Social Listening: not magic, but strategy

Are you really listening to me? No, we’re not having a discussion as a couple and this is not the question that will condemn you to sleep on the sofa, but if you have a brand or you’re a marketer you should ask yourself this more often because your audience is already talking about you and your competitors. Even now, as you read these lines. This is Social Listening: it’s not magic, but strategy.

What is Social Listening?

Social Listening means listening to, monitoring and analyzing online conversations about a specific brand, sector or topic.

Imagine you’re Harry Potter in “The Prisoner of Azkaban”, you put on the Invisibility Cloak and you listen to Snape and Dumbledore talking about you and your most bitter “competitor” Voldemort. In marketing you can really do this without risking an Avada Kedavra.

It’s not just about reading the comments under your posts, but digging deeper to understand what people are really saying, even when they don’t tag you.

Angry tweets, two-star reviews, discussions on Reddit, TikTok going viral and niche forums: all this is a goldmine of information, if you know where to look.

Why should you definitely do Social Listening?

Social Listening is useful for better understanding your audience and obtaining strategic advantages that can really make a difference for your brand. We’ll give you at least five good reasons to start “eavesdropping” online:

1. Get to know your audience better: Social Listening allows you to find out what they really think of you. You can understand their opinions, emotions, and needs in real time.
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3. Uncover trends and opportunities: listening to conversations helps you recognize and intercept emerging trends or market opportunities.
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5. Beat your competitors at their own game: not only to find out what they think of you, but also to keep an eye on your competitors. By analyzing what is said about them, you can identify their weaknesses and areas where you can stand out.
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7. Improve your marketing strategies: analyzing conversations provides you with valuable insights to optimize your campaigns, choose the right messages and communication channels, and create content that truly responds to the interests of your audience and buyer personas.
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9. Build stronger relationships: interacting with your users in an authentic and timely manner allows you to strengthen your bond with them, showing that you listen to them and that you care about their opinions.

Social Listening vs. Social Monitoring

Social Listening and Social Monitoring, spoiler alert, are not the same thing.

Social Monitoring is the first step, it’s about monitoring mentions, comments, likes, shares and sentiments related to your brand in real time.

The aim is to respond in real time and manage communication with your audience. You receive a one-star review, you respond promptly (and politely, of course).

While monitoring deals with the symptoms, such as a single negative comment or an increase in mentions, listening reveals the root cause.

Social Listening is the next step; it’s not just about collecting data, but analyzing it to identify trends, improve marketing strategies (not just what is said, but why it is said) and optimize content.

Social Listening: step by step

Now that you know what we’re talking about, we’ll tell you how to follow a super effective Social Listening strategy.

Step one: Always define your objectives, before anything else.

You have to know what you’re looking for, otherwise you’ll never find it. Before you start, ask yourself these questions:

• Do I want to know what users think about my brand?
• Do I want to discover new market opportunities or collaboration opportunities?
• Do I want to understand what people are saying about my competitors online?

Second step: Find the keywords.

Establish the topics that you consider strategic and identify the keywords to study in order to have data to work with. Needless to say, we at SEOZoom can give you a hand with this.

Third step: Choose the tools.

There is some software that can help you collect data and organize it for you and we’ll talk about it in depth in the following paragraphs (but we can tell you now that, like Cartier jewelry, unfortunately it’s not free).

Social Listening tools you can use

Social Listening is based on the idea of collecting and analyzing information to improve your product, service or even your online reputation. For this purpose, there are powerful tools that, like Harry’s invisibility cloak, allow you to effectively monitor and catalog all relevant conversations.

And if you can do it for yourself, you can also do it for your competitors of course.

Here is our selection of the three best Social Listening tools:

1. HootSuite
2. With features such as “Insights”, which allows you to monitor your competitors’ activity through sentiment analysis, and “Streams”, which allows you to follow mentions, keywords and trending hashtags, HootSuite is ideal for those looking for an all-in-one platform to manage social media.
3. Brandwatch
4. If you’re looking for a complete social listening solution that can analyze data in depth, Brandwatch is the perfect choice.
5. Used by big brands like Unilever, Toyota and Nestlé, this tool offers advanced research on social networks and transforms billions of opinions into structured and useful information.
6. BuzzSumo
7. BuzzSumo is a tool dedicated to content marketing that, since 2014, has been helping companies discover trending content and successful topics. It’s perfect if you want to save time searching for ideas and topics that could generate engagement with your audience.

How different sectors have used Social Listening

Monitoring online conversations, understanding what consumers think and anticipating trends allows brands to create more effective campaigns and products that are more in line with the public’s desires. But how is it used in practice? Let’s look at some examples!

In the retail and e-commerce sector, Nike launched the “You Can’t Stop Us” campaign after analyzing online conversations following the pandemic period. In the healthcare and pharmaceutical sector, Pfizer used Social Listening to detect public skepticism about Covid-19 vaccines, allowing the company to customize educational campaigns to build trust.

And have you heard of Netflix? The king of Social Listening. By analyzing viewer discussions, it can predict which series and films will become hits, investing in the right productions and offering fans exactly what they want to see.

So now go and “eavesdrop” online

In a world where online conversations multiply every day, Social Listening is no longer an option, but a necessity.

Those who know how to listen to their audience not only ride the trends before others, but also manage to communicate in a more authentic and strategic way.

So, armed with the right tools, clarify your objectives and dive into data analysis with a pinch of cleverness and a good dose of strategy. This way you can create more effective campaigns, build a real connection with your audience and, why not, even predict the next viral trend before anyone else!