How to Listen to Audience Virtually: Social Listening Tools

Suppose data is more than necessary for any organization. In that case, the way it is collected has to be at the centre of any strategy. Among the most effective tactics are social listening tools. These not only contribute to strengthening the brand and enriching interaction with users but are also crucial instruments for accessing information that would otherwise be inaccessible. Social listening is specially designed to analyze massive amounts of social media conversations, posts, and trends. Thus, we can draw a digital image of the current situation of consumers and the industry.

Types of ‘social listening’ tools

There are many social listening tool platforms on the market, making it difficult to compare the features and coverage they offer. Social listening involves monitoring and analyzing conversations and trends on social networks to better understand the public and the market. Measuring it with specialized tools is crucial to obtaining accurate insights into digital reputation and making informed strategic decisions.

1. Hootsuite

It’s a great tool for marketers who aren’t yet familiar with social listening. You can use Hootsuite to set up social media streams that monitor conversations, keywords, mentions, and hashtags. You can even monitor and respond to conversations and mentions immediately from one dashboard instead of logging in and out of multiple social platforms.

2. Sprout Social

Its main strength lies in its social media management software, which allows publishing and scheduling content and promoting communication with customers through social channels. In addition, it allows you to identify in a single inbox all the interactions and conversations that occur around the brand. It allows you to discover what is happening on topics relevant to your business. Its query builder helps you create complex questions and use different phrases so you get filtered results, which can save you time and effort.

3. Brandwatch

In addition to monitoring and classifying brand mentions, it offers image recognition, provides demographic data about your audience, recognizes trends within a given topic, and allows you to export the information to custom dashboards. On the other hand, it provides the opportunity to manage social networks from the same platform, offering a unified content calendar. Brandwatch also relies on artificial intelligence to automatically analyze data and identify trends in conversations.

4. Mention

It is a basic social listening platform. Although its infrastructure may make you think of an old page, it is easy to use and useful for your strategy. The most interesting thing is that you can search for a term and the platform shows you all the mentions that your brand has had on different social channels: Facebook, Twitter and even Reddit. In addition, it offers information about user opinion, whether it has been positive, neutral or negative; ideal to know the status of your brand among users.

5. Buzzsumo

Most professionals can work with this tool to track social media conversations, analyze consumer engagement in real time, and identify influencers to boost their brands and campaigns. Its offer is based on four pillars: search for data, discover content, monitor trends and identify influencers.

6. Talkwalker

Its artificial intelligence engine learns to classify relevant mentions to improve system performance. This helps get results for the queries and products that the customer wants to prioritize. Likewise, it allows you to detect the most popular discussions related to a brand or a product, compare a company with its competitors based on specific metrics and analyze audience sentiment, among many other features that promote better decision-making. Finally, it enables the integration of social tools.

7. Agorapulse

It is an innovative tool that anyone can use to control and track content, analyze engagement based on ROI, and collaborate with other teams in real time. What makes this solution so intuitive is its set of features, most notably its Power Reports tool. Perfect for marketers focused on social media.

8. Buffer

It is a platform with which to plan publications, schedule drafts and publish. Also, approve your employees’ submissions so you’ll be sure the messages you want are being sent. Offers monitoring, reporting and analytics. You can even analyze the stories on Facebook and Instagram. In addition to these social networks, it connects with LinkedIn and Pinterest.

9. Brand24

It offers a set of basic features that allow you to track and respond to brand mentions in real time. It also shows a history of mentions on social networks, which helps to know the opinions of the audiences and detect the sentiment in the market. This platform tracks the volume of mentions on a particular topic and presents them with inaccessible graphs and reports. Likewise, the system determines whether the mentions have a positive, negative or neutral tone.

10. Meltwater

Among its functionalities, the tool offers logo recognition, determines the gender and age group of the authors of the mentions, recognizes objects and scenes, and allows you to identify influencers. It also has a social media management component that streamlines the process of content programming, interaction with the audience and evaluation of the effectiveness of the different communication channels.

Analyzing what is said about your brand on social networks is very important. It is key to address it, especially for your link-building and sales strategies. Not to mention what improves online reputation management. There are multiple options on the market, as you have seen. But the purpose is none other than to improve understanding and engagement with the audience. Suppose social listening does not appear in your digital marketing strategy. In that case, the time has come for you to consider where to start. Overlooking it is not an option if you want your organization to prosper.