How to Conduct Social Listening Research to Refine Your Marketing Campaigns

Whether your brand is active on social media or not, you need to be doing social listening research.

There are two reasons for this. Firstly, social media is an effective way of understanding your target audience. In addition, it can uncover how people perceive your brand. Both are crucial to stand out in a competitive environment.

Do you want to supercharge your marketing effectiveness? Then, social listening will help you do that. In this article, we'll explore social listening. We'll also look at the steps you need to take to make it work for your business.

Understanding social listening

The proliferation of social platforms has created an information-rich environment. This is ideal, as marketers can glean deep insights into audience preferences and consumer sentiment.

Any effective social media strategy works in two directions:

1. You create and send out Facebook posts, Instagram reels, or TikTok videos through your brand's social media channels. This is your attempt to reach potential or current customers.
2. You track conversations mentioning your brand on social media. This helps you uncover customer feedback and pick up on broader market trends.

What are people talking about? How do they perceive your brand? What are their expectations? With social media listening, you can answer these questions and garner meaningful insights. In short, social listening research.

Then, you are ready to make strategic decisions based on real-world consumer research.

Negative comments can be very valuable, too. Implementing effective social listening strategies depends on leveraging advanced sentiment analysis. In turn, this helps you understand the customer experience and how to improve it.

With many social media sites and data sources, social monitoring can be challenging. That's why having a well-thought-out strategy in place is crucial. So, let's take a look at the core aspects of social listening research. We'll explore how to do it step by step.

Step-by-step guide to social listening research

To check consumer conversations on social media, you need a systematic approach. You can't track everything because the amount of data involved would be overwhelming. Instead, you have to focus. Here's how to go about unearthing valuable insights using social intelligence.

Set objectives for social listening

The first step is to decide upon your business goals. What are you trying to achieve by monitoring online conversations? Typical examples of areas that can benefit include:

• Customer service: Watch your brand name on various social media platforms. That way, you'll be ready to act when a customer complains about poor service. Remember, they won't always tag your brand name in full. So, make sure you're tracking the name and not just your tag. (Also, track common misspellings of your name to be on the safe side.)
  
• Competitor analysis: Select keywords relating to your key competitors and track them. Over time, this will help you build up a picture of their strategies. It also allows you to understand better how to reach a broader target audience.
  
• Lead generation: Determine keywords that people might use when searching for your product or service. You can track these to establish customer expectations and improve your offering to generate more leads.

Whatever objectives you set, enterprise resource planning (ERP) is key. This will help you align all your departments with your strategy. In turn, you'll be able to develop effective social media listening.

If you’re running a small business you might find use a tool such as Asana. This project management software should be enough to get you up and running to begin with.

However, if you want to really invest in the long-term growth of your business, you can use Sage ERP implementation software to centralize all your data. This gives everyone access to the information they need to respond to social data.

Choose the right tools

In 2023, around 75% of companies spent at least $50,000 on social tools. And as many as 39% spent over $100,000 (up from 33% in 2022).

Does that sound high? You may have underestimated the value of using the right social media listening tool. Indeed, most companies have several in their arsenal. The same survey found that a mere 16% of respondents rely on a single social listening tool, and 1.7% use more than ten!

It's not surprising when you think about it. After all, there's such a diversity of social media platforms, and many tools specialize in a few. That means you need to decide which platforms to focus on first. Doing so will enable you to select the proper social media monitoring tools for the job.

As well as the big names such as Facebook and Instagram, consider other kinds of sites such as:

• Product review sites
• Legacy media sites (particularly those that enable comments)
• Industry-specific blogs
• Consumer forums

Once you have a clear idea of which social channels you want to follow, research the available options, then choose tools that incorporate the features you'll need to gather the relevant data.

Collect relevant and accurate data

With the right tools in place, it becomes much easier to track social media discussions in real time. You can filter the content for specific keywords, topics, and hashtags.

These should always be relevant to your brand, industry, or target audience.

For instance, let's imagine you're aiming to gauge reactions to new products you've launched. In this case, you would include the product names in your list of keywords. But what if your main goal was to scope out the competitive landscape? You might want to track the names of some of your main competitors.

Analyze your social media data

Apply social media analytics techniques to the data to generate actionable insights. Specialized social listening tools collate the data and use sophisticated algorithms to check for patterns. In most modern software, AI enables this.

At a more granular level, you'll also be reviewing the data within the context of the KPIs you've set. Want to check your customer engagement? Average response rates? Audience sentiment? The data collected will tell you about the real-world performance of your social media strategy.

Apply insights to marketing campaigns

Gleaning audience insights from social listening is very useful. It gives you a rich harvest of information that you can use to fine-tune your marketing campaigns. Track customer interactions, including direct and indirect mentions of your brand. Doing so gives you a realistic assessment of where you are and what you need to do to improve.

For instance, understanding online customer behavior can help boost your marketing campaigns. Take something as simple as timings. Understanding what times of day your target audience is active on social media can drive your strategy. You could start scheduling posts at specific times to maximize their impact.

But you're not quite finished yet. Next, you need to measure the impact of your posts and broader campaigns.

Measure the impact

Measuring the effectiveness of your social listening research efforts is crucial. This will help you assess where your social media monitoring is working as intended. It'll also alert you to where there's room for improvement.

To begin, track social-specific data such as engagement on your social media accounts. Then, examine the effect your social listening campaign has on the bottom line. Not to mention big-picture metrics such as market share.

You can use financial data from your accounting software. Take this information and merge it with your social listening stats. This way, you'll get an overview of how the two relate to one another. Over time, this will illuminate how social listening boosts your business success.

Wrapping up

There’s a goldmine of data available to you on social media sites. There is so much, in fact, that the first step of social listening is narrowing your focus.

Start by establishing a few goals and define some KPIs. Then, you can build a clear social listening strategy. This will uncover everything you need to know about a range of things. From consumer behavior to customer journeys, from trends to competitors, you can discover a lot.

Most crucial of all, you have to make sure you have the right tools at hand. Modern social listening solutions are incredible. They can take a mountain of data and process it into digestible nuggets of wisdom. You can use these to adjust your strategy, making it even more effective. So listen to what that data is telling you — you’ll be glad you did.