Want to know why social media listening should absolutely, 100% be part of your marketing plans right now?

Well, let me give you an example. Imagine you own a bookshop. One day, you overhear two customers chatting.

The first says: “I love this place!”

“Me too,” says the other. “I just wish they sold food and drink, too – I’d spend all my time here!”

So you start selling coffee and brownies. Soon, people are queuing out the door to buy a book, a hot drink, and a snack. Business is booming!

Social media listening is the same as this but on a massive scale. It lets you discover, learn from, and get involved in online conversations about your brand on whichever platform they use. That’s vital intelligence you just can’t afford to overlook.

What Exactly is Social Media Listening (& Why Should I Care)?

Social listening involves tracking words and phrases across social platforms and websites and then analyzing and learning from the results.

The word “social” can be misleading because social listening is not limited to platforms like Facebook and LinkedIn. It can cover the whole web, often focusing on sites like blogs and forums alongside social media.

As you can imagine, monitoring the entire internet is a challenging task. About 34 million videos are uploaded to TikTok daily — not to mention all the activity on every other social platform and website. Fortunately, there are a bunch of social listening tools designed to handle all the heavy lifting – more on them later.

Having found where those conversations are happening and what’s being said, marketers use social listening to make smarter decisions. Specifically, according to research from the Social Intelligence Lab, they use it for:

  • Trend detection (cited by 36% of respondents)
  • Brand monitoring (24%)
  • Campaign analysis (18%)
  • Competitive benchmarking (18%)

However, plenty of other use cases exist, from improving customer support to understanding how different content types perform.

6 Examples of Social Media Listening in Action

That’s all the theory out of the way. Let’s look at how brands use social media listening to improve their marketing strategies. Here are three practical examples of social listening in the wild:

1. KAYAK Digs Into Travel Etiquette

In combination with their creative agency Supernatural, travel search engine KAYAK wanted to launch a marketing campaign discussing what people do (and don’t) think is acceptable behavior when taking a flight.

The campaign — titled Airplane Mode — involved asking consumers what they think about controversial travel behaviors, aiming to re-build travel rules in the wake of the pandemic.

To do this, they first had to understand those controversial behaviors. Social listening allowed them to identify these issues, which included:

  • Taking off your shoes on a flight
  • Reclining your seat
  • Doing yoga in the aisle
  • Climbing over other passengers
  • Clapping when the plane lands

All they had to do was carry out a survey to gauge travelers’ reactions.

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Bianca Chaer, Communications Strategist at Supernatural, explained: “We wanted to give people the opportunity to weigh in and get a read on the topics we’d identified because often the comments were open-ended, pointing out behaviors and not necessarily declaring their opinion one way or another.”

2. Crypto Platform Protects Brand Reputation

Cryptocurrency platform Cryptiony uses social listening as a key element of its reputation management strategy.

The brand attracts a high volume of online conversation, especially from customers on X/Twitter. Keeping up with all those discussions manually would be near impossible, so they invested in a social listening tool instead.

Now, they can easily track brand mentions across multiple platforms, analyze the conversations, and respond as necessary, helping them put out fires before they grow into serious, reputation-damaging issues.

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But that’s not all.

Cryptiony also uses social listening to monitor keywords relevant to its brand and industry, such as “cryptocurrency tax.”

That way, they can quickly identify media outlets discussing those topics and contact them about potential collaborations.

3. McDonald’s Joins Trending Conversation

Remember the limited-edition Grimace shake at McDonald’s?

It was such a big deal we included it in our roundup of 2023’s biggest social media moments.

Thanks to the power of social listening, McDonald’s knew early on that they’d created a viral sensation. It was so viral that the hashtag #grimaceshake was used in almost 150,000 posts on TikTok alone.

Having spotted this opportunity, it was simple for the fast food giant to get involved in the online conversation by riffing on the meme:

 

View this post on Instagram

 

A post shared by McDonald’s (@mcdonalds)

Which, in turn, helped them generate millions of impressions and hundreds of thousands of engagements.

