Marketing - What is Social Listening?

All right, so in today's world of almost everybody being on social media, as businesses and

organizations, we need to be on there too. These days a lot of people don't look for, it used to be people would look for a website

You know, you hear about a new product or a new brand. First thing you might do is look up their website

Well, people don't even bother with that anymore in a lot of cases. They go straight to social media, whether it's Facebook or Instagram or whatever platform

they prefer, that's one of their first moves when they hear about something new

So the thing for us as an organization is trying to keep up with what all is being said

what's going on on social media. And that's the key to something called social listening

So what is social listening exactly? Well, if you see the definition here, it's tracking

mentions of an organization, its brand, its products, or its competitors, on social media In other words it just keeping up with what being said about us or our products our competition all of those things So why do we need to do this Well there a lot that being

said, so we need to know what exactly that is. It's a great source of market information

in other words. People are having the conversation right in front of us, so to speak, so we ought to

be listening. The other thing is this provides real-time feedback. In other words, if we're paying

attention and we're listening, we can be right on top of things, which can help if something

maybe a negative conversation starts, we can address it. You know, if somebody's talking about

an issue they had, well, we can turn it from a negative to a positive by fixing it right then and

there on social media. It can also just help us know what's new with our competition and

things like that. So in other words, we can get real-time information about the market that in past

years, it would have taken much longer for us to learn about. So that's the key to social listening

is just knowing what's going on on social media