Social listening tools

Social listening tools enable firms to tap into social networks and listen in on the billions of conversations and interactions happening on social media every day. The social web, which includes social networks, microblogging sites, forums, blogs, and user reviews, offers companies a wealth of data about their brand, business, and consumers. Social listening tools help you aggregate and analyze social media data and obtain meaningful insights around your brand’s online presence, your marketing campaigns and the audiences targeted by those campaigns, and your customers and competitors. With the right listening tools, you can zero in fast on the conversations, people, and events that truly matter to your business.

What social listening tools are and how they can help your teams

Social listening tools are software applications or services that automatically gather data—the baseline metrics and mentions you need—from social media platforms and sites. You define the social accounts and specific keywords you want to monitor, and the tool collects engagement, reach, and other useful metrics from multiple social networks as well as mentions of your specified keywords, which will likely include your brand name, the names of your products, and the names of competing firms, from across the social web.

As opposed to social monitoring tools, social listening tools also provide you with advanced social media data analysis capabilities. These help you filter and organize your brand’s social mentions so that you can obtain actionable insights faster. Applying sentiment analysis to your listening streams, you can find frustrated customers or critical feedback for your customer care and product development teams. Using trend analysis, you can better understand and stay in tune with consumers’ social conversations and online behavior, allowing your marketing team to adapt their strategies to the changing needs, interests, and preferences of consumers.

Best practices for using social listening tools

Carrying out social listening isn’t as simple as finding the right tool, however, although that will certainly help. A successful social listening program starts with a smart social listening strategy. Making clear your objectives and expectations for your social listening initiative will help you choose the right tool and obtain the most value from your investment. As you explore the various tools on the market and carry out your own social listening tools comparison, keep in mind what it is that you want to achieve. Are you trying to increase brand awareness? Monitor your brand reputation? Or identify your target audience? Some tools offer unique metrics and analytics tools that may help you achieve your goals more efficiently and easily.

Once you’ve found a suitable tool for your needs, make sure to cast a wide net. The analytics provided by social listening tools will help you sift through the results and surface the insights you need. Don’t just monitor your brand name or the names of your products or services. Make sure to include the names of your competitors as well as best-in-class firms in other industries. By watching your competitors and industry leaders, you can learn from their successes and their mistakes.

Also, be sure to share the insights gained from social listening with other teams in your organization—customer care, sales, product development, PR, marketing, and your executives. Dashboards and reporting functions provided by social listening tools can help you distribute and share social intelligence with internal stakeholders and foster social data-driven decision making in all areas of your business.

Why choose Synthesio’s social listening tools

Global brands choose Synthesio’s Social Listening Platform because of its extensive collection of social data and enterprise-scale analytics capabilities. With support for listening in over 80 languages, Synthesio’s social listening tools help companies around the world monitor, track, and make sense of conversations in global markets. Using Natural Language Processing, Automated Sentiment Analysis, and Data Enrichment technology, Synthesio processes and adds metadata to your mentions for you, letting you filter by keyword, topic, media type, source, location, sentiment, and more and find the information you’re looking for faster.

Synthesio’s use-case based Social Listening Dashboards let your teams keep an eye on the metrics important for their specific objectives alongside real-time mentions of your brand and other relevant keywords gathered from across numerous social sources. With Synthesio Rank, a proprietary influence ranking tool, you can filter out the noise and focus your efforts on the people, sites, and mentions that matter most. And when you want to accelerate your time to insight, leverage Synthesio’s AI-powered trend detection and insights module Signals.

How Imagination uses Synthesio’s social listening tools

Imagination is a creative agency that develops and delivers experiences, or experiential marketing campaigns. In the social listening case study below, you can read more about how they used Synthesio’s social listening tools to measure campaign engagement and provide valuable insights to their clients. Using data on sentiment, share of voice, and share of interactions, they were able to evaluate and demonstrate the effectiveness of experiential campaigns and show how emotionally engaging experiences lead to greater brand loyalty and more positive experiences overall. Since partnering with Synthesio to create their Connected Experiences Index, they have seen a major increase in clients asking for social listening insights around their events.

Synthesio Named a Leader in Forrester Wave™: Social Listening Platforms, Q3 2018 Report

“Synthesio is a sound choice for brands that need a social listening platform that solidly delivers on core functionality”

FAQs

How do you use social listening?

You can use it to measure and track brand health, assess the effectiveness of your marketing campaigns, evaluate the impact of influencers, identify and profile your target audience, and improve your marketing ROI. You can also monitor and manage your brand’s online reputation, obtain valuable consumer insights, deliver faster social customer service, gather competitive intelligence, and carry out market research more efficiently. What is the difference between social media monitoring and social listening tools?2020-02-17T09:58:33-05:00

What is the difference between social media monitoring and social listening tools?

Social listening tools combine social media monitoring and social media analytics technology. Social media monitoring tools are used to collect and aggregate metrics and mentions (of your brand, products, services, competitors, etc.) from multiple accounts and channels. Social listening tools provide you with social media analysis tools like sentiment analysis, influencer analysis, and trend analysis, enabling you to make sense of and extract meaningful insights from your cross-channel metrics and conversations faster. How do you use social listening insights?2020-02-17T09:59:57-05:00

How do you use social listening insights?

You can use them to fuel strategic decision making across your organization. They can be used to better understand your customers and target audience(s) for marketing campaigns, create more engaging and appealing content, evolve your social media and marketing strategies, improve your products and services, discover new markets or gaps in existing markets, and boost the ROI of your marketing campaigns.