A Beginner's Guide to Social Listening

Social listening is a revolutionary tool for media monitoring and analysis. It collects every piece of online content that can be relevant for you. This includes articles, blogposts, all sorts of social media content and comments. It can give you useful insights into what internet users think about you. But here is the trick: thanks to the automated process, it all happens without actually reading this huge amount of content. They say social listening is the future of media monitoring, but it is not the future anymore. Online content can now be collected and analyzed without human intervention, but with human-level precision. It means you can stay informed about everything that is published about your brand, company, product or competitors. And, again, you don’t even need to read the relevant pieces and mentions. Every important conclusion will be detected for you.

Let’s see an example!

So you are the social media manager of a well-known brand. Your new product seems a big hit on the market, and the management asks you to make a presentation about the online perception of this new product. Well, you have two options. You either start reading all 3000 articles, posts and comments published about it and give up sleep for a couple days. Or you can be smarter than that. If you accept the help of a social listening tool, all you have to do is run an analysis on the name of the product, wait a couple hours and get the results shown on its easy-to-understand graphs and charts. The dashboard will reveal how many positive or negative texts are found, what the related topics, names, brands, emotions or locations are and much more!

As the expression ‘social listening’ itself says: listen to your audience! Because people in the audience listen to each other, too.

Today’s typical consumer doesn’t believe in advertisements or promotions. However, people are truly aware of the advantages of internet freedom. They listen to other people’s opinions while they are not afraid to publish theirs, either. It’s been clear that the most successful companies are the ones who let themselves be guided by their customers. And guess what: hearing what they want has never been easier in the era of social listening. Being aware of every relevant opinion helps you to be one step ahead of your customers. You will know what they want even before they realize they want it. Once analysing their opinion isn't a burden anymore, all you'll have to do is focus on campaign and strategy planning.

We’re aware of how difficult campaign success measurement is. It’s a common challenge among companies, so we try to help it become as simple as possible. Customer and client satisfaction surveys might be useful to gain feedback on a campaign, but sometimes they are just not insightful enough. So, here comes social listening to save us again! As the saying goes, words on the internet are not written in pencil but ink; everything leaves traces. The good news is, an automated monitoring and analysis service can find them all.

When it comes to campaign efficiency, it is useful to focus on these fundamental questions: “Who talked about your campaign? What and how much did they say? Why, where, when and how did they say it? What have been the results compared to the expectations?" Neticle’s automated social listening tool will give you all the answers in minutes, saving your precious working hours.

Social listening is based on keyword search, so it finds relevant content for you by crawling the web for a given word or expression. The keyword can be the slogan of your campaign or the name of your advertised product/service. The system will find every content the given keyword has been mentioned in. The number of mentions will show how many people were engaged in the discussion during the campaign, and how many of the mentions were positive, negative or neutral. Furthermore, the distribution of mentions is shown based on where these mentions were published (news articles, social media sites, forums etc.) Besides these insights, you can also see the gender distribution of the mentions’ authors, and you can get to know the name of the opinion leaders, too. This way you can check whether the results are in sync with the predicted performance indicators.

More importantly, let’s emphasise it again: social listening is more than an ordinary monitoring service, because you can detect way more about mentions with it. Here are some examples:

We have developed our own search methods to download all the publicly available articles, comments and posts from news sites, blogs, discussion websites, Facebook, Twitter, Google+, TikTok and YouTube. We monitor the web nearly real-time: we find every new content within 10-30 minutes. It is mainly online, however, print, audio and audiovisual offline media content is also available upon request.

Our social listening tool is outstanding because we cover local or niche languages as well. Currently we provide social listening services in the CEE, DACH and Western European region.

Figure out what you’re interested in

The system is based on keywords that our experts create together with our clients. First we ask for short briefs from our clients’ issues to understand what they want to analyze. If it is their own reputation, we usually add their brand or company names and product names to the system. If they want a broader picture of the industry they are in, we also add the competitors’ names and market analysis regarding relevant industry topics. Within 2 weeks, our new clients have access to comprehensive analyses around the keywords.

When creating the keywords, we set up synonyms, misspellings and regulations of your company's, brand's or product's name. We analyze the hits automatically. Our system rates them between -3 and +3 based on the strength of the keyword's polarity. We call this the opinion index. The scores of the keywords are added up, so you can see the overall opinion and reputation of your keywords (e.g. how much people like Coca-Cola).

We can manage irony and double negations, too. We can also customize the algorithm if needed (e.g. if the field or industry of a given keyword requires specific expressions to recognise in the contents). Besides sentiment, our algorithm also recognises what the hits are about: places, topics, persons and brands are automatically identified.

Get the key insights with only a couple of clicks

Once the analysis is done, easy-to-understand charts are generated, visualizing the results. The mention graph shows what topics are frequent in connection with the relevant mentions, how these are connected, and what other positive or negative opinions connect to them. The quantification of the share of voice will let you know everything about your online reputation without reading the mentions.

This is how we created our market leading algorithm that is able to analyze texts with near human-level precision.

The drop of the web opinion index means that lots of negative opinions were published online about your keyword. But don’t worry, our system will alert you when this happens so you can react to the criticism quickly.

All of our visualized charts are interactive, you can drill down to see detailed data, so you can identify all the sources of the mentions that modify the opinion about your keyword.

Have your questions answered right away

Another advantage of Neticle Media Intelligence is the intelligent question bar on our Dashboard. We show many graphs and charts on this platform, but we know this amount of data and information can be overwhelming sometimes. This is why we added the question bar that automatically answers your analysis related questions.

Just type your question in a casual way (e.g. What was the most engaging Instagram post?) and it will show you the relevant results of the analysis. This is a very useful AI driven tool because you do not have to have any experience with data analysis in order to get the answers you need.

The quantification of online opinions helps us follow the reputation of the keyword through time with our web opinion index. If the web opinion index drops, it means that lots of negative opinions were published online about your keyword.

All of our visualized charts are interactive, you can drill down to see detailed data, so you can identify all the sources of the mentions which modify the opinion about your keyword.

Finally, if you're still reading this very long article, there is only one thing left to say: thank you! We know it's been a massive piece but we hope you've found it useful.