Social media has fundamentally changed the way businesses operate. Rather than rely on only traditional marketing channels, many companies now devote a significant amount of their time and budget to social listening. Social listening tools enable your business to monitor and track relevant topics, influencers, and fans relevant to your brand. This article explores how social listening tools work, how they analyze online conversations specific to a brand, and what information they monitor.
How they work
When you upload content to your social media account, like a status update or a tweet, it automatically uploads to a data source owned by the service. These tools analyze this information and create reports, analytics, and insights that can then be used to manage relevant content and campaigns. Here are ways in which these
- The social listening tool monitors conversations relevant to your brand
Each data source houses a host of relevant conversations about your brand. The data sourced can be broken into different categories, like keywords and hashtags. Social listening tools are sophisticated enough to monitor conversations relevant to your brand and monitor conversations about those tagged people to obtain valuable insights.
- They monitor all relevant conversations that are happening online
The social media landscape is constantly evolving, and it’s important to stay current with the latest trends and popular topics. For that reason, social listening tools monitor conversations that are happening online right now.
- They track brands, influencers, and fans on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, etc.
Most social media platforms keep data on their users called a “social graph. Using a social listening tool, you can track and analyze your brand’s leadership in a social network. Profiles of the brand, influencers, and fans are also uploaded to the data source and monitored.
- They monitor conversations happening on specific sites like YouTube, Pinterest, etc.
Most social media sites utilize content management systems that publish analytics about your posts. This gives you valuable information about how people engage with your posts or what parts of your post generate the most response.
- They monitor conversations that are tagged with specific keywords and hashtags
Social media users not only ‘Like’ and RT your posts, but they also comment on your posts with their opinions and insights. And by monitoring comments that are relevant to your brand, you’ll be able to gain valuable insights regarding customer perceptions about the brand.
As mentioned earlier, social listening tools monitor conversations regarding the people you mention in your post too. This is where influencers come into play.
What information do they monitor?
In most cases, social listening tools monitor metrics specific to your business. For example, a social listening tool may monitor the following.
- Number of followers and fan base on different platforms for each brand, influencer, and fan.
- Number of mentions per day on different platforms for each brand, influencer, or fan.
- Percent increase in followers or fans over a certain period.
- Number of retweets and mentions that are related to the brand, influencers, or fans over a certain period.
- Keywords used to refer to the brand, influencers, or fans on different platforms and the number of times they were used.
- How many people visited your website, and how often do they visit.
- Top keywords that were used on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, etc. to refer to each brand, influencer, or fan.
- Top influencers that were tagged in your posts and how many times they were tagged.
How they analyze online conversations specific to a brand
There are two ways these tools analyze online conversations relevant to a brand.
- Sentiment Analysis
Sentiment analysis uses natural language processing algorithms to identify emotions and feelings based on a person’s writing styles, syntax, and choice of words. This is how sentiment analysis works – These algorithms analyze the sentiment associated with your brand and make it available as a report or data visualization that can be used to manage your communications.
- Topic Analysis
Topic analysis is a way to identify and classify subjects and objects within the text. It’s a technique that aims to identify how ideas or concepts are based on various contextual cues in a piece of text. Topic analysis works by first identifying the basic topics in a group of documents and then analyzing these documents’ relationships. For example, let’s say you want to know what people are talking about when they mention your business? Keyword extraction can help you obtain valuable insights into your target audience.
