What is social listening and how can I do it?

Social listening is a way to actively monitor the interactions that happen around a brand in all the social networks in which it is present. That is, it is a good technique to have an overview of all the interactions that happen around a brand and its social networks, and, from that information, to bring insights that serve to optimise the SSR tactics within the digital marketing strategy of a company.

what does social listening bring to your company?

1. keeping a close eye onmarket trends . Knowing the trends for your business in the sector in which it operates will improve your traffic.
2. improve customer service: Apart from being more attentive to what your visitors and followers need, you will be able to indicate trends about their complaints and requests that will allow you to see user service on social networks as a channel to improve it throughout the business.
3. optimise the content created: with social listening you can not only monitor what is being said about your content, but also measure its impact, recognise influencers for your brand, identify what type of format produces more interactions, at what time to publish it, etc
4. give useful information to your digital marketing strategy: with social listening you can see the impact that networks have on the corporate image of your business, the reputation and recognition it has in the sector from the point of view of consumers active on the networks.
5. avoid reputational crises: real-time tracking can quickly identify any misunderstandings or problems that customers have with the brand. Detecting them in time is key to avoiding major problems. Likewise, an alert system will help us to identify any conversation that revolves around our brand.
6. Identify influencers: Influencers are those leading users of a topic on social networks capable of moving the masses. If you detect them, it is important to follow their actions and work with them in favour of your brand. In the same way, identifying these influencers is fundamental, as they can have a great influence on how their followers perceive your brand or that of your competitors.

how to carry out the social listening technique?

• Align a good protocol with the customer service team, which will allow them to know how to provide the best experience to customers through this channel. Also, remember that it is not about giving generic chatbot-style answers, but about being 100% attentive to provide all the information available.
• Collect as much data as possible in terms of positive or negative interactions with the brand.
• Track PQR's that were communicated through social media and the number of these that were resolved.
• Follow competitor companies closely to identify communication tactics that can be used as well as possible detractors of your brand in their interactions.

Free Social Listening Tools

• Google Alerts: The search engine giant Google offers us a tool through which you can monitor your brand throughout the network. In addition, with GoogleAlerts you can find out everything that is being said about the competition or about aspects related to the products or services you sell, for example.
• Border Reader is a simple tool that includes data from every corner of the web, although social networks are its main source. It is very agile because it allows you to perform very quick searches on your brand.
• Followerwonk: If Twitter is your thing, here is a tool focused on this social network that allows you to access real-time data about your brand in biographies or followers' comments.
• SocialGimp, the version of the previous one but for Instagram, allows you to manage hashtags on this social network and make comparative evaluations of your brand from any device.
• Icerocket: This tool monitors mentions of your brand on Twitter, Facebook and blogs in 20 languages and presents the results in graphs. It also allows you to select time periods to monitor. IceRocket also has nearly 200 million blogs in its database, which makes it an attractive tool for keeping track of bloggers' activity and finding the latest trends related to your search.

Keep in mind that social listening goes beyond reacting to what is said about your company or responding to requests from visitors or followers on social networks, it is about having an active presence that allows you to be aware of the interactions with your brand, how they are referring to it, what they complain about when they mention your business, etc. All this in order to extract the best amount of information possible (at this point it is not about quantity but quality) for your company to carry out improvement actions or continue with good practices.