What Is Social Listening And How Can It Help Your Video Marketing?
Having a solid social media strategy is non-negotiable for the success of your brand. Social media platforms provide an excellent way to communicate with your existing customers and attract new ones. But to create quality content for these platforms, you need to know what everyone is saying about your brand.
That’s where social listening becomes useful. It can also help you achieve your video marketing goals. Here’s everything you need to know:
What is social listening?
Social listening is exactly what it sounds like — it tracks your business’s social media performance, gathers all mentions and conversations related to your brand, then analyzes it for stronger insights. This information can be tracked from social media posts, blog posts, and all comments about your brand, or that are relevant to your brand.
Social listening allows your brand to develop a better understanding of your target audience and what kind of content they prefer.
This of it as you now have access to individual conversations about your brand and the market you operate in, to learn more about what your audience thinks about you as well as your competitors.
Social listening vs social monitoring
If you’re unfamiliar with social listening, it might seem like social media monitoring. But the two concepts are quite different. Let’s take a look.
Social media monitoring is the process of collecting data points such as brand mentions, competitor mentions, industry trends, and hashtags. But unlike traditional social media monitoring that involves following conversations with the audience at a micro-level, social listening allows you to listen in at a macro level to gauge the ‘online mood’.
To put it simply, social media monitoring focuses on the ‘what’, while social listening throws light on the ‘why’. Social monitoring records what has already happened, while social listening looks forward and backward.
Let’s say your brand is called Healthy Breakfasts Inc, and you want to find out what everyone is saying about your brand. With social media monitoring, you can track key phrases and terms that are important for your brand. Say you are hosting a pop-up at a mall called Healthy Breakfasts Here. Every user who visits the pop-up and talks about this event will form part of the social media monitoring data for your brand.
But when you want to dig deeper into why and how these conversations are happening, and what people think even if they don’t mention your brand specifically, you can use social listening.
This can make conversations such as ‘I really need some healthy breakfast options under 10 mins’ or ‘I don’t think I want to spend more than 30 bucks on healthy breakfast options’ provide some critical data to improve your strategy, campaigns, and messaging.
Social listening can also help you to discover potential opportunities to reach out to prospects without sounding too salesy. You can introduce your brand, showcase your expertise, develop a rapport, and gradually convert prospects. This is exactly what Hootsuite, a social media management platform, tries to do:
How can social listening help your business?
If your business doesn’t have a social listening strategy in place, you’re missing valuable data.
1. Understand your audience
Social listening gives you access to incredible insights to understand your target audience, their content preferences, the brands they follow, and their expectations from different brands. If your brand cares about your customers, you will care about your social listening insights. This data can enable your business to deliver exactly what the audience is asking for.
2. Turn customer insights into promotional videos
Social listening can help you boost your video marketing strategy and analyze the impact your videos create beyond the traditional metrics for measuring engagement. Let’s say your band is receiving positive feedback on a new product that you have recently launched. In that case, you can convert the feedback into a testimonial video and use it to promote your product.
3. Competitor intelligence
Social listening isn’t just about what real people are saying about your brand. It can give you valuable insights into what your customers are saying about your competitors and general industry too. Knowing this information in real-time gives you an insight into where your brand fits in the marketplace. The conversations you find might just reveal a gap in the market that you can fulfill.
4. Avoid crises before they happen
As social listening tracks sentiment in real-time, it can inform you when a significant change in people’s opinions and moods is happening on social media. Think of it like an early alert or warning sign on changes in how your brand is being perceived on the internet. This can also work with insights into if your brand is receiving more engagement than usual. Social listening will give you the reasons behind it.
5. Exclusive customer insights
You can even use social listening to assess your audience’s reaction to the different types of videos you post on your social media accounts. There are different analytics tools available in the market that can help you understand whether the audience watched the entire video or skipped parts of it. It can even help you find out what parts were interesting for your audience so that you can publish more such videos in the future.
Active social listening can provide you insights into shaping your video marketing strategy for each stage of your sales funnel. For instance, if your prospect is still in the consideration stage, you can use social listening tools to discover what they’re saying about your existing brand videos meant for first-time visitors. You can use the information to address their concerns and create new videos to fill in the gaps. And an easy online video editor can help make your videos look polished before you hit the publish button.
Use social listening to know more about the pain and passion points of your audience
To sum up, social listening is a powerful tool you can leverage to establish brand authority and nurture a deeper relationship with your audience. It can also help you shape your video marketing strategy more effectively. You can develop several video content ideas to fill up your content calendar by studying your social media engagement metrics.
So, make sure to implement it and use the right tools to find out what your audience really wants.
