What is Social Media Listening?

By Insight Platforms

• article

• Social Media Listening/Intelligence
• Social Media Sampling
• User Feedback

Times are changing, and so is the way we interact with online media. Social media used to be mainly to document our daily activities and connect with friends and family. However, where people are — business follows. Brands are working on how to use this surge to connect with consumers in the digital realm.

What Is Social Media Listening?

Social media listening is the practice of monitoring conversations on social media by tracking mentions of topics, brands, products, hashtags, images and keywords. It provides insights into customers’ opinions, preferences, and behaviors.

Why Leverage Social Media listening?

According to Statista, average internet users spend 2,5 hours per day in social media platforms like Facebook, X, TikTok, Instagram, LinkedIn, and Reddit. Statista also revealed that in 2024, over 5 billion people — more than half the world’s population — have access to social media, expecting to exceed 6 billion by 2028.

In short: with more consumers online, brands have new opportunities to connect and influence purchase decisions in the digital space.

The acquired insights from social media listening can be leveraged into better communication, product improvements, competition and reputation assessment, and many other activities to improve brands performance and response to consumers needs.

What Are The Key Objectives Of Social Media Listening?

• Understand Target Audience: identify and understand needs, pain points and preferences.
• Monitor & Manage Brand Presence and Reputation: track mentions of category, brand, products, or services to address feedback, complaints, and queries in real-time and understand sentiment.
• Identify Opportunities: gather consumer and category trends and imerging behaviours, identify and engage with influencers
• Engage with Customers: Identify opportunities to build relationships with consumers to increase loyalty
• Analyze Competition: Monitor competitors’ social media activities and customer feedback to understand their strategies, strengths, and weaknesses.
• Measure Performance: understand impact and ROI of social media efforts

In today’s oversaturated market, it’s all about which brands are agile, informed, and able to pivot and make informed marketing decisions, improving their products and services.

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Social Media Listening Metrics

There are countless metrics that offer insight into a brand’s presence and performance, the choice on what to track depends on the brand maturity stage, investment and actionability of the information.

Let’s take a look at the most important and actionable metrics for social media monitoring:

• Reach: number of people who have been exposed to specific content
• Impressions: number of times a specific content was displayed
• Audience Demographics: gender, age, location and interests based on the content they produce and interact with

These 3 metrics analyze brands’ owned media channels and can be influenced by adjusting media planning and investment.

They gauge insights on how far your message can get, who is being impacted and what kind of content is more likely to engage consumers.

Social Media Listening Meaninful Metrics

However it is important to track metrics of earned media too as they show what organically happens in the social media environment. Those are:

• Mentions: number of times a brand or keyword is mentioned accross platforms. It provides insights on awareness and visibility.
• Engagement: number of people interacting with brands through likes, comments and sharing content.
• Source: reflects number of brand mentions in each social media platform for each brand.
• Share of Voice: share of conversation compared to competitors. It includes both owned and earned media, so it is not totally influenced by brands.

They represent the sizes of buzz created by brands in comparison to competitors and the most important platforms. But to atribute correct meaning and drive action based on these interactions, it is important to understand the quality of what is being said.

Sentiment: evaluates the tone (positive, negative, or neutral) of the conversations surrounding your brand. It shows the nature of consumers’ perception, experiences and feelings towards brands.

For example, if a brand has the highest share of voice, it could be result of good presence but also of reputation issues or crisis. Without sentiment analysis, these metrics aren’t actionable.

Brands can also gather non directly related information from social media to feed their strategy:

• Trend Analysis: means identifying emerging topics and themes related to the industry
• Influencer Analysis: identifying key opinion leaders in the industry and their level of influence within the audience

Top Social Media Listening Tools

Social media listening tools and platforms can analyze large quantity of social media posts automatically, using natural language processing and machine learning algorithms.

These outputs help brands and professionals identifying patterns and trends in social media data.