Not bad for a novelty milkshake, huh?

4. Sapporo Beer Monitors Customer Perceptions

Sapporo, one of Japan’s biggest beer brands, has two main use cases for social media listening:

  • Understanding what people think about its products (including new releases) and why they bought them
  • Monitoring the performance of rival product launches

For instance, when the brand launches a new product, it listens to customer feedback the week before and after the launch date and shares key insights with the relevant brand managers.

“We regularly communicate the importance of [social media platforms] and what we can learn from them,” explained Yosuke Asai of Sapporo Beer. “The ultimate goal is for each brand manager to understand the importance of SNS and to be able to conduct social listening on their own.”

5. Samsung Captures Viral Moments

Samsung uses social listening for various purposes, from measuring campaign performance to predicting potential crises before they erupt.

However, one of the most eye-catching applications is to trawl social media for trending topics to exploit for their own marketing campaigns.

For example, Samsung noticed that the fun little jingle its washing machines and dryers play at the end of their cycle was going viral on TikTok (for some reason). People were singing and dancing over the jazzy little number — so the brand decided to jump on the trend:

@samsung You can always rely on a Samsung Washing Machine to provide the tunes. #SamsungSong #SamsungWashingMachine #SamsungWashingMachineSong #Remix #Laundry ♬ SamsungSong – Samsung

“The social data helps us determine if we’ve stumbled across a trend that has a presence online and is already engaging online communities,” explained Prash Mistry, Social & Digital Insights Lead at Samsung. “We then think about opportunities to scale the content, while it’s relevant, and build into a content workstream to entertain our audiences.”

6. Chicago Bulls Taps Into Audience Sentiment

Keeping up with what people say about you is challenging when you’re a globally recognized brand with a huge audience across multiple social platforms.

That’s why the Chicago Bulls use social listening to better understand audience sentiment around relevant topics and identify emerging trends in social conversations among fans.

This allows the Bulls’ marketing team to get a top-level view of opinions and attitudes toward different subjects and then get more granular by seeing how those attitudes change among different demographics and locations.

This approach often allows them to tap into conversations more authentically — even when those discussions aren’t specifically targeted at the Bulls.

“It’s [about] finding those conversations that might not be directed to us but are about us, and then I can go in and just kind of inject myself and say, ‘Here are the Chicago Bulls,’” explained Samantha Brown, the Bulls’ Social Media Coordinator.

“It allows us to find ways to join those conversations in a natural way, not just push ourselves into something we’re not supposed to be a part of.”

8 Tips to Get the Most Value from Social Listening

Are you keen to start leveraging the benefits of social media listening? Here’s how to do it.

1. Monitor the Right Keywords & Topics

Any social listening strategy is only as effective as the keywords you track. If you’re an enterprise SaaS company exclusively tracking phrases about interior design, chances are you won’t learn anything useful.

So, what exactly should you be following? Here are some key examples of phrases and topics to consider (not forgetting to track common misspellings, too):

  • Your brand name
  • Your product name
  • Your slogan
  • Your campaign hashtags
  • All of the above, but for your competitors
  • Industry-specific terminology and hashtags
  • Geographic terms related to the places your audience lives or works

2. Measure Key Social Listening Metrics

You’re monitoring the right keywords. That’s a good start, but there’s more to social listening than just the “listening” element – you also need to draw meaning from the conversations you’re monitoring. That involves tracking key metrics like:

  • Sentiment: On balance, are the conversations you track more positive, negative, or neutral?
  • Influencers: Who are the most prominent accounts or authors talking about you? What are they saying?
  • Popularity: How frequently are the terms you track being discussed?
  • Engagement: Which topics or keywords you track generate the most likes, replies, and shares?

