Social Listening or Social Media Listening refers to monitoring online conversations and discussions about products, brands, competitors and industry-related keywords across social media platforms. Social Listening is a form of market research that allows companies to gain insights into the public perception of their brand, identify trends and sentiments, and respond to customer feedback and queries in real time.

Social listening helps companies understand and engage with their customers and stakeholders more effectively, improving brand reputation and customer satisfaction.

Social Listening and Social Monitoring

Social Monitoring is a subset of Social Listening. The main difference is the focus and intent of the activity. Social Listening involves actively listening to and processing online conversations and discussions to gain insights and improve strategies. Social Monitoring involves passively monitoring mentions of own brands and products. Social Monitoring enables enterprises to respond to comments and complaints timely. Social Listening provides insights that can feed the marketing strategy.

Social Listening is a proactive approach to understanding and engaging with customers. Social monitoring is reactive and focuses on specific keywords.

Benefits of Social Listening

Social Listening helps enterprises improve customer satisfaction and loyalty, strengthening brand reputation and probability of sales conversion. Social Listening helps enterprises:

  • Understand the target audience,
  • Follow market trends,
  • Gain business intelligence,
  • Manage crisis and reputation,
  • Build stronger customer relationships

How to Improve Social Listening with voice AI

Social media is changing. TikTok was a teen karaoke app with 100 million users in 2018. It became the most downloaded app, with 850 million downloads in 2020. Now it is “the” search engine for Gen Z. Brands started sharing more User Generated Content (UGC) on their platforms. Closed captioning is becoming a norm for videos.

Using the same techniques and tools used five years ago does no longer help. A decade ago, quantity vs quality might be a topic to discuss. Yet now everybody agrees quantity doesn’t come without quality. Monitoring keywords and counting mentions or hashtags without understanding the content provide only so much information. “Reading” is no longer sufficient. Brands should add “listening” to their Social Listening toolbox.

How can brands start “listening” to social media?

Try Octopus Speech-to-Index to find keywords within audio and video files without converting them to text or Leopard Speech-to-Text by transcribing them to text. Interested in detecting keywords such as brand or product names in live shows? Porcupine Wake Word can detect multiple many of them simultaneously.