What is Social Listening?

Social listening is the monitoring of your brand's social media channels for any customer feedback and direct mentions of your brand or discussions regarding specific keywords, topics, competitors, or industries, followed by an analysis to gain insights and act on those opportunities. This is a kind of conversational research and it is an emerging trend in social media marketing.

It's being aware of what is being said about you. Social listening (or social media monitoring) is searching the public social web for mentions and conversations.

A typical starting place is keyword research to find the most relevant terms and hashtags to use in order to optimize your content. Setting up basic keyword alerts is a baby step in the process. Next, you might use that to locate and respond to relevant comments about your brand.

There are different social listening tools to help. They offer ways to track your competitors' performances and how their sentiments compare to yours.

You need real-time social monitoring to track down your brand mentions and group them under relevant factors using filters to narrow down the scope of information.

The filtering will make the data more granular - by geographical locations, by online channels (blog, social media, forums, etc.), positivity, recency, language, and by specific groups.

Not doing this process is the equivalent of not listening to your friend's and co-workers' comments about you. "I don't want to know what they think of me," is not really a good attitude for any organization