How to use social listening tools to build a stronger business

Good listening is the backbone of effective communication. It’s the first step to understanding other people—whether in a tense boardroom negotiation or meeting up with friends.

The same applies to listening to your brand’s audience. In today’s marketing landscape especially, social listening is vital for successful brand communication.

Social media is the world’s largest and most transparent focus group. And social listening enables you to tap into that focus group, their conversations and the trends happening not just around your brand, but around your whole industry.

Many marketers already have access to social listening tools that help them hone into these important conversations. However, they aren’t using them to their best advantage.

In this article, we explain why a listening strategy is so important. You’ll also see how to use social listening tools to their full potential to find useful insights that bring the power of social to your company.

What you need to know before creating a social listening strategy

Social listening is the process of figuring out what’s being said about your brand, products or business through social channels.

It can be seen as an evolution of social monitoring; where social monitoring can tell you what conversations are happening, social listening tells you why.

Collecting this level of insight is possible thanks to social listening tools. But before you create your own listening strategy, there are a few key points you need to consider.

Listening strategies should align with business goals

Social media platforms are crowded, noisy places. Trying to listen to everything posted on multiple different platforms at once is a recipe for overwhelm.

The biggest trap marketers can fall into with social listening is simply not knowing what to focus on.

When defining your listening strategy, you first need to make sure your listening focus aligns with your company’s goals.

The best way to do this is to create specific social listening queries. These queries are strict search parameters that you use as search functions in a social listening tool.

Query examples might include keywords, phrases, emojis, hashtags and cashtags among other data points.

If you’re just getting started with social listening, it’s wise to focus on keywords based on your main goals. For example, your goal might be to reduce the levels of customer churn for your latest software subscription.

In this case, your query could be made up of keywords related to this specific subscription and customer experience. If you combine these with common phrases meant to praise or criticize, you’ll gain a clearer picture of customer opinions surrounding the subscription.

You can then use the listening data to target the biggest issues, reducing churn in the future.

Another example might be to listen to comments on your competitor’s social posts. This shows how positively their products are being received, and can give you insight into changes you could make in the future. Competitor listening insights can also direct your future content strategies.

But these are just a couple of use cases. Make sure to clearly define your business goals, then consider how social listening can help you achieve them.

Listening topics are informed by native research

Social listening is most effective when you know exactly what you’re listening for.

In addition to your business goals, social listening topics can also reveal themselves through native research.

Instead of expecting to find trends solely through social listening, consider finding trends through your native research campaigns. This could be done by manually reviewing the native analytics of your social platforms, analyzing comprehensive network reports from a tool like Sprout, or through recent company reports like market research or competitive intel.

In these instances, social listening can be a vital supplement to your initial research.

For example, a recent piece of market research might suggest customers prefer live chat responses over phone calls when they experience a problem.

You can then use social listening to find conversations surrounding problems with your service across forums such as Reddit. Listening lets you see how problems were resolved whilst gathering insights on how positively or negatively the user found their experience.

Targeted social listening like this will support prior market research, and give you actionable insights to improve your customer support process.

Remember that social listening is a powerful tool, but it’s at its strongest when combined with other research and strategies.

Listening queries require ongoing refinement

Just like in real life, conversations across social platforms change over time. If you’ve found a successful query one moment, there’s no guarantee it’ll be as effective when you try it again next month.

To avoid this, you need to factor query refinement into your process.

Continue to stay tapped into social channels and assess how conversations have evolved. You can then apply these changes to your social listening queries, so your tools give you more accurate insights.

It’s also important to refine your queries regularly so you’re always in tune with changing customer needs and wants. A reliable way to do this is by setting a monthly reminder in your marketing calendar.

Though they’re powered by strong conversational analytics, social listening tools are only as effective as the direction you give them. If you see listening as an ever-changing process, you’ll get better at creating queries yourself and get better results from your tool.

How to use social listening to uncover actionable insights

With the above factors in mind, here’s how to start using your social listening tools more effectively with these five steps.

1. Define your “why”

Determine why you’re using social listening in the first place. Doing this at the beginning of your strategy means you’re always listening for the right data points.

Defining listening goals will look different for every organization. Some initial questions relevant in most situations include:

• What data is important for our business goals?
• Who needs this information internally?
• What problem are we trying to solve through social listening?

