Social listening: Your launchpad to success on social media

Consumer conversations are more transparent than ever in the age of social media. From call-outs to shout-outs, there are endless opportunities to learn about your audience. This includes:

• Topics and trends that your customer base is passionate about
• Ways for your company to outshine your competitors
• Emerging pain points and challenges your customers face
• Which types of marketing messages really resonate

The problem? Brands are often guessing and not listening.

Social listening overcomes this challenge. With social listening, brands can look at customer conversations on a large scale. This helps you tailor your plans more specifically to reach more customers for the best results. The result is a more meaningful and effective social media marketing strategy.

Social listening helps you deep-dive into social chatter so you can proactively monitor mentions of your brand or your competitors. This information helps you shape better strategies for improving your products, marketing, advertising and customer experience.

Social media listening gives you near real-time perspective on:

• Who your audience is
• What your audience wants
• When your audience is engaging with you
• Where your audience is active and engaged
• Why your audience wants to talk about you
• How you can better serve your audience

These answers ensure your content strategy is relevant and impactful. They also help you navigate opportunities to find the right influencers and brand partners to increase your reach.

Social listening vs social monitoring

Even though they’re often used interchangeably, social listening vs. monitoring are two separate concepts. Social monitoring shows you what people are talking about on social media. But only social listening shows you why people are interested in and discussing certain topics.

The food industry is a prime example of how both concepts work and why they matter. For example, restaurants need to know what customers are buzzing about. This might mean their favorite dishes or a new menu announcement.

But the "why" is arguably more important. For example, why are customers reaching out in the first place? Is it a customer service issue? Are customers piling on praise or complaints? These mentions speak to bigger issues that go beyond a single interaction.

Social media monitoring

Social media monitoring involves tracking and responding to messages received about your brand. Here’s an example from CAVA.

You can see how Cava engages with a customer and offers help quickly, making the customer feel valued and appreciated.

Social listening

CAVA could also use interactions to draw conclusions about first-time customers, such as in the example below. They responded to a first-time customer who loves their experience and wants them to open a new store in her location.

Listening is about understanding the bigger picture. Aggregating such social messages through social listening helps you get a combined view of what the audience thinks and wants.

Both social listening and social media monitoring are important for brands. When used together, they give you a complete view of your target audience so you can keep up with market needs and industry trends.

Benefits of social listening

Done right, social listening helps you translate social conversations into better content and more revenue.

Imagine you work for a company like Netflix as a creative director. Chances are you have access to tons of data to inspire the direction of your next series. This includes viewership rates, popular genres and most-watched actors. But let's say you don't have this data readily available. Or you're missing details that are holding you back from a suitable storyline that’d make your series more successful.

That's when you can turn to social media listening to fill in the gaps.

Think about how much the average consumer loves to sound off on social channels like X (formerly known as Twitter) or Reddit. Social listening provides opportunities to translate these conversations into actionable business insights.

Here are five key social media listening use cases you can take advantage of to gain actionable insights.

• Brand health: Gauge public perception of your brand or products.
• Industry insights: Analyze discussions or hashtags within an industry.
• Competitive analysis: Analyze a competing brand or product.
• Campaign analysis: See how a campaign is performing.
• Event monitoring: Monitor audience response to a conference or event.

Benefit #1: Brand health

Pop quiz: How do people feel about your brand?

Public perception matters. Paying attention to positive and negative sentiments around your brand is crucial. This can clue you into what people love about you and where you can improve.

Listening to data also challenges how you see your brand. After all, your brand perception and how customers feel about you may be very different.

Social listening provides the truth straight from the mouths of your target audience. Embracing these insights can help you fine-tune your messaging, product strategy and more.

Answers social listening can uncover about your brand health include:

• How do customers feel about my brand or product?
• Is perception trending up or down?
• Which types of content do people share about my brand?
• Does my social audience align with other channels?
• Frequent social listening provides a pulse on common customer questions, comments and complaints. Not to mention demographics and general sentiment around your brand.

