Media Intelligence: What is Social Media Listening?

Every day, billions of tweets, posts, comments, blogs, reviews, podcasts, and other forms of social media are exchanged.

It’s almost certain that many of those talks will apply to you, no matter what industry you’re in. People are discussing your brand, competitors, the industry you work in, difficulties you might be able to help them with, and a variety of other topics that could provide useful information for your company.

But how can you locate and interpret those insights when they’re buried beneath a mountain of social media data that are continually growing?

What is the definition of social listening?

Social media listening and monitoring are other terms for social listening. It is the process of monitoring and analysing information published on social media networks, usually with a specific search word in mind, such as a brand name.

Social listening services currently collect information from various sources, including Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, Reddit, Pinterest, blogs, discussion forums, and consumer review sites. They can even use AI speech recognition technology to scan the content of podcasts.

Social media can be roughly described as any form of media that allows ordinary people to create and share information online without requiring specialised knowledge or equipment.

Businesses frequently watch social media to learn more about how their customers feel about their brand and products. They can also learn a variety of things, such as what people think about their competition, what gaps there may be in the market for new items, and how developing trends may affect their business.

Companies can do the following with the correct social media listening tool:

• Keep an eye on their brand’s reputation.
• Automatically feed Social Walls for events, websites, and intranets.
• Defend yourself against fake news on social media.
• Find all about competitive intelligence.
• Trends should be analysed and predicted (e.g. marketing trends)
• Discover consumer insights.

Social listening platforms can now consume data in near real-time, thanks to greater computer horsepower. That means that when something is posted on Twitter, the content is nearly instantaneously available for examination within the listening platform.

Users can view the results of their search queries in a variety of ways, based on their preferences:

• Social media reports can be generated automatically at regular intervals and sent via email from the platform, usually in PDF format, with all of the required metrics included.
• Social media dashboards — give you a real-time picture of your metrics with interactive widgets that let you look at the data from various angles, restricting or extending your searches to find patterns and trends.
• Real-time Alerting — when you only want to know if something significant happens, such as a rapid surge in brand mentions or a shift in sentiment that could suggest a possible catastrophe that demands immediate action.