What is Social Listening?

According to Wikipedia, “Social Listening is the way to measure success of social media marketing strategies used by a company or brand.”

We feel social listening is indeed this and it is so much more than just analytics. In fact, we’ve found that Social Listening is the most important tool in our social media tool kit. In our view, Social Listening has the capacity to make or break your online media presence – so that’s kind of a big deal…right?

Why is Social Listening so important?

Well, first of all, social media is just that…it’s social.

Let’s say you were at a social gathering with your friends. If you stood up and just started speaking about yourself and everything you were doing and all that you accomplished and so on and so on, eventually your friends would tune out.  

It’s the same with social media.

Social media marketing is a two way form of online communication between you (the company) and your online community (your followers).

And social “listening” is one of the main opportunities to “hear” what your followers are “talking” about. We feel social listening involves much more than just our online communities, however. It involves the entire social media bubble – And that bubble contains various aspects of online feelings and moods that center around current events.

Social Listening, is also knowing what’s happening in the world before you post to your social networking platforms. Social Listening is also understanding your audience and what they engage with.

You can measure engagement rates through analytics from your platform’s insight pages but we’ll talk more about that at another time.

Social Listening also includes replying to comments in a timely manner, taking notes to reflect on talking points that could be addressed more efficiently in the future.

We’ve learned that Social Listening is much more complex than just analyzing data – It’s a holistic, dynamic and ever-changing aspect of social media marketing.