As digital marketing has evolved audience interactions, the days of uploading content and hoping that consumers will be thrilled or participate enthusiastically are long gone. Brands nowadays need to pay close attention to their audience, their needs, and what they have to say.

It is where social media listening kicks in. We must carefully consider our audience’s feedback to maximize the effectiveness of our social media listening strategy and campaigns. Effective social listening is the key to successfully breaking into any niche, the same as attempting to comprehend a new way of doing a thing.

So, let’s get into the different types of social media listening with real-life examples.

5 Types of Social Media Listening

Social listening involves monitoring various social media sites for mentions of our company to find “hidden riches” that help improve data-driven business decisions. Businesses can better understand target audiences’ by using social listening. Social media tools help analyze and determine the topics important to them, their language preferences, and the content that speaks to them.

However, there are various ways marketers conduct social listening. By understanding the different social listening techniques, most marketers gain great insight to make better business decisions.

So, what are the types of social listening? Let’s get to it!

1. Basic Social Listening

Basic listening is the first type of social listening. It entails paying attention to audience activity. Our followers on social media networks interact with our content and pages. Follower activity includes returning to and reading earlier posts that used hashtags, handles, and company pages.

For instance, a company posts a question on one of its social media pages to “listen” to understand how people respond to a specific event or theme over time.

In this instance, the brand is not seeking in-depth audience insight but instead staying informed of current events and taking a pulse of common reactions.

Brands can only examine every user’s profile who interacts with their material if they work 24-hour shifts. As a result, this information does not assist businesses in segmenting the audience but instead keeps them informed of current events.

This level of social listening needs to be improved to gain profound audience insights. Brands are interested in how people react to various topics. Because not all users interacting with the material can be extensively scrutinized, basic social listening data helps brands understand what is happening at any given moment. It does not allow brands to organize and categorize their audience for simpler comprehension.

Most start-ups and small-to-medium businesses can use the simple analytics tools offered by third-party listening solutions for basic listening. Since the data does not delve deeply into the specifics, obtaining and analyzing it is simple. Basic listening is distinct from social media monitoring, which strongly emphasizes data points and figures.

2. Deep Social Listening

Deep listening entails monitoring all social media posts on a subject, not just those related to or targeted at our business or content. With this sophisticated method of listening, we can find hundreds or even thousands of posts from users discussing a particular subject.

Compared to basic listening or social media monitoring, this listening technique is comprehensive and covers a massive data pool.

Let’s imagine, for instance, that a brand wants to monitor public perceptions of football. If the brand is not utilizing a third-party application, it’s presumably using Twitter’s (or any other social media channel’s) built-in search feature to identify relevant posts. The advantage of using a third-party tool is that it enables businesses to track different keywords and filter data based on various criteria, such as the total number of users engaged, sentiment, content type, and more.

3. Combined Social Listening

Deep social listening and monitoring on social media are both components of combined listening. Successful businesses use social media monitoring as a starting point to better understand audiences because it offers statistics and facts.

The use of social monitoring provides an advantage and enables us to determine from the metrics acquired what insights we need for our company. The objective is to understand our consumers’ personalities, the reasons behind their feelings, and the factors influencing their choices. Combining social listening with monitoring creates a potent tool for understanding our audience as individuals.

Trusted third-party tools can help obtain the correct findings and comprehend the observations. Because brands can merge listening and monitoring, they require tools to help analyze and interpret the enormous volume of data gathered.

Understanding what clients need and how best to meet their needs depends on proper data analysis. Ultimately, the data will only benefit our business if we can understand it.

We can apply different social listening types to our strategies based on our requirements and the insights we want.

Here are some other social listening types.

4. Competitive analysis

After setting up brand monitoring, we should know rival brands well enough to understand the social media landscape in our field clearly. These days, we may utilize Google or the social media platforms’ built-in search feature to locate competitors using industry-related keywords.

We can concentrate on rivals who use and spend on social media marketing to figure out the following:

• What social media platforms do they use?
• How frequently do they post?
• Do they interact with or answer followers?
• How influential and captivating are their posts?
• What kind of content are they publishing?
• What material are they endorsing or using with their audience to connect?
• How frequently do they promote certain types of content?
• How do those posts fare with followers?

For instance, each NFL team is likely monitoring its divisional components to gather competitive social information throughout the league. The Dallas Cowboys, New York Giants, Philadelphia Eagles, and Washington Redskins are the four teams that make up the NFC East, and they are all placed in some of the most massive media markets in the country.

We can expect rivalries for the best social media performance. Thus, we can track their post views, shares, likes, and mentions to benchmark the performance of our company. Instead of copying rivals, we can leverage competitive analysis to inspire the development of our social listening strategy.

Read Also – What Is the Importance of Social Listening in Social Media Success?

5. Social media optimization

Enhancing our social media posts or the entire social media strategy is to get better outcomes, such as more followers, higher engagement levels, more clicks or conversions, and more.

Social media optimization encompasses a wide range of methods and strategies with varying degrees of complexity and scope, including –

1. Simple changes to each post, such as adding an intriguing question or choosing an eye-catching image.
2. High-level improvements, such as changing the social media tone and brand voice.

Performance analysis, audience and competition research, and information gleaned through social listening should be the foundation of social media optimization.

Social media platforms allow for the customization of messages to target particular demographic groups more effectively. Marketers can use social media to alter their content based on user demographic and location data.

Let’s take the example of NASA. Regarding its social media platforms, NASA gets a lot right. For instance, their Facebook page features a captivating profile picture and necessary details to attract visitors who want to learn more. In addition to a brief bio outlining their goals and objectives, they include helpful details, relevant keywords, and crucial contact information. Additionally, their Twitter page replicates their Facebook page.

Consistent brand voice and recognition create a seamless experience by ensuring perfect continuity and optimization across all platforms. Optimizing business social media profiles is a great strategy to reach potential customers and stand out.

How Can Konnect Insights Help in Tracking These Types of Social Listening?

By paying attention to social media platforms, we can learn more about our clients and the market in which we operate. Additionally, it will aid in the early detection of unfavorable reactions and assist in avoiding a PR catastrophe. We can help businesses with this by the following.

• Enable businesses to comprehend sentiment, the share of voice, media kind, classification, influence, demographics, and campaign insights using outstanding dashboards and clever suggestion reports, which assist in basic social listening.
• Help keep an eye on social media channels for brand mentions, rival brands, products, and business-related keywords for deep social listening.
• Konnect Insights can further help brands with competitive analysis and combined listening in addition to real-time brand monitoring by tracking rival brand mentions and providing competitive data.

These insights provide benefits to small businesses and organized corporations. The gathered data can help brands stay current and effectively use social media optimization.

Konnect Insights can manage several social media profiles, tracking brand mentions across all platforms. Our social listening strategy is bolstered by the fact that businesses can interact with their audience and respond to customer comments by monitoring brand mentions.

Final Thoughts

For most organizations, understanding what makes customers tick is their top priority, and social media listening is how they do this. This approach to consumer comprehension goes beyond simply taking facts at face value from diverse sources.

The core purpose of a business is to satisfy customers’ demands and needs while figuring out how to do it more effectively. Understanding their online activities and motivations, among other information, is a method to achieve this.

By using the types of social listening available, we can improve the results of our social media marketing activities while saving time and money. We Konnect Insights prepares businesses to better position themselves in the market with specific tactics relevant to the audience using social listening types.