Essentially, social listening refers to monitoring what is being said about your brand or company online. This can give you valuable insights into how your customers feel about your brand and what their expectations are. If you want to be successful in social listening, it is important to learn some strategies and choose the right tools to help you. With the right knowledge and tools, you can become an expert in this marketing niche.
What Is Social Listening?
Companies use social listening to collect customer data from around the internet. This data is used to understand how, where, and why conversations about the company’s brand, industry, or competition happen. Social listening can also be used to improve marketing.
You use social listening to monitor social media channels for mention of your company in real time, in order to better understand the context and situations in which your audience makes its observations. Influencing factors such as geographic location, political climate, or trending topics can be taken into account. The social listening process typically involves watching social channels and then analyzing all data collected for insights on how to improve your business.
Why Is Social Listening Important?
Social listening allows you to see how well your company’s content, products, and services resonate with your audience, as well as see what your competitors are doing. It can also help you find influencers in your industry.
Social listening can help you provide answers to questions customers or leads have about your brand or products, and improve the customer experience through messaging, pricing, or improvement to services, among other changes. It can also help you gauge the health and perception of your brand and monitor the response to specific campaigns and events.
13 Tips for Conducting Social Listening
Use these tips to make your social listening activities easier and more beneficial for your brand:
1. Set your goals.
What is your reason for wanting to do social listening? Having this knowledge can assist you in making a decision on how to go about doing it. Some examples of goals could include:
- Monitoring your industry to watch for trends
- Reviewing competitors’ products and marketing tactics
- Discovering what content excites and engages your target audience
2. Choose the right words and topics.
To do social listening properly, you need to know what topics and keywords to listen for, which vary depending on the company and industry. These can also change over time as your business changes. Other topics to consider include:
- Your brand name and social media handles
- Product names
- Competitors’ brand names, social media handles, and product names
- Industry keywords or buzzwords
- Company slogans
- Names of key management and employees for your company and competitors
- Campaign keywords or names
- Branded and unbranded hashtags
It might be helpful to look for common misspellings and abbreviations of your key terms.
3. Pick your listening locations.
To understand how people feel about your company or your competition, look for places where they are talking about it. You may have to look in different places, like social media or blogs, to find these conversations. The tone of these conversations may be different depending on where they are. You may find that people don’t talk about your industry at all on some platforms. Knowing where people talk about your company can help you plan your advertising and marketing strategies for those platforms.
4. Filter the results.
If you want to get more specific with your social listening, you can narrow down mentions by geographic location or demographic. This way, you can get more details about segments of your audience or target market. Doing this can help you market to target niches within your larger audience in the places where they talk about their purchases or service needs.
5. Involve different departments.
Social listening can provide valuable insights for more than just your marketing teams. Other departments such as sales, product development, and upper management can also benefit from the feedback collected. When deciding how to engage with your audience online, seek input from these other departments, who may have valuable insights about products or processes.
6. Find unlinked brand mentions and turn them into links.
One way to improve your SEO strategy is to turn brand mentions into links. This is an opportunity you might not have considered before.
If your brand has been around for a while, it’s likely that there are mentions of it on the internet on various platforms such as blogs, forums, and news sites. However, not all of these mentions will include a link back to your site. This is where social listening comes in handy, as it can help you to find these linkless mentions. Once you’ve found them, you can then reach out to the relevant people and ask them to add a link.
This query will search all the instances of the keyword on the internet, but will exclude any instances that have a link to the user’s website. To be fair, you won’t be able to get linkless mentions with every social listening tool. You’ll need one with the Boolean search mode. With Boolean search, the user sets up the search query manually using the Boolean operators, such as AND, OR, AND NOT etc. So in the case of finding linkless mentions, the user should type their brand name as a keyword and add AND NOT link:yoursite.com/* . This query will search all the instances of the keyword on the internet, but will exclude any instances that have a link to the user’s website.
7. Monitor new links to your site.
To build links effectively in the modern age, you need to know where they are coming from and how they are being built. It can be useful to know the motives of the website that is already linking to you. Secondly, you need to be sure that your backlinks come from trustworthy and quality sites. If not, it could have negative consequences for your rankings.
Social listening allows you to track new links to your website in real time. To start, enter your website’s URL into a website/web page field in a social media monitoring tool. Then, select to search from limited sources: the Web plus news/blogs. This will exclude mentions from social media platforms (e.g. Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, etc.). You can also use the link: operator if your tool supports Boolean search.
8. Grow brand mentions.
Google is working hard to develop new ways of determining the value of websites, understanding their content, and being more capable of evaluating the Internet the way humans do. Links are still important for SEO, but they are becoming less so. These days, it is more about being popular, going viral, and being heard in different corners of the Internet. Social media is a big part of the Internet, and some of the most used websites don’t have any dofollow links.
The text suggests that we should focus on linkless mentions. In 2017, Google Webmaster Trends Analyst Gary Illyes said in his keynote at Brighton SEO(Open Link in new window) the following:
If you’re publishing high-quality, highly-cited content on the internet–and I’m not just talking about links, but also mentions on social networks and people talking about your branding–then you’re doing great.
An implied link is a reference to a target resource that is included in a source resource but is not an express link to the target resource.
Working towards growing brand mentions is important because social listening allows you to track brand mentions. This knowledge of when, where, and how brand mentions appear will give you a better idea of how to create more brand mentions. For example, focusing your digital marketing strategy more on social media platforms like Reddit could be a good idea.
There are two ways you can grow brand mentions. The first is by using social selling techniques, and the second is by using influencer marketing.
9. Learn from your competitors.
Several ways to keep tabs on your competition and learn where they get links, do guest posts, or work with influencers, etc., exist. This data can be utilized to help form your own marketing and SEO strategy.
To complete the workflow, use your competitor’s brand names and URLs. Creating alerts for each competitor will make it easier to see your progress and compare it to your competitor’s progress.
10. Choose data sources.
What sources of data do you plan on using? The tools you have may limit which sources you can use and what data you can record from those sources. A good place to start social listening is on social media platforms or other areas of the internet where your business has a presence. Starting with just a few sources and expanding as your listening grows can be helpful so you’re not overwhelmed by too much data at the beginning. This can also make it easier to segment data into smaller subsections.
11. Uncover topics and keywords.
Checking social media isn’t the only way to track your online reputation. If you want to track what people are saying about your company, brand, or products online, you need to create a list of topics and themes to search for. You can start by looking at your direct mentions (any time someone tags you online), and explore related hashtags and keywords for your industry. Social media is just one way to track your online reputation.
12. Record and analyze data.
Keeping a repository of data is not enough to gain insights about your audience, competition, or industry. Many tools can compare data from different sources to get a better idea of the sentiment of the mentions and conversations. This can provide a larger picture of how people view your brand.
13. Repeat the Process
You should not only do social listening once, but rather keep doing it so you are always aware of changes in the industry and how people feel. As you keep doing it, you will get more information and be able to change your goals, topics, and keywords.
Conclusion
Social listening is a new technology with many potential applications. It is gradually changing the way digital marketing is done. Using it for SEO may produce unexpected results.
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