AN EMERGING TOOL OF MAXIMUM UTILITY

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Listening to social networks or social listening is a new digital marketing tool that is becoming increasingly popular among experts. If we assume that the  84% of the population social networks, and that companies, on the other hand, use social networks, If you need to find customers on the Internet in order to understand their online behaviour and their opinions about your brands, you will understand why social listening is booming.

Let's start by defining what the social listening: 

Strictly speaking, it is understood as Social Listening the active listening that the company carries out on social networks by using Internet monitoring tools in order to know where it has been mentioned and what has been said about it. The objective fundamental is use the information obtained to make decisions based on user feedback.

 The Social Listening can be understood simultaneously as a tool and as a strategy. Indeed, it is a tool, to monitor, know and interpret the existing opinions in the networks in relation to companies, products or brands. But we are not limited to quantitative data. The Social Listening is to go beyond tags, number of followers or mentions and to get a clear idea of what is the reputation of the brand in the digital environment. It therefore involves interpreting the things that are said.

The strategic meaning of the concept emanates from the information obtained, since it is on this information that we will develop action plans aimed at correcting weak points and reinforcing positive opinions by influencing users' opinions of the brand.

In addition, it allows us to know the reputation of the competition, which is undoubtedly useful when defining significant aspects of interactions with customers and their degree of satisfaction.

Benefits of the Social Listening.

• KNOW YOUR CUSTOMERS

It helps us to know and understand our customers better, to identify their needs, tastes and online behaviour. 

• IDENTIFYING OPINIONS ABOUT THE BRAND

As we have shown, social listening allows you to identify the opinions that users have in relation to the brand and therefore its reputation in the networks. In this way, we can determine what we like or dislike about the brand and where the root of a specific problem may lie, in relation to the characteristics of the product, price, communication, distribution, after-sales service, attention, etc. The monitoring tools are able to sort the content in which you have been mentioned into positive and negative. This information will allow the necessary corrective measures to be taken in the short term.

• SPOTTING TRENDS

The Social Listening helps you to detect potential market niches and make yourself known and increase your notoriety on the Internet. 

• OPTIMISING MARKETING STRATEGIES

The Social Listening is an excellent strategic tool as it allows to design and implement marketing strategies tailored to customer/consumer wishes avoiding complex, time-consuming and expensive satisfaction surveys which are also not guaranteed to provide complete information and may be dangerously biased. Social Listening provides a information obtained in a natural environment based on genuine feedback that gives us more confidence when making decisions.

• INTRODUCE IMPROVEMENTS IN THE CUSTOMER SERVICE PROCESS

Social networks are the biggest hub for spontaneous complaints from users, which is why it is so important to use social media, is a first-class source of information for the marketing departments of companies. It is therefore essential, to know how to get the most out of them by understanding the causes of customer dissatisfaction, avoiding the creation of a bad reputation problem. It is essential to develop a permanent attitude of active listening. 

• SPOT INFLUENCERS

It goes without saying that everyone would like to be an influencer, but sometimes it's just not possible. Social Listening is an excellent tool for spot people talking about your brand. Influencers can be a magnificent allies with whom it is advisable to establish strategic relationships in order to generate visibility in an organic way.

• KNOW YOUR COMPETITORS

All these advantages we have seen so far are equally available to your competitors. The Social Linstening allows you to identify the strategies of your competitors and also to know what the users of the networks think of them. It allows you to know what problems they have faced and what they have done to solve them. You will know who are their influencers and brand ambassadors with whom they collaborate, and you will be able to define your positioning, in a much more effective way.

HOW TO IMPLEMENT SOCIAL LISTENING?

What needs arise in the implementation of the Social Listening in the company? In principle, it is not particularly complicated, but there are some basic requirements to consider. We will need, first of all, a monitoring tool and establish unequivocally which metrics or ratios you are going to use.

