Social Listening - 2019 and Beyond

The world of social media is vast, reaching far beyond the immediate pages and feeds run by your company’s marketing team. While social monitoring—the act of tracking and responding to incoming mentions, likes, and shares—has been steadily used by most companies looking to optimise their promotional efforts, social listening is the newest strategy that is poised to play a huge role in the success of your business’ social media campaigns throughout 2019. This article is going to take a closer look at the increasingly popular practice so that you have a much better idea of why you should be adding the useful technique to your arsenal.

Monitoring and Listening—What’s the Difference?

The fundamental difference between social monitoring and social listening is the greater scope of analysis carried out by the latter approach. Social listening goes beyond your company’s immediate feed and extends its research to the broader conversations occurring between users across popular social media channels. To put it in even simpler terms, social media monitoring assesses user engagement and marketing performance on a micro scale, while social media listening extends this to the macro scale.

Appealing Content for Increased Engagement

With users perpetually connected to one another through their laptops and smartphones, the world of social media is ever-evolving, leading to trends that are born and popularised at lightning speed. The act of social listening allows businesses to track these trends and discussions in order to stay on top of what is poised to explode in popularity with their target audience. By applying the insights gleaned from this data when curating content for social media posts, you can improve the visibility of your content, spark positive discussions between users, and maximise your odds of generating likes and shares.

This comprehensive approach is critically important for effectively targeting content across various channels, as businesses can apply the insights obtained in order to subdivide users and their interests based on their social media platform of choice—Russians scrolling through VKontakte are not engaging with the same content as Turkish users on Facebook or Twitter. By “listening” to what users have to say to one another, your company can create tailored promotional strategies for diverse regions and platforms, making it far easier to penetrate new markets.

A Closer Look at Overall Brand Health

For companies that have an established social media presence with a sufficiently large following, social monitoring is an important and effective strategy as it provides businesses with actionable information pertaining to the direct experiences of your audience. Unfortunately for companies making exclusive use of this technique, it’s not foolproof. By narrowing the scope of your study to assess only what’s present on your various feeds, you risk misinterpreting data due to small sample sizes. Social listening directly addresses these problems by giving you the opportunity to examine how your brand is being discussed and received outside of your immediate circles—you can track conversations, assess their context, and chart possible paths that can bring your brand into mainstream popularity.

What it all boils down to, ultimately, is this—social monitoring can provide you with pure analytics, but it’s social listening that can provide your company with the all-encompassing view to put those numbers into greater context. If the social media growth of your business has been stagnating, then social listening needs to play a greater role in your marketing strategies throughout 2019 and beyond. By acting on the information that it can offer, you can greatly improve the quality and relevancy of both your content and communication to your desired demographics in order to expand the reach of your brand.