PUBLIC RELATIONS
Why Social Listening Should Be A Top Priority In 2021
By Irene Mbonge
Companies of all sizes today are looking to improve the effectiveness of their social media marketing . This is owing to the fact that digital platforms are constantly innovating the ways through which brands are discovered , shared and experienced .
The data speaks for itself : The number of worldwide social network users is expected to reach 3.09 billion monthly active users in 2021 , and global internet users spend some 136 minutes per day surfing social networks . Many organizations have responded by allocating more resources to digital marketing and technology , now accounting for 29 % of total marketing expense budgets and digital advertising spend for 2020 - estimated at about $ 385 Billion .
Yet these numbers are a double-edged sword . Consumers today react to products , services and ad campaigns in real-time through social media , creating new demands on organizations . Generating and sustaining high levels of engagement and enthusiasm online requires clarity around the firm ’ s goals and values .
It is important to appreciate that social media is still relatively new . Instagram , for example , is only ten years old , and brands are still finding novel means of selling on the platform . For every new platform that hits the mainstream , such as TikTok in 2020 , there are multiple ones that have faded , such as MySpace , or folded completely ( like Vine ). All this means that businesses often find it hard to work out where to funnel budget beyond the big four platforms - Instagram , Twitter , Facebook , and LinkedIn - and even those have proved difficult to master .
Demystifying Social Listening
So , what exactly is social listening ? While many use social monitoring to stay on top of brand mentions and relevant conversations , in many cases so they can engage with their audience as necessary , social listening is more complex ; it ’ s a way to track specific topics , keywords , brands , niches , audiences across social platforms so that you can gather data .
Consumers today react to products , services and ad campaigns in real-time through social media , creating new demands on organizations . Generating and sustaining high levels of engagement and enthusiasm online requires clarity around the firm ’ s goals and values .
Social listening is the process of collecting data from social platforms and forums on a chosen topic . This could be a brand , an industry , or anything else . The collected data is then analyzed to find trends and useful insights . This can influence a wide range of processes including business operations , product updates , and advertising approaches .
It is not an entirely new approach , it ’ s just that the technology is now different . Brands have been trying to gauge the opinions of the public and their customers with surveys since the beginning of organized corporate communication .
What tech means now is that you don ’ t even need to prompt people anymore . People are talking about anything and everything online , it ’ s just a matter of finding them .
Similarly , the art of social listening ; which involves tracking your social media platforms for mentions and conversations related to your brand - is often overlooked by businesses for fear of putting too much weight on overly negative or totally positive reviews . This might also partly be because marketers are far more comfortable with social media monitoring - for example , looking for the number of brand mentions and creating quantitative figures on it to report back - than the more qualitative , and less scientific , approach of looking at the range of opinions on social media .
It ’ s time for that to change . Given that the Year 2020 took away so many methods for speaking to customers directly ; fewer focus groups and in-person networking
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