Social listening: what it is and why you should listen to the network

What social listening is and what role it plays, an indispensable process for every company.

As you inquire about market research and online reputation, you may have heard about social listening as one of the key processes for your business.

When I mention this to my clients, their first reaction is pure puzzlement. They don’t even let me finish talking and start overwhelming me with questions about what exactly they can listen to, how, what they need it for, and so on.

So, if a number of doubts are swirling in your head about this mysterious network listening, don’t worry: it’s normal!

Through reading this in-depth study you will find all the answers you are looking for!

What does it mean to listen to the network?

“Network listening,” “social listening,” “web listening,” “social monitoring,” and you name it-we hear all kinds of things about it now.

But what exactly is this social listening? The net is quintessentially silent, so what is it that is heard?

Social listening means tapping everything that is posted online about any topic, brand, or even a single person (think politicians or an influencer).

It can be a few hundred posts and reviews, or it can be millions of conversations: in either case the goal is to find out what people think about a certain topic or product, to find the information you need most.

Read also: Covid-19: wealth growth of the richest men translated into numbers

What is the purpose of social listening?

It depends. It depends on what your goal is and what you need to find out.

In general, listening to the network serves you to gather much information about people’s opinions in a short time and with little effort.

Think of it as a kind of 4.0 survey: instead of setting up interviews and phoning people, you can collect everything consumers have already shared on the topic in seconds.

At CMI, we use network listening in almost all of our surveys:

• in brand reputation surveys, it is the main method of intercepting who is talking about you;
• In market research , allows us to understand what customers are interested in;
• In trend surveys. , helps us find out which topics are increasing in relevance and why.

The Web is a huge database, growing in size every second: thanks to social listening we have a way to find the information you need most.

Three goals of network listening are, for example:

• Monitoring reputation
  People talk about products, companies and brands all the time. Find out how we can help you take control of your brand reputation. 
• Getting to know customers better
  By listening to what they are interested in and talking about, you can finally get inside your customers’ heads and figure out how to break through to their hearts. 
• Discovering market trends
  If people are talking about it more, it means it is becoming more and more relevant! By listening you can find out how your market is changing.

In jargon, this visibility is called “earned”(earned media in English), because it is the end result of everything you are doing.

The better your marketing, the more people, blogs and newspapers will be led to spontaneously talk about you (in positive terms, that is).

Let us clarify a little more about the concept of “earned media,” which is very important for understanding the principle behind network listening.

Earned media: an excellent aid to your brand’s online presence.

Earned media represent all content about your company that has been spontaneously posted by someone else, so people talking about you, reviews and articles mentioning you, influential people using your products, satisfied customers posting photos with your products, and so on.

All of them help you amplify your online presence even more.

As you can see, earned media is the most relevant percentage and the one that can grow the most over time if you manage it right.

Plus they have another advantage: they are “free,” because you don’t have to spend to increase them!

But you need to make sure that you can measure, monitor and manage them, watch over them to see if they become negative in any way, and interact to nurture the interest of your audience.

Otherwise, in addition to taking great risks, you will miss the opportunity to understand what is in people’s heads when they talk about you.

“But what happens if few people talk about me online? I will probably have no earned media and there will be no information!”

Good objection! If your brand is small or not very visible to the public, it can happen that your earned media is close to zero.

In that case, already finding out this information is an important feedback, don’t you think? Maybe you think you are visible and in reality you are not and your marketing campaigns fail to grow your visibility.

However, if you don’t have visibility today, it doesn’t mean you can’t gather any useful information about your customers’ perceptions or your market, quite the contrary!

It will simply be even more important for you to have the second type of conversations, that is, those in which you are not mentioned directly but in which people talk about everything about you.

How is the network’s listening activity carried out?

I imagine that at this point you have a number of questions in your mind, including one very specific one:

“But do I really have to read hundreds of articles, posts and conversations to listen!?”

A more than legitimate doubt!

Around network listening, in fact, there is really a lot of confusion because the tools and possibilities change every day .

