Social Listening

Digital Marketing - Study Notes:

What is social listening?

Social listening involves observing or collating live social conversations to develop insights about what people are saying about your brand or other topics, and why they are saying that. These social conversations offer insights into your consumer interests, aspirations, dreams, products, and so on. They also show how customer sentiment is evolving over time.

How to conduct social listening

Although social listening is very effective, in order for it to be comprehensive, you need to use paid tools. If you don’t have access to paid tools, social listening can be achieved observationally when developing insights by searching keywords and making observational assumptions.

Paid social listening tools can go into incredible detail, looking at huge volumes of conversations. Because you are working with such large volumes, you can develop more accurate insights into your audience.

For example, an airline may be interested in what its customers talk about online, in social media, in forums and other digital conversations. A social listening tool can identify airline customers and their conversations and categorize them into different topics as shown in the conversation wheel below.

For example, you can look at the types of conversations that airline travelers are engaging in on social media.

Each conversation topic can then be analyzed further exploring what consumers are saying about the topic (keywords, hashtags), how they feel (sentiment) and any brands, businesses or influencers that are involved in the conversation.

Types of social listening

When conducting social listening, you can adopt an observational or empirical approach:

• Observational social listening involves making assumptions about your audience (based on what you observe) and building a theory of how they behave.
• Empirical social listening, on the other hand, involves validating your observational assumptions by using real data.

Observational social listening

If you do not have the budget for a paid tool, you can use observational social listening to gather your data. It will not be as accurate as the tools you pay for. However, by observing how people use keywords, hashtags, and tags, and the content and types of media they engage with you can still develop hypotheses of behavior.

Step 1

The first step is to observe how your audience are talking about specific topics by utilizing keywords and observing how they talk. Are they happy or unhappy? Do they use specific emojis?

Step 2

Then, in the second step, using your own data, you can match your assumed insights to empirical data. If your consumers are happy about a product, you should see high positive engagement on that product’s content.

Developing insights from social listening

Next, you can develop insights from your observational or empirical social listening. This involves five steps:

• Identify keywords: Identify commonly used keywords when discussing your brand, product, or service.
• Use social search: Search on social platforms to confirm that these keywords are used by the consumer.
• Check for additional keywords: Check for additional keywords that the consumer is using. There may be some that you have not considered!
• Identify trends: Identify trends in subject, language, or hashtags.
• Establish insight: Gain insight from the consumer’s challenges and experience with competitors.