No one will disagree with us when we say that social media is one of the best tools that people can use to express themselves online and let people know what they think, particularly of things and topics that interest them the most. 

 

However, for effective communication and understanding to be achieved, it’s not enough to just express yourself, you also need to listen. This rings especially true for brands and marketers participating in digital marketing in the Philippines who use social media platforms to promote their businesses, products, services, or clients online. 

 

They do this through a process called social listening. But what exactly is it? 

 

Defining Social Listening

 

Social Listening involves the tracking of digital conversations and mentions about a brand online, specifically on social media networks and other digital channels (review sites, online forums, blogs, etc.). These conversations and mentions are analyzed to understand how consumers and users view or perceive a business—its products, services, customer service, and more.

 

The process involves three steps: 

 

Monitoring – This phase is where mentions and conversations about a brand are collected or tracked. Multiple social media networks and digital channels are crawled to gather data and information. 

 

Analysis – Here, collected data and information are analyzed to determine the sentiment of the audience—their likes and dislikes—about a brand.

 

Response – In this stage, brands leverage analyzed data to make informed and improved responses, strategies, and plans for their digital marketing activities. It’s also here that issues found during monitoring are addressed—like customer complaints, feedback, campaign effectiveness, and more. 

 

Digital marketers and social media management agencies in the Philippines rely on the culmination of these three steps to form better marketing plans, strategies, responses for consumers, and more. 

 

Why is Social Listening Important?

 

If you want to have a better grasp of how your consumers view or perceive your brand online, make social listening a permanent part of your strategy. 

 

Through it, you’ll gain a more accurate picture of yourself from the point of view of your customers, specifically through the analysis of their sentiments and conversation about your business or marketing activities online—ad campaigns, content, customer service, and more. 

 

Using the insight that social listening provides, you’ll be able to crack down on the pain points and problems of your digital marketing strategy, allowing you to improve your marketing efforts, your products or services, and your customer response strategy according to the users’ preferences. 

 

Social Listening vs Social Monitoring: How do they Differ?

 

When you look up social listening online, you’re always going to come across social monitoring. After all, many tend to put them together as one—as having the same meaning or intent. But that couldn’t be farther from the truth. 

 

While both share similarities, they are not the same, particularly in what they aim to accomplish. 

 

Social listening aims to make sense of gathered data and analyze it to determine people’s opinions and feelings toward a brand on social networking sites, which is also called social media sentiment. 

 

Meanwhile, social monitoring focuses on data collection, in particular mentions of your brand across social media. Its priority is tracking metrics and measuring the effectiveness of campaigns and marketing actions rather than understanding the users’ sentiment toward a brand.

 

Social Listening: The Benefits

 

If you think that social listening is only concerned with understanding consumer sentiment, then you’re wrong. Here are some of the other benefits that you’ll get: 

 

Improved Customer Service Experience

 

If you know what people think of your brand and your products, you can take action faster, especially when it comes to points of concern. You will provide better customer service and experience if you respond more rapidly to such issues. 

 

Better Customer Engagement

 

Social listening allows you to gain insight into people’s perceptions of your brand online, allowing you to determine what people like and dislike about your business. Having access to this information, you can create a strategy that appeals to their tastes, which will ultimately increase engagement and interaction.

 

In addition to that, social listening allows you to directly respond to your audience’s queries, appeals, and similar sentiments—be it through posts, comments, messages, announcements, and more. 

 

Content Creation

 

Since employing social listening helps you better understand the preferences of your consumers or target audience, creating and generating content for them will become much easier. 

 

Competitor Analysis

 

In addition to tracking conversations and mentions around your brand, social listening also allows you to monitor your competition.

 

To learn more about what your competitors are doing, try observing conversations that surround their online activities. By doing this, you can compare their strategy to yours and see whose strategy is working better and receiving more engagement from users. 

 

Managing Your Reputation

 

By monitoring conversations about your brand online, you can identify areas of your strategy, products, or services that consumers would like you to address or improve. This allows you to take quick action to preserve or even improve your reputation.

 

Finding Influencers

 

There are a lot of social media influencers out there, so it can be tough to choose the right one for your brand. However, social listening can help you narrow down the list by identifying influential people who are already talking about your brand. This way, you can be sure that the influencer you choose will do a good job of marketing your product to their followers.

 

Conclusion

 

In today’s fast-paced social media and digital marketing world, it’s easy to lose sight of what matters most—the sentiments of your consumers concerning your business and its offerings. However, it’s not too late to bridge the widening gap between you and your audience.

 

You can still make use of the powerful tool that is social listening to reconnect with your audience and figure out what it is that they want from your brand, specifically when it comes to the products or services that you provide. 

 

Tip: To get the most out of your social accounts, you also need to invest in driving traffic to your channels. A good way to do this is by making use of search engine optimization (SEO), which uses keywords relevant to your brand to keep you at the top of Google’s Search Results page. You can turn to SEO Services in the Philippines for help with this one if you’re not too familiar with it.