What is Social Media Listening and Why is It Important?

Ever heard of social media listening? We live in a digital era, where social media platforms are part of our daily to-go sites. People use social media platforms to connect with friends, catch up with news and entertainment, check out their favorite brands, follow them, or participate in live conversations. Brands also create social media accounts on social media platforms to create awareness of their brand, engage customers, provide customer support, generate leads and educate customers.

With that being said, conversations are shifting online. Enters social listening. People talk about brands online and engage with brands online. Therefore, as a brand, you should listen online to what your customers say about you.

What is Social Listening?

Hubspot defines social listening as monitoring 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.

Through social listening, you will gain insights about your brand, engage with customers or your brand ambassadors in time. You will also tweak your content strategy to meet the current trends and needs.

How to Do Social Media Listening

To conduct social listening, you need a social listening tool such as Brand Moran. Brand Moran is a  social listening and media monitoring tool tailored for Kenyan and African brands.

It allows you to monitor your brand on social media channels, local dailies and blogs using keywords and hashtags. Brand Moran enables you to get real-time alerts via SMS or email when your brand is mentioned online.

You can view the mentions, get sentiments analysis, and export data to CSV for more analysis.

Read our previous report: International Women’s Day 2021 #ChoosetoChallenge Campaign Engagement in Kenya

What Are the Benefits of Social Listening?

Here is why social listening matters today!

• Allows Brands to Engage with Customers Promptly

To begin with, through social listening, you will be able to engage with customers who talk about your brand online. It could be followers who have tagged your brand, those raising concerns about your brand, or those asking your brand questions.  Customers and followers love when brands respond or share their posts. Here is a good example.

Hi. Please provide account number and contact details for assistance.
Answered by: DO

— Kenya Power (@KenyaPower_Care) January 6, 2021

•  Helps Brands Manage Crisis on Time

Unless you live under a rock, you must have seen Kenyans go to Twitter and complain about a brand or even create a negative hashtag and make a brand trend. This is usually a crisis for brands. Social listening helps brands deal with PR disasters before the damage is too big.

Since you never know when a bad sentiment about your brands will occur, it is important to have a social media listening tool that tracks your brand’s mentions or keywords.  In some cases, you might post a tweet and the sentiments of the replies might be negative. At this point, you can use social media listening tool to check the sentiments of the tweet. You can act by apologizing and even deleting the post.

•   Track Competitors Actions Online

With the social media listening tool, you will get competitive insights into your competitors’ online. You will get information on how they respond online, benchmark volume of conversations, how frequently they do marketing campaigns, the products they are launching, sites they post press releases, etc. This information will give you insight and allow you to improve your strategy.

• Identify Influencers and Advocates

Brand advocates are the people who are talking positively about your brands, while influencers are people with a significant influence on following on social media. It is easier to identify your brand’s right influencers and brand advocates on different platforms with a social media listening tool.

Have a look at this tweet by media personality Ciru Muriuki. She endorsed Baobab Beach Resort and Spa and she states clearly that it is not a sponsored post.  With a social media listening tool, Baobab Beach resort and spa could have identified her as their brand advocate.

I do not say this lightly. This is one of my favourite places in the world. https://t.co/pf1dM1UYD2

— Wanjiru Muriuki🇰🇪 (@CiruMuriuki) October 7, 2019

•    You Can Discover New Opportunities

By listening and monitoring what your customers say online, you might discover new opportunities. For instance, in this tweet, a user suggests that Kenya Wildlife Service has proper lodges and an affordable air shuttle service from Wilson to Kora National Park.

The fact that KWS isn’t the one that builds roads is the reason I had a seemingly elitist recommendation. Wish they could do this for the reserves untouchable by private sector.
Kora, Bisanadi, Rahole, Arawale, South Kitui, Dodori & Tana River Primate https://t.co/c7WRYGJ6JY

— Airbender The Wicked Skengman (@kinjeketile) July 18, 2020

Bottom Line

As you can see,  social media listening and web monitoring should be part of your digital marketing strategies and customer service strategies. Without social listening, you will be missing a lot about the conversations about your brand online. Your reputation can be damaged without you knowing.

Contact Brand Moran to get a demo of the social media listening and monitoring tool to look at what is happening around your brand and your competitors.

Email: info@brandmoran.com to book for a demo and follow us on LinkedIn, Instagram, Twitter and Facebook