What is Social Listening, Why it Matters, and 10 Tools to Make it Easier

Social listening gives brands an opportunity to track, analyze, and respond to conversations about them on social media. It’s a crucial component of audience research.

Imagine you own a coffee shop. One day while you’re making a latte behind the counter, you overhear two customers in line talk about your food selection.

“I love the pastries here,” one says. “Especially the croissants.”

“Yeah, the croissants are great,” the other one replies. “But I’m not too crazy about cookies. Way too dry.”

You begin to wonder. Hmm. Does everyone feel this way about the cookies?

So you start to ask around. You hear other opinions about your coffee shop. You start to listen. Based on what you hear you start to make changes that people like.

And it works. Your customers are lining out the door to get a hold of your new cookies. That’s because you just employed a tried-and-true method for brands to engage with their customers and give them what they love:

Social listening

If you’re not using social listening, you’re leaving a lot of great insights on the table.

Here’s how you can get started—and the tools to make it simple.

What is social listening

Why social listening matters

How to get set up for social listening

Social listening tips

Social listening tools

Bonus: Download a free guide to discover how to get more sales and conversions with social media monitoring on Hootsuite—no tricks or boring tips.

Social listening definition

Social listening is when you track your social media platforms for mentions and conversations related to your brand. Then you analyze them for insights to discover opportunities to act.

It’s a two step process:

At first glance, social listening might seem like social media monitoring—but the two concepts actually differ in important ways.

Social media monitoring is simply taking a look at metrics such as:

…and collecting data about those metrics. Social media monitoring is great for things like monitoring ROI or A/B testing campaigns.

When you take action in response to the data you collected, you begin the process of social listening.

Where social media monitoring looks at metrics like engagement rate and number of mentions, social listening looks beyond the numbers to consider the mood behind the data.

This helps you understand how people feel about you and your competitors. It’s not just counting the number of times your brand gets mentioned.

This “online mood” is also called social media sentiment. Keeping tabs on social media sentiment is a key part of social media listening.

Understanding how people feel about your brand helps you keep your marketing and product development efforts on track. It also allows you to respond right away to positive or negative posts.

The main thing to understand is that social listening looks forward and backward. It’s about analyzing the information you collect and using it to guide your strategy and day-to-day actions.

Why social listening matters

If you don’t use social media listening, you’re leaving a lot of valuable insights on the table.

In fact, you might be missing out on a big piece of insight about your brand that people are actively discussing. You want to know what people are saying about you.

Your customers are telling you what they want from your brand. If you care about them, you need to take a look at the insights you might gain from social listening.

Here are a few ways social listening can help you:

Engage with customers

Social listening gives you opportunities to engage with your customers about your brand.

For example, a customer might have tweeted about how much they loved your product, or they might have reached out to you on social media for a customer service request.

Nike does this very well. In fact, they have an entire Twitter account dedicated to responding to customer support issues.

It’s not always direct replies either. Sometimes they spot a trend and address it right away.

Another great example comes from Coca-Cola. They frequently respond to followers who tweet about their product—and follow up with them in their DMs.

We are loving your Energy! DM us to follow up. ⚡️
— Coca-Cola (@CocaCola) March 3, 2020

This creates goodwill with their followers and boosts engagement. Consider how your brand can do the same.

Manage crises

Engagement is good—but only when it comes with positive social sentiment.

Social listening allows you to track that sentiment in real time. That way you can see what posts are doing well for your brand, and which ones aren’t.

If you’re getting a lot of positive engagement, look for the reasons behind it. Your customers share a ton of useful information about what they like and what they don’t. Those lessons can help guide your strategy across channels.

Social listening also helps you address PR disasters before they get out of hand. If sentiment is down, review the social feedback for lessons that could prevent a similar misstep in the future.

If sentiment is way down, look for the cause and make changes right away, by pulling a problem post, or apologizing for an insensitive Tweet.

One great example of this comes from Nike. In 2019, they found their brand in the center of controversy when Duke basketball player Zion Williamson’s Nike shoe exploded in the middle of a game.

Nike’s stock fell after Duke star Zion Williamson’s shoe exploded on the court during a game. @ChristineRomans reports on the fallout: https://t.co/FWzAQXME86 pic.twitter.com/oLSGZqKAW8
— CNN (@CNN) February 22, 2019

The game was on national television. So when it happened, influencers and celebrities took to twitter to voice their concern for the player—as well as throw some shade on Nike.

Hope young fella is ok! Literally blew thru his ????. ????????
— LeBron James (@KingJames) February 21, 2019

Nike’s social media team wasted no time jumping on the grenade. They took time to respond to tweets from concerned customers, and their PR team released a statement the next day wishing Willamson well and promising to investigate the matter.

They also reached out to Willamson himself and offered him an advertising deal.

Raheem Sterling’s $120 million Air Jordan deal would elevate him above Zion Williamson’s earnings with the iconic shoe brand https://t.co/iTFu670sUs
— Sports Insider (@SportsInsider) August 14, 2019

The goodwill, commitment, and humility in the face of crisis allowed Nike to rise above the situation.

Track competitors

Social listening is more than understanding what people say about you. You also want to know what they say about your competitors. This gives you important insights into where you fit in the marketplace.

You will also learn what your competitors are up to in real-time. Are they launching new products? Developing new marketing campaigns? Taking a beating in the press?

Social listening allows you to find out about these new opportunities and threats as they happen, so you can plan and respond accordingly.

Find pain points

Monitoring conversations around the industry uncovers a TON of insight about what’s working and—more importantly—what’s not working for your customer.

This information is a gold mine for your product and marketing team.

Can you tweak an existing product or add a feature to resolve the problems people are talking about? Maybe what you learn will spur a new product idea.

You’ll also learn about frustrations with your current products. Can you tweak your products to help address the concerns? If you do, be sure to tell people about it with a targeted marketing campaign.

Discover new sales leads

It’s a truth universally acknowledged that customers love it when you solve their problems. It’s also a truth universally acknowledged that customers hate being sold to right away with the white hot passion of a dying star.

Social listening helps you develop relationships with potential customers in your industry who you can nurture into relationships for social selling.

Reach out, make a connection, and share helpful information. This will help establish your brand as the best resource when it comes time to make a purchase decision.

Identify influencers and advocates

Monitoring social conversation about your industry will give you a sense of who the important influencers are. These are important people to connect with. As the term implies, they can have a huge influence on how their followers and fans feel about you—or your competitors.

You will also find people who already love your brand and are saying great things about you on social media. These are natural brand advocates. Reach out to them and look for opportunities to collaborate.