Social Media Listening And How It Improves Your Brand

In today’s business world, we’re constantly hearing about data and how good data should be what drives critical decisions.

This is true and one of the reasons this mantra has become so popular among businesses of all sizes is the amount of data that’s available today.

Market data and metrics used to be something that only the largest companies and brands could access. Data collection and parsing through that data was often the role of specialized departments and custom-made data tools.

But today, all of that has changed. With modern technology and simplified dashboards, even the smallest brands can access the most important data they need to make adjustments to their business and marketing strategy.

With influencer marketing, this is also true; brands can use this data to monitor their performance across different platforms and understand how audiences are receiving their message.

A big part of that data collection and interpretation is known as social listening. Through social listening, brands can get a birds-eye view of how their brand is being talked about across the internet. They can also dive deeper and get to the granular details of what’s working and what’s not.

In this guide, we’ll explain everything you need to know about social listening so you can use this trove of data and information to optimize your marketing and business strategy.

What Is Social Listening? 

If you’ve ever watched a modern spy or espionage movie, you’ve likely seen how intelligence agencies try to keep track of everything related to what they’re tasked with protecting. 

From phone calls to messages and who certain people interact with, it’s all monitored so agents can react to changes in real time and before any negative consequences.

Social listening is similar, just without all the cloak-and-dagger stuff that usually goes along with spy movies.

Social media listening takes publicly available and anonymized data and aggregates it into a form that brands and marketers can sift through to get an aerial view of what’s happening across an entire social media platform.

The goal isn’t just to monitor social media and digital channels. The goal is to obtain actionable data to inform your critical decisions regarding marketing, branding, and overall digital positioning.

While all this may sound complicated, modern dashboard tools and platforms make leveraging social listening very easy. 

What About Social Monitoring?

If you’ve researched influencer marketing, you’ve likely also heard the term social monitoring.

Social monitoring and social media listening are similar, but they describe slightly different data collection and interpretation methods.

Social monitoring is for when you track specific hashtags or other mentions to help you stay on top of activity related to your brand.

For example, your customer service department may use social monitoring to quickly respond to customer complaints or issues posted on social media.

If you’ve ever seen a large brand respond to a single unhappy customer on X or Instagram within a few minutes, they likely saw that complaint through social monitoring. That’s also why social monitoring is sometimes referred to as brand monitoring, and these terms are interchangeable.

In contrast, social media listening is more of a comprehensive look at every conversation related to your brand across digital platforms. It gives you an overview that helps you spot trends along with the ability to dive deeper and gain more knowledge.

How Does Social Listening Work

Social listening works by combining various data collection tools that mine information. That information is then aggregated via a central piece of software or app that you can use.

When data from different sources are combined into one location for you to visualize, this is often referred to as a dashboard.

For example, you may look at your website’s traffic through Google Search Console. This is a dashboard that takes all the data from visitors to your site and places it in a central location where you can search and create reports.

Social listening works much the same way. By mining text on forums and conversations on social media, the social listening tool presents that information in a dashboard you can view and work with.

Some different social listening tools are offered by companies such as Brandwatch and Hootsuite. We’ll cover each of these tools along with some alternatives later in this guide.

How You Can Use Social Media Listening To Gain Insights

So far, we’ve explained the general idea of how social media listening can be used to give a brand more data on consumer behavior. Below, we’ll go into the specific areas in which social listening provides you with the data you need to make more informed and proactive decisions.

Deeper Understanding Of Your Audience

Most brands will have existing knowledge of their audience as well as segmentation within the audience. However, most of this is usually based on demographics and more general pain points related to a product category.

With social listening, you can gain almost real-time insights into what customers want or expect from your brand.

As an example, let’s say you own a new cosmetic brand and are currently running a social media influencer campaign.

With social media listening, you may notice a recurring conversation around your product that shows customers like what they see but wish you had a foundation for a specific skin tone or type.

This can immediately give you more insight into your audience than what you get through standard demographic segmentation. 