Make this process easier with Sprout’s social listening strategy template. This template helps you align your goals with customer experience and set up your social listening framework–all in 90 minutes.

Creating your framework with Sprout’s template also opens up several questions, which you can use as the foundation for your listening queries.

2. Get clear on what listening can do

Capture a full view of the many ways you can use social listening and what it can do for you. Such as:

• Crisis management. Social listening reveals real-time reactions and data that allow crisis management teams to respond proactively. Figure out the scope of a crisis and understand why it’s happening. These insights will help you address the issue directly.
• Industry insights. Monitor several different industry trends by listening to topic themes, including trends related to products, competitors, controversies and more.
• Market research. Use social listening to support existing research or conduct new research quickly. Some examples include uncovering possible market expansion opportunities or gathering insight into the needs of specific audiences.
• Competitive analysis. Social listening can be used to track competitive insights, such as share of voice and sentiments. You can also track the performance of your competitor’s campaigns to gain inspiration for your own content strategies.
• Brand health. Find out how people are talking about your brand. You can track conversation trends, sentiments and influencers to see how your brand is perceived.
• Campaign analysis. Social listening can show you how much social conversation a campaign has achieved. You can also track responses, and identify active influencers for future partnerships.

Understanding how to use social listening effectively means being aware of all of these use cases and the benefits they can offer your brand.

Define which use case you want to achieve with your listening first, as this will allow you to measure your success.

3. Identify the first question you want to answer

Since social listening can answer so many different questions, it’s worth selecting just one to start with.

This also makes using a social listening tool easier if it’s your first time listening. But even if it isn’t, honing in on a single question means you can focus your efforts. It also means you have a strong foundation of listening data to build from.

This recent Sprout Instagram post asked social marketers what they spend the most time on. By tracking responses, and listening to the sentiments behind them, we were able to gain new insights that can support Sprout’s feature refinement in the future.

If you’re unsure what to focus on, Sprout’s Analyze by AI Assist is helpful. This tool surfaces the key listening insights related to your business, like words, phrases, emojis, smart categories and more.

Also use the Queries by AI Assist feature. This tool integrates with OpenAI to generate initial keyword suggestions for your listening queries, saving you time and brain power.

By combining these tools, you can quickly gain an overview of which insights to target, and the queries necessary to get precise information from them.

4. Set refinement reminders

After defining your first question and topic, you need to consider refinement.

Listening query refinement is essential due to several factors. For example, you might need to add a new keyword to your searches that has only recently become important, based on your own research.

Or, your competitors might have experienced a recent controversy that you need to factor into listening to gain new insights.

Adding new keywords to refine topics also impacts your historical data when performed through Sprout. Because of this, it’s also worth analyzing your prior data after you’ve fine-tuned your topic.

There’s no strict rule on when you should refine your topics. But if you can get into the habit of setting refinement reminders each month on your calendar, you’ll get more relevant insights from your listening.

5. Establish an insight distribution game plan

Once you’ve collected your data and set a refinement plan, you need to know what to do with it.

This is the final piece of the puzzle; insight distribution. Define a cadence for how you distribute your social listening insights across your organization.

Listening insights aren’t just useful for marketing departments. When collected and presented effectively, they can guide decision-making across an entire company.

For example, while you may share your reports with senior management, particularly in cases of crisis, listening insights can be a north star for product design or software development teams as they plan product and service enhancements.

Social listening data also influences cross-functional work. Marketing teams might use this data alongside R&D to conduct new industry research. Or, your sales team can work with your product designers to find out how best to communicate new features, based on sentiments gained through listening.

But none of this is possible if you can’t deliver insights in a clear, easily digestible way for all departments.

If you’re unsure, use Sprout’s social listening report template. This is a presentation-ready deck that allows you to collate key findings, and position them against competitors and trends.

Once you’ve defined your distribution plan, continue to refine and conduct social listening. In time your strategy will develop, and you’ll collect even more actionable insights that can change the shape of your organization.

Open your company’s ears with social listening tools

Social listening is one of the best ways to harness the power of today’s social platforms.

Applying the above strategies to your brand and business means you can start to learn how to use social listening tools effectively. Once refined, this ensures you can cater to what your customers ask for.

If you’re ready to start listening, access Sprout’s 90-minute social listening guide to build your first listening query.