Once you've gathered your conversational data, it's time to brainstorm your next steps. Here are examples of actions you can take right away:

• Find your most frequently asked questions. Then, create a FAQ document or knowledge base to answer these questions at scale.
• Find your customers’ most common issues. Then, figure out streamlined solutions or create talk tracks to respond quickly.
• Figure out what your customers love about you. Then, incorporate that information into your campaigns and content strategy.
• Identify your key social media customers. Then, figure out how you can use their traits to target new social audiences.

Read between the lines of positive and negative comments. If sentiment skews negative, determine if the problem is with your social presence or your company at large. For example, a social content strategy can be revamped quickly, while a poor perception of your products or customer service team runs deeper.

Even if your customers are happy, you still have work to do. Listening reports provide the gut-check your brand health needs.

At times, brand sentiment is hurt by factors outside of our control. From shipping issues to service outages, sentiment can nose-dive for many reasons.

The key is to understand the cause of negative comments and prepare for the future. If you have slowdowns during your product updates, maybe there's an issue with your tech stack. If your service team is bogged down with shipping complaints, find the root cause. Then, you can move towards the next steps to prevent all of the above from happening again.

It's critical for brands to not silo social listening data related to brand health. If anything, this is the data that's most valuable to the rest of your organization.

Listening data provides first-hand insight into what makes your audience happy (or unhappy). This includes main themes, keywords, audiences and locations.  These details could lead outside teams like product or fulfillment to a major “aha” moment.

Benefit #2: Industry trends and insights

Done right, social listening identifies industry trends before they even become trends. It sorts through the noise of industry hashtags and discussions, so you can listen closely to the right conversations. This can help you change your plans or stay ahead of industry trends.

Likewise, it can also affect your message and content plan and help you adapt to changing customer needs, giving you a strong competitive advantage.

Here as some ways to use social listening for industry insights:

• Keep an eye on disruptions to your space (think: new tech, competitors or legislation).
• Track political and social issues to weigh in on if they’re relevant to your brand.
• Find gaps in the industry that a new product, solution or workflow could solve.
• Look for frequently-asked questions to create content your audience needs.

The current discourse over AI content is a great example. From marketers to artists and consumers, the impact is wide-reaching, with plenty of hot takes. Tech brands and companies using AI can monitor what people are saying about them in this regard and improve their products and services.

The power of social listening for industries goes beyond trends, too. Many brands use listening tools to identify relevant influencers. The boom of the creator economy speaks for itself.

With so many creators, finding a good fit requires some serious digging. Listening to specific terms or conversations can help you find influencers faster. This beats sifting through social bios or countless pieces of content.

• Find your current top influencers and empower them to advocate for you
• Find all of the influencers in your industry and create a list of people to collaborate with
• Find your competitor’s top influencers and attempt to win them over.
• Figure out the best networks for your strategy (ex: TikTok versus Instagram)

Benefit #3: Competitive analysis

Social media is fiercely competitive. That’s why social listening for competitive analysis can be a game-changer.

Whether it's new competition and consumer markets, or keeping up with your direct competitors, social listening lets you track conversations that really matter to your brand. This includes:

• Determining your share of voice. This includes your volume of mentions and messages versus your competitors.
• Understanding your competitors' shortcomings. This could be related to their product, service or messaging. Then, brainstorm how you can create a better experience.
• Finding competitive content that outperforms your own. Then, analyze why it resonates with your shared audience.
• Quickly identifying new products or solutions. Determine how people feel about new offerings in your space. Then, consider how you can pivot or reposition yourself to outshine them.

Competitive shortcomings aren't always obvious. A thoughtful social listening strategy can help you hone in on them. This is especially valuable if you're taking on a bigger competitor. Positioning is key when you can't outspend or brute-force your way into greater awareness.

Take for example, the skincare industry, where there are numerous brands and competitors, and social chatter is filled with terms relevant to specific audiences and their needs, such as "acne-prone", "k-beauty" or "retinol."

Brands are often pitted against each other by consumers and influencers alike. Listening to these conversations can be really informative. You can learn a lot about a competitor's strengths and weaknesses, especially compared to what they think of themselves.