This is just one example, but through the monitoring of brand mentions and conversations, you can quickly gain more insight into how customers view your product or service and make the adjustments needed to better suit their needs.

Competitor Research

So far we’ve mostly explained how social media listening works for monitoring your own brand. However, that’s only half of the equation.

Social media listening is also extremely powerful when it comes to researching competitors and finding areas where you can gain market share or better serve customers.

Similar to the example used earlier about your customers requesting a specific type of cosmetic foundation, you can also spot openings in your competitor’s product or service.

By monitoring conversations about competitors, you can use those insights as actionable data for your own product strategy moving forward to capture more customers.

Beyond just products, competitor research with social listening can also show you where competitors are gaining traction with new audiences that you may have missed.

The most successful brands use competitor research as a key tool in their toolbox. It may not be talked about as much, but keeping tabs on competitors gives you a distinct advantage over other brands that can sometimes become too myopic when viewing the marketplace through the lens of their own company.

Social listening gives you an easy way to add competitor data to your current business intelligence.

Partnership Opportunities

Through social listening, you can find influencers who may already use your product or have mentioned your product.

This is an organic way of finding influencers that are already perfectly aligned with your brand and your customers. 

Once you find these influencers, you can reach out to try to forge more beneficial partnerships that help your brand and provide the influencers with the resources they need to keep creating great content.

This also works for finding influencers if you plan on launching an influencer campaign and need to start building a list of possible brand partners.

Public Relations

Although we all try to avoid it, sometimes your brand can become embroiled in a controversy or other PR issue that needs attention so you can control the response and the narrative.

In the early stages, this can be done through social monitoring. But later on, social media listening helps you see how your audience responds to certain issues or topics being discussed.

This lets you carefully plan and craft a response that addresses the main concerns your audience or customers have about the problem.

Things like product recalls, misinterpreted social media posts, or claims from other accounts can all cause minor PR problems for a brand of any size.

Being able to see these develop in real time can help you deal with these quickly so they don’t grow into bigger issues or narrative problems surrounding your brand.

As we all know, things spread fast on social media whether they’re true or not. Being able to spot possible issues with your brand’s image can head off a possible PR disaster.

Setting Up Your Social Listening Strategy

We’ve outlined what your social listening strategy can help you with, but that’s a lot to deal with all at once. 

If you’re new to social listening and want to implement a strategy to start improving your overall business intelligence, there are a few key steps you can follow to quickly get started.

This will help you leverage the most crucial data necessary to achieve your current goals.

Specify What You Want To Address

As with most business initiatives, you want to start with a specific goal or issue you want to address.

For example, are you looking for influencers to partner with on a new marketing campaign?

Another goal may be related to market research. If you’re looking for a new product category to explore, then you’ll want to focus on sentiment and discussions regarding competitors as well as your own products.

Start by prioritizing what you want to achieve through social listening. You can use the benefits from the previous section to determine which aspects are most appropriate for your goals.

From there, you can start to expand to other uses once you have a workflow and understand the tools and metrics involved.

Choose Your Social Media Listening Tool

Once you have a specific purpose in mind, you can start to look for the right social listening tool to fit your needs.

There are plenty of choices in this area and each has slightly different features that may be appropriate for you. Some are general purpose and others are designed for more specific tasks.

In the next section, we’ll cover the top 5 most popular social listening tools along with their strengths and weaknesses.

Set Up Your Channels To Track

You will want to monitor all of the channels where you believe your target audience is active. If you’re conducting a specific type of research, you may want to limit your channels at first to help make it easier to manage the data.

For example, if you’re focusing your efforts on Instagram influencers, you may want to just use that platform as your primary channel for listening.

Which channels you monitor will depend on your overall goals, just be careful not to overwhelm yourself with data if it’s not needed during your initial setup and monitoring.

Analyze The Data Collected

Depending on your goals and how you set up your social listening, you may have immediate actionable data and also data that requires further study.

