When we ask brands to listen to their customers and audiences, we totally mean it. We ourselves decided to listen to the most frequently asked questions about social listening. And here we are, putting together a guide to take you through the answers to some of the most frequently asked questions.
If you are here for the first time, we suggest you take a look at social listening – the concept before proceeding with the most frequently asked questions about social listening.
Social Listening FAQs
The number of questions we receive in relation to social listening explains why the tool is gaining ground. And with more and more advances in AI and language processing, the tool keeps evolving. Under the circumstances, many questions are bound to arise.
We have tried answering the most common questions around social listening. Apart from this, we also try to explain the different aspects of social listening in-depth in our other blog posts.
1. What is Social Listening?
Social media listening is a process that helps you monitor and measure your keywords and mentions. This is to help you better understand your target audience and industry. Social listening tools analyze every piece of relevant data from the global stream of online conversations. It analyzes qualitative mentions and derives insights like SOV, reach, sentiment, demographic and behavioral data, and more.
2. What is Social Media Monitoring?
Social monitoring includes searching for and gathering data from review boards, social media sites, and messenger forums. The tool monitors all mentions based on the keywords and keyword combinations.
3. What is the Difference between Social Listening and Social Media Monitoring?
The terms social listening and social media monitoring are often used interchangeably. And both the tools are similar to each other conceptually.
Social media monitoring allows you to track each mention and engage with your audiences on a day-to-day basis. It is focused on gathering the relevant data.
Social listening goes beyond accumulating data. It analyzes the data and presents actionable insights based on the data retrieved.
In a way, social media monitoring is like the pieces of a jigsaw puzzle while social listening is the picture that forms when you put the pieces together.
4. How does Social Listening Work?
Social listening works around ways to mine actual consumer views that are expressed online. The tool is an efficient way to gather relevant data without having to wait for weeks and months. Every mention is tracked in real-time.
The tool simply works by collecting data and then analyzing it. The data is collected from social networks via APIs. Hereby the tool sends out requests for all mentions pertaining to your keyword. The social media network sends back every relevant mention.
For other sources like blog and online news articles, the tool employs crawlers.
5. How to Use Social Listening?
Honestly, social listening is an all-in-one tool for most of your business needs. You can use the tool for everything ranging from:
- Market research
- Online brand reputation management
- Influencer marketing
- PR crisis management
- Lead generation
- Content Marketing
- Improved customer service
We have extensively discussed the various uses of social listening in our previous blog posts. Take a look at the detailed posts if you wish to know more.
6. How to Choose the Right Social Listening Tool?
With the growing popularity of social media, more and more social listening tools are available in the market. Generally, the tools come in two price ranges – middle tier and premium. To choose the right fit for you, we need to consider your brand’s needs first. Following that you can start matching the features of a given tool to your needs and goals.
When you are opting to invest in a social listening tool, you are most likely looking to improve your business performance. Hence it is important to find a tool that measures all the essential KPIs and cater to your specific needs. For instance, at GenY Labs, our tool is built to extract industry-specific data and create benchmarks and reports for you specifically.
In case you are wondering what else to look for in a social listening tool, here’s a guide that can help you understand these matters better.
7. Which are the Best Free Social Listening Tools?
The best free social media monitoring tools available are Google alerts and TweetDeck. A lot of social listening tools are available as free versions. However, the features in a free version come fairly limited. This is primarily owing to high development costs for the tool and the API, and deployment of servers to store the data et cetera. Taking all these into account, it is difficult, if not impossible, for anyone to publish an entirely free social listening tool.
However, you can always try out Auris’ free trial version and/or set up Google alerts.
All these are the most frequently asked questions about social listening we constantly keep hearing from our readers. Hopefully, we have been able to answer these questions to your satisfaction. There are a few more questions we answered pertaining to our own platform. If there are any more questions you still have, do reach out to us!