Advantages and disadvantages of social media listening

Is a social listening strategy right for your brand?

Implementing your own social listening strategy is a powerful solution for brands who want to connect with their consumers through a social media presence, but it's not perfect for every situation. Before determining whether it's the right fit for your business's social media marketing strategy to start monitoring online conversations, you need to consider several advantages and disadvantages.

Advantage: unfiltered opinions from an ongoing social conversation with your target audience

Social listening allows you to be the fly on the wall, collecting social media data. With social listening, you can gather current and prospective customers' uninfluenced thoughts and opinions. These thoughts and opinions offer customer feedback that may be less filtered than what they would share in a survey or interview response, making them more authentic and meaningful insights.

Social monitoring (different from social listening) involves examining online social media posts and social media conversations about your brand to gain valuable insights into your target market's perceptions. Brand monitoring is a crucial component of social media analytics, generating actionable insights that help social media marketers enhance their marketing campaigns and strategies.

Social listening examples for customer relationship management

• By identifying the emerging trends topics your audience discusses on social media channels, you can tailor customer experiences or generate new content that aligns with their interests throughout your social media strategy.
• If you monitor conversations, when social media users share negative comments, you can enter crisis management and address their concerns promptly, improving customer experience across all social channels.
• A social media marketer can identify and connect with key influencers, start conversations online conversations.

Disadvantage: no guarantees with a social media listening strategy

The nature of social listening is much different from traditional research, where you ask to prompt an answer. No guarantees exist with social listening, and you never know what you will (or will not) find. However, if your area of interest is something included in the broad range of topics discussed online, you should be able to uncover useful information monitoring relevant conversations — even if it wasn't the information you initially anticipated finding.

PRO TIP: Sentiment analysis is a powerful tool for businesses and researchers to understand and respond to the public's feelings and opinions efficiently through consumer conversations

• Regularly utilize sentiment analyzing on social media and customer feedback channels to gauge public perception.
• Use these insights to proactively address any negative sentiment and amplify positive ones, thereby continuously improving your brand health and maintaining a strong, positive reputation.

Advantage: travel back in time with advanced social listening tools

Most social mention tools will store and provide access to social listening data for about 24-30 months. Some tools have the ability to go back even further but at an additional cost. This means that if you start a trending program to compare current online conversations to past social conversations, you can begin analyzing the information right away and don't have to wait for multiple data collection periods.

Disadvantage: social listening tool findings gain power with supporting information

Social listening insights don't always stand alone. Actionable insights often work best as a complement to other information or research. However, social listening efforts can add a unique dimension to traditional research, sometimes uncovering the motivation behind behaviors and shedding light on how to move forward.

PRO TIP: reporting with social media listening tools

• Enhance your social media reports by incorporating data visualization techniques. This not only makes your reports visually appealing but also simplifies the process of analyzing social data to measure your brand health effectively.

Advantage: social listening strategies offer possibilities within other forms of media

Social listening isn't limited to text. Images, videos, and emojis often help us better understand what consumers are thinking, saying, and doing better than a more traditional research method would allow. That rich media backed up by commentary text allows us to notice key terminology and understand how to communicate back to consumers using their own words.

Are you ready to act in the face of change?

In digital marketing, the social world is one of constant disruption, as social media platforms and industry trends emerge and evolve. What grows today could die on the vine tomorrow. (Speaking of, remember Vine?) All this change with the latest social media trends impacts how and where to listen for social insight.

Likewise, privacy expectations and policies flex across social platforms and governments. Like anything on the cutting edge, social listening requires being adaptable to constant change and finding innovative solutions to achieve your business objectives.

Ready to harness the full potential of social media listening? Contact us to begin exploring countless opportunities.