For example, some tasks like responding to customers or posts can be taken care of immediately by your social media director or customer service staff.

Other data such as consumer sentiment, trends, or competitor behavior can be stored and analyzed more closely later.

For the data that you plan on studying more closely for later action, most tools will allow you to export it into spreadsheets. Some tools will also have data visualization features built in so you can create charts or graphs to share with your team.

Take Action

With our data collected and analyzed, you can now come up with a data-driven strategy to address your goals from the first step in this process.

Instead of taking guesses on what your customers are thinking or what your competitors are up to, you now have actionable data to base your decisions on.

This allows you to make bold choices with less wasted resources or time which can sometimes happen when you have to guess and test the results.

One key element is to act fast after you collect and analyze data from your social listening tools. As you already know, trends and consumer behavior can change seemingly overnight.

Also, the whole point of social listening is to increase your business intelligence. Business intelligence is designed to make your business more agile and be able to react faster.

So be ready to act on your finding as soon as possible and move before the competition when setting up your social listening strategy.

One example of this is to have resources already in place before you begin. This could mean lines of credit or specific influencers ready to receive your latest creative brief for a new campaign.

Top 5 Most Popular Social Listening Tools

There are plenty of choices when it comes to social listening tools. This can seem a little bit daunting when you first start looking so below we’ll feature a few of the most popular options to help you start your 

search.

1 Sprout Social

Sprout Social is one of the more well-known social media management and listening platforms and it has several pricing plans that are competitive with many other tools in the category.

Due to its history, Sprout Social is a mature solution and has robust integrations and features to make tracking social media interactions and sentiments very easy.

Beyond just social listening, you also get scheduling and other features to help with your campaigns. Sprout started as a social media management tool, so these features are well-developed and full of useful features. This makes Sprout an all-in-one solution that works across platforms for virtually any social media task.

The reporting and data visualization tools are also easy to use and allow you to quickly view your own data or put together presentations for stakeholders or team members.

At $250 per month, Sprout Social is pricey, but there is a free trial for those who want to test it before committing.

2 BuzzSumo

Unlike Sprout Social which is a comprehensive social media management tool, BuzzSumo is strictly for social listening, content research, and insights. There are no additional features for scheduling posts or other account management tools.

The real bright spot with BuzzSumo is its simple interface that can walk you through the social listening process.

For example, if you’re looking for influencers, you can use their dedicated search tool that allows for filtering by keywords, topics discussed, or shares from particular websites or other accounts.

All of your research can be grouped into projects so you can return to any task and pick up where you left off.

BuzzSumo also works for keyword research, content ideation, and even content brief creation. These features blur the lines between a social listening tool and SEO-focused products such as Moz or Ahrefs. So for content marketers, those features may be able to replace other tools you’re currently using.

BuzzSumo subscriptions start at $199 per month and they offer a free trial for new users.

Overall, the simplicity and robust features make BuzzSumo worth considering if you want a dedicated social listening tool without extra management features.

3 Brandwatch

Brandwatch is similar to BuzzSumo and provides a complete solution to monitor conversations and sentiment around your brand on all platforms.

You also get full publishing and project scheduling features to manage your campaigns directly from the Brandwatch platform.

Brandwatch is a powerful social listening platform but the data visualization and reports can be more difficult to use than some competing platforms. However, that can be subjective and the Brandwatch interface may “click” with certain people who find it intuitive.

Unfortunately, Brandwatch doesn’t offer public pricing and you will need to contact them directly for a free demo. The upside of this is that you will get a dedicated sales representative to walk you through the demo and answer any questions you have.

Just be aware that Brandwatch has significantly higher pricing than other tools on this list. However, it’s very powerful and for the right brands, it can deliver exactly what they need along with personalized support.

4 Keyhole

Keyhole combines social listening with overall social media analytics in a budget-friendly package.

It offers all of the key features you might need but forgoes some of the more complex options that more expensive listening tools offer. It’s a great option for brands that focus on hashtag monitoring as their main listening strategy. 

