searching for a job.

HR specialists who know how to use social media as a recruitment tool are able to find potential candidates to fill an urgent vacancy in less time.

You can easily set up a project to monitor phrases like “looking for a job,” “I need a job,” etc. Results can be filtered by specific geographic regions and industries by adding ‘Required keywords.’

Once you collect some mentions, you’re ready to start reaching out to potential employees. Respond to their tweets or posts on LinkedIn, or send private messages asking for more details about their personal background.

10 Back up your marketing and competitor research

Do you plan to introduce a new product or implement a social media campaign? Or do you want to know what your competitors are up to?

Social listening will help you spot all mentions that are relevant to your business. And that includes listening to conversations about your direct and indirect competitors.

You can derive a lot of information about your target group based on the data that you monitor, including user demographics, preferred online channels, and when your audience is most active – not to mention their levels of engagement, the context of public discussions, and much more.

This data can help you design the most effective marketing strategy. For example, you can learn where you should implement your campaign, the best days/weeks/months to run it, and the best hours for posting on social (visible inside the Brand24 Excel report).

It also shows you the kind of language you should use in order to convey your message in a way that will resonate with your prospects and clients. Of course, there’s much more than you can learn from media monitoring data.

11 Measure the value of organic reach

Measuring the value of your organic reach is especially useful for agencies and CMOs that need to report the results of their strategies to a board of directors — in the form of tangible numbers.

You cannot precisely estimate how many people have made a purchase decision after watching a TV commercial. However, if you display the same ad online, you can collect precise information about conversion rates at each step of the customer acquisition process.

An effective social listening tool, like Brand24, can help you estimate the value of online talks about your brand. Taking into consideration factors such as:

• Size of the profiles that mention your brand,
• Reach of their content + the number of interactions — you can learn how many people have potentially seen mentions regarding your brand.

Using this data, you can effectively calculate the estimated value of these mentions and discussions regarding your brand.

The Estimated Reach is equivalent to the amount of exposure that you receive from your online marketing activities.

12 Measure social media presence

Another interesting metric that Brand24 came up with is the Presence Score, which helps you find out if a certain enterprise or topic is popular online and measure brand awareness. You can also use this metric to track social media presence.

Social listening shows you how many people have encountered online content about your brand, campaigns, and products. Furthermore, it helps you estimate the online advertising value (AVE), which is the real market value of an asset in terms of the average market cost of advertising after discounts.

Social listening case studies

Social media has transformed the way that businesses interact with their customers. Now businesses can connect with the audience easily.

How do popular companies use social listening for their growth?

01 Lalafo found 42 marketing partners

Lalafo, a Ukrainian platform for the online exchange of items, aims to get as many collaborations and publications as possible.

They needed a tool to find and contact potential partners faster.

Jan Jankowski, marketing manager at lalafo, uses a social listening tool to acquire marketing partners. 

If mention of lalafo appears in an article or social media post, there are higher chances of making a partnership.

We can catch people talking about us and expand cooperation by submitting additional information and publications on similar topics. Ukrainianinpoland.pl wrote about us – I saw it through Brand24 and got back to them. Now we have ongoing cooperation,” Jan says. 

Recently, with the help of Brand24, lalafo collaborated with 16 news portals in Poland and 26 in Ukraine. 

In fact, lalafo has a great social listening strategy in place. Read more: How does Brand24 help Ukrainian NGO establish new collaborations?

02 TimeCamp boosted linkbuilding strategy

TimeCamp, a fully automated time tracking and task management app, pays lots of attention to its content strategy. 

The SEO team makes efforts to ensure that articles rank high in the Google search engine. Relevant backlinks are necessary to do that. 

With the help of the Brand24 tool, they gain accurate backlinks from sites that mentioned TimeCamp. 

“We monitor content on specific topics to identify sites or individuals who can help us with SEO efforts by posting or exchanging links,” says Maksymilian Kujawa, Product Marketer at TimeCamp.

Read more: TimeCamp specialists on how Brand24 helped them increase website traffic

03 Virgin Trains helped a passenger in need and proved their customer service is spot-on!

One of the best examples of how listening can improve online customer service has to be this one from Virgin Trains:

A passenger was on a train headed to Glasgow from Euston when he got up to use the restroom. Just minutes later, he found himself in an urgent situation. He’d run out of toilet paper just when he needed it most. What would you do if that were you?

This passenger decided to tweet about it, unabashedly informing the company about his dilemma.

Virgin Trains quickly tweeted back, promptly taking care of the issue – both online and on board.

04 Somersby used social listening to measure the effectiveness of the online campaign

Somersby, a leading brand of cider from the Danish brewing company Carlsberg Group, is an excellent example of using listening to support their marketing campaigns.

They’ve designed numerous hashtag campaigns that have successfully engaged fans, amplifying their success by building strong relationships with bloggers and influencers.

For instance, when they introduced a new variety of Somersby to the Polish market, they worked with dozens of bloggers and encouraged people to share content (especially photos) with a dedicated hashtag.

They used social listening to track this campaign and check the sentiment towards the brand. Thanks to this method, they were able to see that the campaign improved the overall brand sentiment towards Somersby and gained tremendous social media reach.

Beyond that, the new beverage became a bestselling beer in its category and the brand executed what became an annual sales plan in just 4 months.

Check out another case study: Somersby Social Engagement Case Study

05 PlayStation increases audience engagement

Take a cue from PlayStation’s social media monitoring strategy and see how they join online discussions to increase audience engagement and increase brand loyalty.

PlayStation uses social listening to find conversations that are related to gaming, gamers, and the brand itself. Then they invent creative and funny responses to engage their audience and encourage gamers to play on the PS console.

Final thoughts

We’ve covered a lot today, so let’s review!

Social listening is the process of understanding online discussions, gaining insights, and taking accurate actions to improve your business. 

It will help you to identify the crucial online mentions so you can respond to them immediately. 

Let’s take a look at some key facts about social listening:

1. Manual social media listening is time-consuming and less effective. 
2. Social listening tools automate the process and do most of the job for you.
3. The main reason why companies invest in social listening is to conduct sentiment analysis, increase brand awareness, follow industry trends, run competitor analysis, and prevent PR crises. 
4. It will help you find leads, but you need to set up a project correctly and use filters smartly. 
5. Starting social listening is simple, but you need to pick your goals and choose keywords you want to monitor first. 
6. With a proper tool in hand, you can discover some valuable metrics such as share of voice, presence and reputation score, social media and non-social reach, AVE, EMV, etc. 
7. Most of the tools offer a free trial so you can test them carefully. 

Willing to try social listening right now? Sign up for a 14-day free trial and test the Brand24 tool!