Many companies provide different angles and outputs from social media monitoring. Here are some specific tools and the difference between them:

• YouScan: YouScan is a social intelligence platform that helps analyze customer behavior and preferences to improve their experience. Its capabilities include  AI for text analysis to assess opinions about brands and products, Insights Copilot, which uses ChatGPT to assist with data interpretation, and Visual Insights for image analysis, detecting brand logos and real-life usage in images. Additionally, YouScan provides audience insights based on demographics and interests and covers various social media channels such as X, Instagram, TikTok, Reddit, YouTube, LinkedIn, Google Business Reviews, Pinterest, Twitch Blogs, product review sites, and more.
• Brandwatch: Brandwatch offers AI-powered features like sentiment analysis, trend detection, and work clouds. In addition to social listening, it includes tools for social media management, such as a social inbox, content publishing, and social ads management.
• Meltwater: Offers coverage of online news, data, and other media sources, which serve as valuable additions to social media listening. The platform also includes tools for media relations, such as communicating with key journalists, and social media management tools like content scheduling, posting, community management, and moderation.
• Audiense: Audiense, as the name suggests, focuses on audience analytics capabilities. It allows you to segment social audiences by interests, develop data-driven personas, identify the right influencers to work with and understand niche audiences. Watch this webinar for CPG innovation application.

Notable Mentions:

Brand24 and Mention.com: While their capabilities are somewhat limited, in comparison to the above options, they are notably inexpensive and serve as a solid starting point for social media listening.

Social Media Listening Pros

Unlike traditional research methods social listening provides unfiltered opinions and spontaneous reactions, offering a more authentic view of consumer sentiment.

On top of that, it also:

• Is cost-effective
• Gather insights from many sources rapidly
• Enables analyzing large amount of data
• Provides real-time data
• Enables tapping into hard-to-reach populations
• Is digitally adept at analyzing visual content like images and videos

Social Media Listening Cons

Despite the benefits of social media listening, it comes with its own unique set of challenges and pain points:

Data Availability: If no one is talking about your brands or its category, there isn’t information or insights.

Data Context: Social media posts are often brief and lack detailed explanations, making it difficult to understand the full story behind a comment or mention without the full context.

Demographic Bias: Social media users do not represent the entire population. Therefore some demographics may be more active than others, skewing the results.

Sentiment Bias: Consumers use social networks to vent about brands when something goes wrong, as a form of protest. However, it often takes a super fantastic experience to gain a great comment. Pair it up with other sources to guarantee results are not misleading.

Data Quality: Social media data can be noisy and unstructured, making it essential to pre-process and clean the data before analysis. This involves filtering out irrelevant content, removing duplicates, and standardizing data formats.

Ethics and Privacy: Going through people’s social media networks raises important ethical concerns around privacy, informed consent, and anonymity.

Principles Researchers Should Keep in Mind

It is essential to handle information with care and safeguard users’ privacy to maintain trust and study legitimacy:

• Ensure personal data protection from unauthorized access and used only for research purposes.
• Keep users’ personal data separate from their online activities to ensure their identities remain confidential throughout the research.
• Adhere to all relevant laws and regulations regarding data collection, usage, and storage to ensure compliance and ethical standards.
• Avoid bias and conduct research impartially to ensure that collected data accurately represents all relevant groups and demographics.

How to Get the Most Out of Social Media Listening

It involves upfront planning and attention to detail.

When in doubt, follow these steps to ensure your social media listening efforts are both effective and insightful:

• Document reasons why and the expectations from it
• Understand availability of data for your category and brands
• Define specific data you need and what metrics will provide them
• Use this information to define data collection and analysis method
• Evaluate current keywords’ performance and determine which ones you want to influence with your brand strategy – bare in mind that category definition keywords might not differentiate brands and could lead to a failed strategy
• Monitor keywords, topics and brands in text and visual content, to capture a complete view of their meaning.
• Don’t forget to factor in seasonal trends and current events, as these can influence what people are talking about online.
• Pick the platforms that best fit your research needs and make sure to clean and organize your data to keep it accurate.
• Don’t be afraid to revise metrics and keywords a few times during first months of set up, to ensure the metrics are fit to your purpose.
• Present your findings in a clear and engaging way, using visuals and context to make the insights easy to understand and act on.

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