This article consist of how Listening Module works and its importance along with bonus tips for best use

Listening, also referred to as social media listening, is the process of identifying and assessing what is being said about a company, individual, product or brand on the internet.

Conversations on the internet produce massive amounts of unstructured data. Because of that, it’s important to know what an organization wants to achieve with a social media listening initiative. Depending on the goal, Radarr will be the right tool to help you analyze the data with mining techniques.

Why is social listening important?

Social listening helps companies understand the conversation surrounding their brand and the products and services they offer. It provides valuable consumer data that companies can use to gauge brand awareness and improve their products and services.

Companies gain the following benefits from social listening:

Campaign analysis provides feedback on how a particular marketing campaign resonates with audiences on social.
Competitive analysis reveals insights into how competitors are doing based on conversations on social media.
Event monitoring enables a company to see how audiences respond in real time to a specific event, such as a virtual conference.
Industry trends surface when a company listens for discussions mentioning its industry, using social functions like hashtags.

Companies can use the conversational data they gather through social listening to alter their treatment of these things. For example, if the conversation around a certain marketing campaign is negative, a company might change the current campaign to address the problem. It could also use the information to craft better campaigns in the future.

If social conversations about a company’s competitors are positive, it might mimic the competitions’ behavior.

Gathering social intelligence from social media conversations is a good way to gauge authentic audience sentiment and reactions.

Social listening vs social monitoring

Social monitoring explains what people are saying on social media. Social listening explains why people are saying what they are saying. Monitoring is tactical, whereas listening focuses on long-term strategic decisions.

Examples of each are as follows:

Social monitoring. A restaurant monitors Twitter for mentions of its new product — a hamburger with cream cheese on the bun. Once detected, the business may respond to the mention but doesn’t have to. The main point of monitoring is gathering information. There is not necessarily a strategy attached. The business can see all the different ways its hamburger comes up in conversation online.

Social listening. The same restaurant monitors social media for mention of its new hamburger and aggregates the data to perform a sentiment analysis of what people are saying. The restaurant uses the information collected to develop a broader marketing strategy. Using sentiment analysis, it can determine the following:

whether people like the hamburger;
what they like about it;
what they like to eat with it;
how long to keep the hamburger on the menu; and
new ideas for its next featured product.

In the listening example, the business does not engage with every mention of the product. It doesn’t try to affect the conversation or change people’s feelings about the product. Instead, it aims to read sentiment and gain insights with the goal of developing a strategy to improve sentiment in the future.

Social listening and social monitoring are not mutually exclusive. A social listening strategy takes social monitoring a step further to gain a better understanding of brand-centric conversations on social networks.

How does social listening work?
The goal of social media listening is to monitor relevant conversations on social media platforms, understand the underlying mood or sentiment and respond with a marketing strategy that influences sentiment favorably. The social listening process consists of three main steps:

Monitoring. This entails monitoring multiple social media channels for mentions of brand names, topics, competitors, keywords and products in social conversations. A business can do this type of brand monitoring manually by checking social media sites daily or more frequently or it can use a tool to automate the process.
Analysis. This is the step that sets social listening apart from monitoring. Companies analyze information gathered during monitoring to identify what customers like and don’t like about a product or service and look for patterns and trends. A variety of customer sentiment analysis tools are available that use automated software to offer companies insight into the emotion behind the text customers write or say.
Response. Companies may then choose to respond. This may be a small response, such as communicating with a customer online, or a big one, like repositioning the entire brand strategy.
Companies can use the information collected from social listening for other purposes, including the following:

to identify potential customers and unhappy existing ones;
to gauge the quality of the customer experience (CX); and
to collect information to use for return-on-investment monitoring or to A/B test different versions of a campaign to compare how they perform.

Social listening tips:

Best practices to perform social listening effectively include the following:

Understand the audience. Learn which buyer personas are attracted to a brand and its products and services. Understand how to market to the target audience on its platform of choice.

Determine what to listen for. There will be a wealth of data to draw insights from. It is important to have a clear idea of what your organization wants to learn from the data. This will help businesses ignore noise in the data set.

Use keywords to find data. Keywords are a good way to filter conversations on social media. They can relate to a company, its brands, products and services, or to a larger industry.
Use a social listening tool. Tools for collecting unstructured social data can help gather insights from the data they collect.

Develop a strategy. After analyzing social data, it’s important to use the findings to develop a strategy. If a company finds the social conversation is favorable, it should find out what customers like about it. If a business finds customers are unhappy, then it should explore what’s wrong and look for ways to change. This might mean changing product descriptions, prices or features. Or it could mean adopting other marketing strategies to better explain their offerings, such as optimizing data-driven content creation.