 

Benefit #4: Campaign analysis

Brands spend so much energy on fresh campaign ideas. But how can you say with confidence whether a campaign succeeded or not? You can't repeat your positive results if you don't know what's working. On the flip side, you don't want to rely on strategies that underperform.

Listening tactics boost your campaign success dramatically. Think through the following capabilities for your next campaign.

• Track the impressions and engagements around your campaign posts.
• Quickly gather general sentiment around specific campaigns.
• Identify the top influencers discussing your campaigns.
• Understand which of your audience demographics the campaign resonates with.
• Figure out the key themes behind your campaigns
• Track collaborative campaigns from a single source of truth.

Social listening can finally prove to you the value of your marketing campaigns. Start by crafting listening topics to capture the conversations around your campaign. Analyzing hashtags or handles can uncover countless metrics to clue you in.

You can then break down all of these insights by:

• Network
• Content type
• Message type
• Sentiment

Benefit #5: Event monitoring

Events and conferences are great places to get useful listening data. Most events use hashtags on social media, so social media may be full of conversations about them.

Listening by title or terms associated with sessions and speakers is a start. Consider also how listening can open your eyes to:

• Your attendees' favorite events, speakers and sessions
• Opportunities to improve the event experience
• Whether your event led to meaningful business opportunities

Why use social listening for events

Gathering feedback is a must-do given the legwork required to put on an event. You want to make sure your investment of time and energy is worth the effort. From recruiting events and conferences to performances and beyond, listening is fair game. Measuring audience reactions is a common use of listening analysis. It's an effective one, too.

Benefit #6: Crisis management

It takes years of careful planning to build a brand reputation. But in a time when it's easy to provoke cancel culture, brands have to be very aware of the market and audience's feelings to handle crises with care.

Social listening helps brands do this strategically by:

• Detecting issues early: Social listening tools detect potential disasters early. They find negative sentiment in social conversations related to your brand, so you can intervene quickly.
• Managing crisis response: Listening to people online helps you understand how they think about a situation. This information helps you choose the tone and content of your response to make sure it makes sense to the audience.
• Identifying key influencers: Analyzing social chatter around a crisis helps you find those accounts or influencers who are shaping trending discussions. This helps you engage with them directly to help manage and influence public opinion to reduce damage during a crisis.
• Monitoring impact: Listening to social media also helps you track how the crisis has affected people and your business, and how your plan is working to reduce it. You can track sentiment shifts and adjust your moves accordingly to manage the crisis lifecycle and avoid damage to your brand health in the future.

Understanding Sprout's Social Listening tools

Gathering and analyzing social data is straightforward. Turning that data into relevant insights is more complicated and requires additional context. Sprout's social media analysis solutions cover all types of listening to give you answers and insights. We balance both engagement and analytics.

Here's a detailed look at how each of Sprout's Social Listening tools, like conversational analytics, help you provide better service, improve your content strategy and improve your messaging to increase market engagement and ultimately, business.

Smart Inbox

Sprout's Smart Inbox tracks every conversation with and about your brand. Think of it as your home base for social listening.

Our unified Smart Inbox helps businesses engage and build relationships with their audiences. This is done by organizing all of your ongoing customer communication. We empower brands to prioritize their most important messages across channels. Brands can use the Smart Inbox to:

• Create a one-stop shop for social engagement. Bouncing between platforms and log-in screens is a poor use of your time. The Smart Inbox aggregates your messages in one place.
• Stay focused and never miss a message. With one inbox, you're less likely to overlook your notifications. You can likewise use the Smart Inbox to track branded keywords. You won't miss notifications for those, either.
• Maintain engagement as a team. The Smart Inbox was built with team collaboration in mind. Our platform helps brands increase their response time and reduce duplicate conversations.

Brand Keywords

The Brand Keywords feature captures X conversations relevant to your brand, industry and competition.

Since not every shout-out or call-out is tagged, nor is every piece of content about your brand tied to a hashtag, it's easy to miss out on these messages. Searching for them manually is time-consuming and catching them all isn't feasible without a tracking tool.

