Speaker 1: With social media continuing to grow, it's more important than ever to keep track of what's being said about your business online. Ever wondered how you do that? Let me explain. Hi everyone, it's Josh from Brand24 and today I'll be talking about all things social listening, what it means, what the benefits are, and some of the best tools out there to help your business get the most out of it. So let's get started. What is social listening? Now the phrase social listening is beginning to be thrown around a lot, in the business world nowadays at least. However, people very rarely take the time to explain exactly what this means. Ultimately, social listening is a way for businesses to keep track of what is being said about their brands online. This helps gauge an honest overview of what consumers truly think about them and their products. Social listening itself is split into two parts, monitoring and analysing. First off, it's important that you monitor what the users are saying about the topics that you're interested in. The easiest way to do this is by setting up a brand monitoring project. We'll pop a link on our guides to the brand monitoring in the description below. Once the project has been created, the tool will begin to collect all the publicly available mentions containing your keywords, whether that be your brand name or even that of a rival. Once the monitoring process has been set up, the social listening can then begin. This will take your monitoring process one step further, as it starts to analyse the gathered information and begin to draw the most actionable conclusions that will help you achieve your business goals. It does this by adding valuable data to your social monitoring, such as estimated reach, most active sites, as well as helping you identify some influences that can help raise your brand awareness. 12 Key Benefits of Social Listening Now, social listening could ultimately prove to be the difference between an ineffective and a highly effective strategy. So it is crucial for your business that you take it seriously. Let me outline 12 key benefits for you, and you'll understand why social listening is becoming increasingly important. 1. Improve Your Customer Service The internet has become a haven for people who love to rant and rave about poor experiences with products and services. With social listening, you can use this to your advantage. Social listening can allow you to view any complaints quickly and easily, meaning your customer service team can put out any fires instantly. 2. Generate New Leads Social listening can also help you to generate new sales leads. The key for achieving this is by looking out for mentions related to your goals. It is important to monitor keywords that are related to the name of your company, your products or services, or even your competitors. This will allow you to swoop in on social media and spark a conversation with a potential new customer. 3. Track and Measure Your Marketing Campaigns Nowadays it is pretty common to see dedicated hashtag campaigns, especially since it's proven to be one of the most effective ways to increase both reach and user engagement. Monitoring online conversations on different social networks will help you to gather the data that could benefit your brand's marketing campaigns. 4. Use Social Media Listening for Customer Engagement These days, more brands than ever are engaging in online conversations with their fans and clients. Once a user posts something on the internet that is related to either a brand or an entire industry, social media managers are there to interact with the audience. Social listening will help your social media team notice more of your brand mentions, even if your page isn't tagged in the post. 5. Access Customer Insights Today's consumers are more open to sharing their opinions and reviews about the products or services that they use, mainly due to the rise in social media. You can use this to your advantage, using these posts to improve your brand and services using customer feedback. 6. Identify Social Media Influencers As I touched on earlier, social listening will help identify influencers that help improve your brand awareness. They can be ranked in order of how likely they are to be beneficial to your brand, as you'll only really want to work with those who truly believe in your products and values. Now, I don't think we'll be seeing Elon Musk promoting a Ferrari any time soon. 7. Protect Your Brand Reputation This one is one of the most common and obvious social listening uses. Sadly, you often see fake comments and profiles popping up all over the internet, with brand jacking becoming a real problem. Brand jacking is when someone impersonates a brand online, often replying to a genuine question with often a rude or malicious reply. This will damage your brand reputation massively if you're not quick to react and get the fake user profile taken down. 8. Reveal Purchase Decision Factors Learning which factors have the greatest influence on customer purchase decisions is possibly the most valuable customer insight that you can derive from social listening. If you learn the reason why people buy your product, you could then create marketing campaigns that play off of these reasons, ultimately boosting your sales. 9. Prepare Content Tailored to Your Audience Needs Social listening is widely used by many bloggers who are looking for content inspiration. It can help them find out what the latest trends on the internet are, and what members of the public are currently reading. It's a fairly simple process. You just need to monitor relevant keywords. Naturally, keyword selection depends on your industry and the topic of your blog. 10. Find Top Talents for Your Company Human Resources is another department that can benefit from this research method. HR specialists who know how to use social media as a recruitment tool are able to find potential candidates to fill a vacancy in no time. You can easily set up a project to monitor phrases like, looking for a job, I need a job, etc. Blogs can even be curbed to specific geographic regions and industries by adding required keywords. 11. Back Up Your Marketing and Competitor Research If you've got a marketing campaign coming up, and you need to get the most out of your research, then you've guessed it, social listening can help with that too. You can derive a lot of information about your target group based on the data that you monitor, including user demographics, preferred online channels, and when your audience is most active. Not to mention their levels of engagement, the context of public discussions, and much more. 12. Measure the Value of Organic Reach Measuring the value of your organic reach is especially useful for agencies who need to report the results of their strategies to the board of directors in the form of data. You cannot precisely estimate how many people have made a purchase decision after watching a TV commercial. However, if you display the same ad online, you can collect precise information about conversion rates at each step of the customer acquisition process. 9. Social Listening Tools Now you know the benefits of social listening, I think it's about time that I told you all about some of the best social listening tools out there. 1. Brand24 What a shock, right? Now hear me out. Brand24 is one of the most robust and affordable social listening tools on the market. The tool covers a wide variety of resources, such as social media, review sites, blogs, and more. It collects real-time information and stores all mentions on a user-friendly dashboard, meaning all the information is right there in front of you. 2. Brandwatch Brandwatch is an enterprise-level social listening tool. It offers a wide range of functionalities, but it is one of the most expensive tools on the market. Brandwatch offers features such as geolocation and industry trends, as well as having recently updated its interface to one that is a lot more user-friendly. 3. TweetDeck As the name suggests, TweetDeck is dedicated solely to Twitter. The tool collects and analyzes social media trends from the platform, helping you manage your social media presence. 4. Buffer No social listening solutions listicle will be complete without Buffer. It is one of the best social media management tools on the market. With the help of this tool, you could easily schedule social media posts and engage with your audience. It also offers one inbox for all your social media messages. 5. Sprout Social Sprout Social is another social media management tool with a social listening twist. The tool collects brand mentions across major social media networks, making it the tool that you want if you wish to know about your social media users. 6. Keyhole Keyhole is a social listening and social media management tool which lets you track the performance of your accounts across various platforms. The tool collects mentions in real-time whilst offering social media analytics, letting you take a closer look at sentiment analysis, keyword clouds, and geographic data of your mentions. 7. Hootsuite Hootsuite is a social media monitoring tool which lets you track trends, topics, and social media profiles. That way, you can easily see what is going on in your industry niche and get to know your audience better. 8. Buzzsumo Buzzsumo is a tool dedicated to improving your social media marketing. It will discover top-performing mentions, find influencers, and monitor your pre-defined keywords. Interestingly, you can also create alerts and get notifications once a keyword that matters is used online. 9. HubSpot This is a go-to platform when it comes to social media management. The main aim of the HubSpot interface is to find the optimal way to grow your business using social networks. One of the strongest features of HubSpot is the ability to nurture leads. If your main aim is to grow your client base through social media, HubSpot offers some interesting solutions. There we go. We made it. I do hope this video has helped answer all your questions and queries in regards to social listening. If not, then just let me know in the comments below and be sure to subscribe for more Brand24 content. See you next time.