Social Listening Guide: 8 Ways Companies Can Use Social Data - Business 2 Community

Social listening is a weird discipline.

It’s so versatile that it can be tricky to define – or even narrow down to a brief list of benefits or use cases. One could say, social media monitoring lets you manage brand reputation; and while it’s true, reputation management is just one of the many ways to use social listening (and, arguably, not the main one).

With equal justice, one could say, social listening lets you find potential customers – not just the ones who go “hey, I’m looking for a home insurance company in New York City”, but also the ones who go “hey, I’m about to move to NYC”, if you’re willing to go there.

In this social listening guide, I tried to put together a somewhat comprehensive list of the benefits of social media listening. I’m also going to try and break down every use case into easy-to-follow steps and give you a way to measure performance. But before we start, let’s address the tricky question: what is social listening, exactly?

(An attempt at) defining social listening

Social listening is the process of using a tool to monitor online conversations for mentions of a keyword (such as a brand name) or a complex search expression across social media and the web at large.

The process also includes pulling analytics on the data to give users insights into:

• the volume of conversations around their keywords,
• the reach of these conversations,
• public sentiment towards the subject matter,
• key themes within the mentions,
• geography and demographics of people...

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