Sprout’s Brand Keywords are custom searches that run consistently to identify such messages. These results display in your Smart Inbox so you can then interact with them like any other message.

The Brand Keywords feature offers strategic opportunities to:

• Find your most important messages. Add keywords mentioning your company and products. Common misspellings of those, too. You can also uncover conversations that don't @tag you directly.
• Find new opportunities. A real-time pulse on branded keywords means you can influence people faster. For example, let's say someone tweets for opinions on your brand versus a competitor. You can jump in to recommend your product or explain your company's advantages.

Trends Report

The Trends Report highlights popular topics and hashtags related to your brand. For example, our X report shows tags and topics trending in your mentions. You can also see the people and brands that engage with your business the most.

Brands can leverage the Trends Report to:

• Take the guesswork out of content creation. Quickly filter campaign and demographic data to identify top content. Then, tailor your marketing strategy to create more of it.
• Identify trending topics to reach new audiences. Spot emerging trends and top content relevant to your brand, competitors or industry.
• Leverage hashtag listening and reporting. For example, you can perform quantitative and qualitative analyses of keywords and hashtags. Then, you can compare your campaigns' success and your share of voice

Keyword Report

The Keyword Report reveals basic keywords related to your brand, competition and industry.

The X Keyword report instantly uncovers trends in X traffic for any keyword. This includes hashtags or long-tail search queries across any date range. Consider how the Keyword Report can:

• Keep tabs on your industry. Track your brand against the competition and trends.
• Track effectiveness and reach. This applies to your past and current hashtag or marketing campaigns.
• Discover patterns in keyword usage. Consider how some terms or trends fall out of favor. Then, adjust your marketing efforts to reflect that new language.
• Track your brand’s products and sentiment. You can measure this against yourself or your competitors.

Listening

Insights from Sprout's Listening features are among the most valuable for brands. This includes emerging trends, identifying thought leaders and deep sentiment analysis.

And with Sprout's built-in Listening add-ons, you can start listening ASAP. These include:

• Queries by AI Assist: ​​This capability enables you to use keywords to sift through the noise by extracting relevant, actionable. It’s keyword suggestions further help you narrow down your search so you get the granular information you need.
• Summarize by AI Assist: This feature allows you to summarize any text that exceeds 800 characters and quickly summarize the key messages and topics.
• Insights by AI Assist: This tool helps marketers identify significant metrics, hashtags, keywords and Smart Categories trending in the conversation topics they've chosen to analyze.

These listening tools are a powerful complement to our extensive social monitoring features and offers a window into the unfiltered thoughts of your audience. When these thoughts are front-and-center, trendspotting is so much easier. You can likewise uncover threads and gauge feelings around any given topic.

These insights inform your big-picture business decisions. Meanwhile, your Smart Inbox tracks specific interactions and engagements with your customers. It's the best of both worlds!

Here's a snapshot of what Sprout's Listening can do:

• Empower your organization. Sprout’s listening data takes your team's impact beyond social media. You can offer actionable insights to strengthen other departments. Sales teams and customer service, in particular, can learn a lot from listening data.
• Cut time to insight and action. Learn and act at the speed of social media. Having your listening data alongside your publishing tools means hopping on trends faster.
• Organize your social presence in one platform. Streamline your workflow by eliminating jumps from point solution to point solution.
• Research with intention. We provide filtering options to help you get relevant answers fast. Doing so means cutting through the noise.
• Create targeted Topics with ease. The Topic Builder makes it simple to set up complex and relevant queries. You can then search and research these topics over and over again.

How to create a social listening strategy

Here’s a walkthrough of how to create a strong social listening strategy that helps you drive meaningful brand engagement and improves your reputation.

Step 1. Choose a social listening tool

Social listening tools can analyze millions of social messages within minutes, giving you the insights you need. While manually analyzing thousands of online messages seems impractical, building a customs ocial listening tool is time-consuming and costly. With several high-performing social listening tools to choose from, it makes sense to partner with one that best suits your business and needs.

Step 2. Determine your initial goals and desired outcomes

Having precise social media goals is key to achieving your marketing initiatives as they guide your strategy.