The downside is that it doesn’t support as many platforms as many of its competitors, so make sure it can work with the platforms you need to follow before committing.

Beyond that, you also get a great analytics module with customizable dashboards to display the information and data that’s most important to your goals.

Overall, this is a strong package for brands or marketers on a budget who don’t mind the slightly limited feature set.

Keyhole starts at $79 per month and offers a free 7-day trial.

Hootsuite

Hootsuite is a very popular social media management tool and it includes several key social listening tools as well.

Hootsuite is an all-in-one solution for social media management, so it does everything but doesn’t really specialize in social listening.

That doesn’t mean it lacks key features, but it doesn’t offer the level of granularity that a dedicated social listening tool can offer. This is evident around reporting, non-social media tracking, and data visualization.

Hootsuite was one of the original social management platforms and the interface does show its age a little. This results in it being a little more difficult to initially navigate than it needs to be.

One newer feature within Hootsuite is the use of AI language to interpret sentiment and give you summaries across platforms. It’s an interesting feature but it can sometimes yield conflicting results, which means you should use it as a starting point and then confirm as you go.

Overall, Hootsuite is a well-rounded package if you need specific management tools in addition to social listening tools.

Hootsuite starts at $99 per month and offers a free 30-day trial.

Free Social Listening Tools

If you’re on a budget or just want to get your feet wet with social listening without a big investment, there are few free or freemium options available.

These have limited feature sets but when used correctly, you can still gain insights that you otherwise might not have.

Google Alerts

Like many Google products, The Google Alerts system is free and provides a simplified way to track brand mentions, topics, and discussions across the internet.

The interface is simple and you just enter the keywords or topics you want to be notified about and you will get alerts when Google crawls new discussions or mentions.

There are filters and other methods to prevent you from being overloaded with alerts on popular topics, which is a niche touch.

Overall, this is one tool that almost any marketer or brand should be using for research and social monitoring even if they use additional tools.

XPro

XPro is the rebranded TweetDeck application used for managing and social listening on the X platform.

While not technically free, it does come bundled with a paid Blue subscription on X. 

If your brand is active on X, then it’s well worth being a Blue subscriber and becoming familiar with the included XPro service. 

Fedica

Fedica is a social listening and management platform that works on a freemium model.

Signing up for a free account gives you up to 9 total social media accounts to track.

Analytics are unfortunately limited on the free plan, but you do get useful account management and scheduling tools. If the platform clicks with your workflow you can always upgrade to get the full analytics and listening features.

Fedica breaks down different listening tools into three different paid packages. While this does allow you the opportunity to only pay for what you need, they do fence the best features behind the most expensive package.

This is common with subscription software and unfortunately can cause the monthly cost to quickly go up.

Other Free Social Listening Options

Several social media platforms have their own internal tools and features that work similarly to social listening tools. These are specific to the platform but still provide valuable insights and should be a part of your overall social strategy.

• TikTok Audience Insights – Free for any account
• Meta Business Suite – Free tool for Facebook & Instagram analytics and management

These tools are designed for optimizing and targeting paid advertisements, but they offer many of the key metrics for user engagement, traffic, and other similar data.

Getting Started with Social Listening

Throughout this guide, we’ve outlined how to get started with your own social listening strategy as well as which tools can help you get there.

For some brands, you may be working with an influencer marketing agency to either manage your social media or create influencer campaigns for you.

In this case, your agency should provide you with detailed stats and reports that include many of the metrics we talked about in this guide.

Before they create a campaign for you, your agency will use many of the methods we outlined above to choose the right influencers, create campaign briefs, and then track the results as the campaign is launched.

However, even if you use an agency, you may want to monitor social media through your own preferred listening method. Whether it’s your sales department, customer service, or product development group, knowing what’s happening across social media is vital.

Social media listening provides a trove of data that can help you make the right decisions in a complex and fast-moving marketplace.