What is Social Listening?
You might be wondering, “What is social listening?” and thinking “Isn’t it just checking my notifications?” The answers: it’s a tool you need, and no it isn’t.
Social listening is a useful social media tool that allows us to keep our finger on the pulse of online conversations that are relevant to us and our clients. By using social listening, we can see how people are talking about a brand or topic on social media, creating a holistic view of user’s opinions, which helps to inform future content and marketing decisions.
How is Social Listening Different from Social Monitoring?
Social listening can easily be confused for social monitoring, and while the two work well together, they provide different insights.
Social monitoring is used to count mentions of your brand on social media for the purpose of gathering data analytics and directly responding to comments. This is a great tool if you want to know how many users are interacting with your brand on social media.
Social listening allows us to dig a bit deeper into these conversations, analyzing how users in certain locations and demographics are feeling and talking about a brand online. This is known as ’social sentiment’ and helps a brand understand why users are talking about them online, as opposed to how many times they’re mentioned.
How data and storytelling came together:
We manage the reporting and paid media accounts for a regional fertility clinic, and as part of that, we include social listening. During our monthly reporting meeting, we mentioned that we were seeing an increase in online conversations around PCOS (polycystic ovarian syndrome), and recommended joining the conversation as an industry expert in infertility treatments. When we proposed the idea, our client immediately perked up at the opportunity, as they had seen an increase in diagnosis around PCOS with more people becoming sedentary during the pandemic.
This was a great example of how our teams were able to come together to provide a great piece of content, and help position our client as thought leaders in larger social conversations.