• The first thing to ask yourself is what you want to know. This will help you to set clear objectives. 
• In which channels you should search. This is a fundamental aspect as not all channels are suitable for certain searches. In each of these channels, we will find different audiences, different interests and different age groups. It is not the same Instagram where we will find more young people than Twitter where we will find adult people. The selection of the channels must therefore be careful. It should be taken into consideration that monitoring tools work by number of mentions contracted, so in order not to run out of mentions and not obtain any important data, make a good segmentation of the channels.
• Thirdly, you must discern according to your KPIs which of the mentions are useful and which are not. You will have to make a keyword index. 

• • The brand.
  • The most used hashtags.
  • The names of the directors of your company.
  • Your advertising slogan and that of your competitors.
  • Your competitors' brands.
  • The most frequent keywords in your sector.

In order to get to know your customers in depth, it is necessary to segment them by age, tastes and interests in order to locate them where they are most active. 

SELECTION CRITERIA FOR THE SELECTION OF A TOOL FOR ACTIVE LISTENING:

In terms of monitoring tools, there are a number of active listening options on the market. It is a matter of analyse them and determine which one best suits your needs according to your objectives. It is necessary to find the option that allows you to interpret the data in a simple and intuitive way. In addition, it is necessary that the tool allow full filtering of the data collected, by date, by channel, by keyword. It should make us recommendations regarding the most appropriate times to publish, how many people our publications reach and what their profiles are. It should also create reports, which we can deliver to clients or use in presentations. 

SOME RECOMMENDATIONS FOR SOCIAL LISTENING TOOLS:

1. HOOTSUITE

It is uone of the world's most popular. It allows you to monitor multiple Key Words and unify them into a single dashboard that will show you information about them on social media, including demographics, mentions and reviews. Hootsuite's price starts at USD $10, and increases according to the features you want to add.

2. SOCIAL MENTION

It specialises in identifying chains of conversations about a brand on social networks such as Twitter, Instagram, Facebook y YouTube. The aim is to gain an insight into what attitudes have been formed about it on the basis of audience opinions, in order to which analyses mentions based on whether the "sentiment" behind the messages: positive or negative.

3. BRANDWATCH

It is known to be one of the most sophisticated tools of Social Listening, by having access to data collected from 80 million sources, including not only the most popular social networks, but also forums, opinion sites, blogs, etc. The advantage of this tool is that it has what we could call an "intelligent analysis", which identifies patterns in the users who talk about you. This allows you to get to know your audience better.

4. TWEETREACH

Being specific to Twitter, it allows you to evaluate how much influence your tweets have, by measuring parameters that indicate - for example - how long on average your post is shared or which followers generate the most retweets. Note that TweetReach costs from US $99 to $399 per month.

5. SOCIAL SPROUT

In addition to being a platform that allows you to schedule automatic publications on sites such as Twitter and Instagram, it also serves to perform Social Listening, by including a function that tracks certain keywords or hashtags, providing demographic and gender percentages.

6. CONVERSOCIAL

Similar to Social Mention, Conversocial has features that facilitate social listening by locating on social networks the name of the brand we want to know.

7. KEYHOLE

Through graphs generated in real time, Keyhole shows you how mentions of hashtags, usernames and URLs on Twitter and Instagram are evolving. The great thing about this site is that it is quite specific, even including the use of geofilters from Snapchat in the charts. The price ranges from US $116 per month.

8. GOOGLE ALERTS

One of the few free social listing tools is Google Alerts. It has a simple, beginner-friendly interface that displays data on both your brand and your competitors. Simply set up the terms (or web addresses) you want to monitor and Google Alerts will alert you when it finds mentions of them.

9. SPRINKLR

It is ideal if your goal is to know the emotional response of your audience to the keyword entered, as it adds the context in which it is being used. If you want to try it, you can request a free demo through a form on their website.

10. HOWSOCIABLE

It looks to compare the data traffic your brand generates on specific social networks, showing you a score for each. For example, on Facebook you might get a score of 10, but on Twitter a score of 2, depending on how many mentions or retweets you have.