3. Choose the Right Social Listening Tools

As we mentioned earlier in the article, you need the right tools to do social listening effectively. Without them, you can really only focus on a tiny proportion of conversations happening online, which could give you a skewed impression of the terms and topics you’re tracking.

Fortunately, there are tons of effective social listening tools on the market. Here are three of our favorites:

  • Awario: An affordable social listening tool incorporating Boolean logic operations to weed out unnecessary or irrelevant mentions.
  • Brandwatch: At the upper end of the market, Brandwatch is an enterprise-grade tool that does all the basics and offers advanced features like image analysis to find pictures containing your brand’s logo.
  • Sprout Social: Somewhere between those two options is Sprout, an all-purpose social media management platform with social listening functionality, helping you identify knowledge gaps and monitor consumer sentiment toward your biggest rivals.

👉 Learn more: Get more recommendations in our guide: Top 28 Social Media Listening Tools for Your Best Audience Insights.

4. Cast the Net Wide

You might know your audience has one or two preferred platforms. But that doesn’t mean they exclusively use those platforms.

Conversations about your brand and topics that are relevant to you could be happening anywhere online. If you’re only paying attention to the big social sites while ignoring forums, you could be missing a ton of key insights. Moreover, you’re unlikely to get the complete picture because discussions on Facebook could differ from those on LinkedIn or X.

For that reason, it’s important to cast the net as wide as possible. That way, you’ll be able to build up the clearest overview of what’s really being said in your industry, making it easier for you to react and join in with the conversation.

5. Keep Tabs on the Competition

Sure, you don’t want to copy your rivals – you’re a unique brand with your own tone. However, you can still learn from what people say about them (and possibly also from how they react).

On the one hand, it’s helpful to understand what people love about your competitors; it’ll help differentiate your own brand.

Conversely, it’s beneficial to be on hand when they trip up! If they release a product update people don’t like, or introduce an unpopular new policy, or respond poorly to a customer service issue, you definitely want to know about it. At worst, it’ll help you avoid making the same mistake. At best, it might help you win a bunch of new customers.

6. Look Out for Customer Pain Points

Hopefully, you already understand the problems that would convince a potential customer to search for a solution like your product.

Maybe you’re a SaaS platform that helps customers save time and money. Perhaps you’re a government agency providing public safety information. Or maybe you’re an e-commerce brand that makes it easy for consumers to keep up with the latest fashion trends.

But pain points don’t stand still. Chances are, there are a bunch of reasons you’ve never even thought of that might persuade someone to buy from you.

Social media listening can help. While tracking brand mentions, keep an eye out for conversations related to audience problems so you can plug any gaps in your content and social media strategies.

7. Deliver Better Customer Experiences

Social media users generally aren’t shy about telling you what they really think about any given issue.

This can be tough for social media managers to deal with. But it can also give you valuable data to help you deliver stronger, more enjoyable customer experiences.

For example, suppose your social listening research tells you that a lot of customers complain about your high shipping costs. In that case, you can take action to turn those frowns upside down — such as introducing a slower, cheaper shipping option or running more free shipping promotions.

Not only will this mean you have a happier customer base, but it also provides many other benefits. Research from Khoros shows that when brands respond to social media complaints in a timely fashion, many customers will:

  • Become more receptive to the brand’s ads
  • Encourage friends and family to buy the brand’s products or services
  • Praise or recommend the brand on social media

This could help you attract a bunch of new customers.

8. Use Social Listening Insights to Step Up Your Marketing Strategy

This is the key point. What separates social media listening from simple monitoring is what you do next.

From a vanity perspective, seeing people praise your brand is always nice. But what really matters is leveraging insights into brand perception – and all the other metrics you’re tracking – to drive your future strategy.

For instance, maybe a new ad campaign has put you in front of a wider audience. What do these new customers think about you? Do they behave exactly like your existing audience and engage with the same content? If not, you might need to rethink your marketing plans.

To learn more about social media listening, marketing, and building an engaging online presence, check out one of our upcoming social media strategy conferences.

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