Social Listening
What is Social Listening?
“Social listening is the process of tracking conversations around specific topics, keywords, phrases, brands or industries, and leveraging your insights to discover opportunities or create content for those audiences. It’s more than watching @mentions and comments pour in via your social profiles, mobile apps or blogs. If you’re only paying attention to notifications, you’re missing a huge group of people that are talking about you, your brand and your product.”
https://sproutsocial.com/insights/social-listening/
Why should you use social listening?
Social listening can give you valuable insights.
Valuable insights about your brand and customers to help you speak to and serve your target audience better
Social Listening can also be used for research purposes. Research can help you understand the interests of your target audience and will tell you what they are talking about and help give you a direction for your social media strategy.
Social listening can help you to you identify the topics your audience cares so that you can be more targeted with your content creation and an analytics tool can help you see which hashtags, topics or keywords people use when speaking about your brand.
You need to be doing than just reacting to mentions and comments. You need to be proactively engaging, researching and testing/experimenting.
Twitter Lists and Hashtags can be simple tools for listening, but there are also more sophisticated/professional third-party tools that can be used for social listening (and social monitoring).