Those who do not deal with this from morning to night often do not have the opportunity to know what is possible to hear and what is not.

In addition, one of the biggest biases that turns companies away from listening to the network is the fear of having to waste an enormous amount of time reading all the conversations collected.

“Where will I ever find the time to read all these articles, conversations, etc.? I’m overworked as it is….”

I have heard this question asked several times!

Fortunately, listening to the net does not mean having to scan the Internet daily, read tons of texts, or even having to hire a team of interns to do it for you.

Listening to the network professionally is not something you do manually, searching Google or individual social networks and collecting all the results in an Excel spreadsheet.

This is how it was done in the past, when there were still no other ways to explore network content quickly and fully.

Today, however, we have tools, online software, that do all the dirty work for us.

These tools monitor the entire web all the time, even while you sleep, and collect and catalog all the content on the topics you are interested in.

As I said earlier, you don’t have to be forced to read all these texts: the software also takes care to translate all intercepted conversations into useful information to help you make marketing and business decisions.

Magnificent, don’t you think?

Now let’s see what this information is and how it can help you learn more about what is going on around you!

Read also: Exploratory market research: web listening to benefit your business

What can be listened to? Is it legal?

I guess you’ve been asking yourself these two questions for a while now. At this time, when we are constantly talking about GDPR and data legality, it would be strange not to wonder.

The good news is that yes, it is very legal. We listen to what people publish, precisely, PUBLICLY.

Where. On social networks such as Twitter, Facebook (with limitations), Instagram, Youtube, VKontakte and so on. We intercept articles on blogs and news sites, and posts on forums. We can also intercept reviews on sites such as TripAdvisor, Amazon and Google Review.

In short, almost everything that is public online can be heard in some way.

Here’s what we can find out specifically with social listening

Listening to the network allows you to answer many questions, which without social listening would remain almost entirely unanswered:

• How many people are talking about my company without my knowledge?
• Do they talk more about me or my competitors? Am I more popular or not?
• How has the popularity of my brand increased or changed in general?
• How has the popularity of my industry changed?
• In what online channels is my company talked about?
• Who are the people who talk about me, where are they, what age are they?
• Who is happy and who is dissatisfied?
• Which are the most influential people who have the power to change consumer opinions?
• Which influencers and bloggers should I contact?
• What issues do people talk about regarding my products?
• What do they like and what do they dislike?
• Which hashtags are the most used (and have positive sentiment)?

This is just to give you a taste, because depending on the things you want to find out, you can use network listening in thousands of ways!

Many people mistakenly think that it is an activity useful only for marketing. In fact, they associate getting to know their audience better with campaign creation activities and finding bloggers, influencers, and media outlets to contact for public relations activities.

Certainly this information helps to better plan marketing activities, but not only that!

Listening to the network is critical for your business because it helps you see clearly what is happening around you and take charge, guiding your most important business decisions.

How we listen to the network

You can listen to the Web in two ways: looking into the past, for intercepting conversations back in time, or in real time, to find out what people are talking about right now.

• We choose the sources
  We listen to major social networks (Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, GooglePlus, Youtube), then forums, blogs and news sites.
• We collect mentions
  We remove the noise from online conversations to skim only those that talk about your brand and your competitors.
• Let’s check the Sentiment
  Are the mentions positive or negative? With the help of semantic analysis software, we identify the sentiment of mentions.
• We find answers
  From the analysis, we answer questions such as: what topics are most frequently talked about? Who are the influencers? Where is this discussed?

Listening with the right tools

Every self-respecting secret agent walks around with an arsenal of tools to complete his or her investigations.

At CMI we have tested hundreds of different software and know which ones to take advantage of depending on the channel you need to listen to.

We can listen all over the world and in all languages, even tapping into eastern social media.

Thanks to our partners’ software, we monitor h24 who mentions your company and industry, so you can sleep soundly.

Listening to the network helps you keep an eye on the competition and make more informed decisions. It helps you remove the blindfold we have always been forced to have and allows us to finally see clearly around us.

If you want to start listening to the network, contact us and talk to one of our Social Listening Experts!