These goals could be:

• Run a deep analysis of your brand to understand what customers and prospects think.
• Monitor your industry or niche to keep a pulse on what’s new and what would make good content.
• Keep an eye on your competitors’ products, audiences and marketing tactics.
• Identify the best suitable content to share based on trends and data.
• Identify your key social media audiences to better inform your targeting strategy.

Step 3. Choose relevant data sources

Choosing your data sources will depend on where you get the most engagement and where audiences usually flock to. In general, X is the best place to find social listening tools. It has hidden gems that X listening can find, even if your brand isn't active there. Similarly, listening on Instagram and Facebook can help you tap into customer opinions.

Sprout pulls social data from a variety of sources including those mentioned above as well as channels such as Reddit. This approach gives you the most comprehensive sense of where your brand stands.

Step 4. Build your topics and themes to listen to

Building your listening topics is the next key step to a successful strategy. Brainstorm specific queries relevant to your brand including terms you want to track and noise you want to avoid. Let’s go deeper.

What to query

• Keywords or phrases
• Hashtags
• Cashtags
• Mentions of user
• Mentions from user
• Mentions to user
• Keywords or phrases
• Hashtags
• Cashtags
• Mentions of user
• Mentions from user
• Mentions to user

And/or logic

Listening is about more than just hashtags and keywords. You can refine the logic of your search even more with additional parameters.

For example, say you want to track sentiment around Chicago-style pizza. Your query may end up looking more like below.

Now all sorts of variations will register:

• chicago pizza
• chi-town pizza
• chicago deep dish
• chi-town deep dish
• chicago pie

Exclusions

Consider how "Chicago pie" could mean pizza or baked goods.  This is an example of where exclusions can be helpful. For example, you may add pie flavors to ensure that the scope of your search is limited to pizza.

Step 5. Gather data to inform your strategy

After refining your topics, start collecting data to inform your strategies. Let's run with our Chicago-style pizza example. Below is a word cloud of the frequently mentioned keywords based on the query.

You can click on each keyword to get a better sense of what the messages mean. You might notice that a lot of the messages mention cold weather in Chicago. Use this information to your advantage and craft relatable content such as:

• Social posts about whether you’re open when it's freezing out
• How temperatures impact pizza sales
• Come up with a playful, weather-themed promotion
• Think outside the box, such as Chicago shelters or workers that could benefit from free pizza

Step 6. Measure the results of your listening efforts relative to your goals

Tracking how well your strategy is working is an important step necessary to ensure your hard work is paying off. To measure the results of your social listening, consider zeroing in on priority social media metrics based on your campaign goals. For example,

• Clicks
• Reach
• New followers
• Profile visits
• Engagement rates
• Engagement speed

These will give you an overarching view of how well your strategy is working and where you can adjust your efforts to optimize results.

Watch this video to understand better.

Step 7. Report and act on insights

Once you’ve gathered your social listening insights, it's time to share them with the relevant teams within your organization. This shared knowledge helps teams like product development, marketing and customer service make smart choices that match consumer preferences and market conditions. They also get a better understanding of customer sentiment, market trends and competitors.

For example, insights showing that customers don't like a product feature can help product development teams focus on improving the product. It can also help marketing and customer service teams create responses and campaigns to address concerns raised through social listening.

Acting on these insights is equally critical in driving tangible business outcomes, and refining products and services. This proactive approach based on customer feedback increases brand appeal and fosters stronger customer satisfaction and loyalty. It positions your brand as responsive and customer-centric, thus driving tangible business results and sustained business growth.

Ready to start listening?

Social listening helps you understand and engage with your audience in a more proactive and meaningful way. This direct engagement also lets you find brand supporters, influencers and loyal customers who can help spread a good word about your brand. That’s why mapping out a social listening strategy matters. Not to mention, serving as a valuable tool for market research and product development.

Translate your customer conversations into actionable insights and thrive as a customer-centric brand that’s in tune with the market and its audience. Request a Sprout demo and explore Social Listening to build an impactful listening strategy.