A Beginner's Guide to Social Listening

Social listening is a groundbreaking media analysis tool that automatically finds every piece of online content that mentions your product, brand or company.

Every minute there are 510,000 comments posted on Facebook. Imagine how much you could learn about your online perception if you found all the mentions concerning you.

1. WHAT IS 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.

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2. HOW SOCIAL LISTENING HELPS

New level of media monitoring

 

Most importantly, social listening saves you time and energy. Big amounts of textual data like social media posts with thousands of comments take a long time to process. This will no longer be a problem. With the help of this new approach to media analysis, you can get the necessary insights without actually reading what has been written about you on the internet. Every mention and relevant piece of content about your brand, company, product, field or competitors is collected automatically. In addition, the results are shown on easy-to-understand charts. Most social listening tools show the results on simple but insightful charts, so everyone can get the gist of them without any experience in data analysis.

 

Social listening is also comfortable because these tools usually alert you the moment when reputation threatening articles, posts or comments are published about you. This way you can act on these issues immediately and you can prevent any potential PR or social media crisis. But even if it’s not so threatening, it can really boost your audience’s trust if you react to their questions, complaints or comments as quickly as possible. They will feel that their opinion is valued and it will build a connection between you.

 

And last but not least, social listening tools leave no stone unturned. Whether you’re curious about what digital conversations are happening around the key topics in your sector, or need a quick and cost-efficient market research on topics and people’s opinion, it will cover your needs. It provides a detailed overview of industry trends, digital conversations about relevant topics and much more. Through these tools you will gain extensive knowledge of your field and make better and quicker business decisions.

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3. CAMPAIGN EFFICIENCY MEASUREMENT

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:



  • You can see how positive or negative your campaign’s perception has been
  • What emotions people connected with the message of your campaign
  • What expressions or topics were mentioned together with your campaign

    1. This way you will know about every additional topic or feeling towards your campaign, and it will also show whether or not you spread the message of the campaign successfully. How many people said the new product was delicious, and how many of them said it was delicious, but the packaging could be better?

 

Thanks to automated social listening, not only quantitative but qualitative data is provided for you by Neticle Media Intelligence. Once we show you these results, you have no additional tasks when it comes to campaign monitoring and efficiency measurement. You can think about the next steps of your strategy right away!

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4. COMPETITOR ANALYSIS

Social listening is not only useful for keeping an eye on your own reputation. You can monitor your competitors' online presence and the opinion given about them, too. Let’s see how!

 

Never forget about your competitors

This might sound obvious, but it’s still important to emphasise. Monitoring your competitors is crucial because this is how you will gain extensive industry knowledge. Thanks to social listening, you can learn what communication strategies the others use. This way you can see what generates more engagement when it comes to your target audience. Plus, you can see the common mistakes they make, so you can avoid these errors without ruining your own online reputation.

 

Follow them on social media

Which platforms should you use based on your competitors' experience? How to talk to your customers on social media? Do they prefer “expert” or "cool" content? Save the time it takes to find out all the answers by yourself! You will have the data and the best practices for every social media situation collected for you, so all you have to do is prepare and time your killer campaigns. Check out all the frequently used expressions on your competitors' platforms, because there is a chance that you are going to succeed with similar buzzwords. Also, take a look at the negative comments on their channels because it reveals what the audience doesn't like. On Neticle's impressive dashboard, we give you everything that helps you understand the preferences of your target group.

 

Don't forget about PR

Social listening will show you your competitors' PR and CSR activities, too. You can see the analysis results of every press release, article or blogpost written about them. Did the audience welcome the news about them? Was there any controversy? What kind of public image are they trying to build for themselves? It is a well-known fact that winning over the press is key, however hard it is. The good news is: while achieving an outstanding reputation used to be time-consuming and required lots of research and planning, now the necessary tools are basically served on a silver plate for you.

 

Recruit an alliance of followers

Let's get back to the audience for a moment! They are not only important because they help you create target personas. No, they are also very important because the opinion leaders and influencers are also among them. You can see who the biggest advocates are for your competitors, and you can try to win them over with your own brand or product. You can study their profile, so you will know how to get them to like you and share their opinion about you. This way you can speak to their followers and audience, too. Which, in the era of influencers, can sometimes be more effective than a traditional television advertisement.

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5. HOW OUR SOCIAL LISTENING TOOL WORKS

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.

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Vodafone Hungary

“Neticle Media Intelligence shows us what the web thinks about our brand, our services, our competitors and our industry. Using Neticle we got to hear the feedback from our customers in their voice, and it allows us to see the highest priority areas for improvement in real-time.”

Ágnes Gyetvai Social Media Manager

Danone

“Neticle has a user-friendly interface, and the staff members are always ready to help with anything. Without a doubt, I give Neticle and the team a score of 10/10. Honestly, I would happily recommend both the team and the tool to anybody.”

Adrienn Orosz External Communication Specialist

Mindshare

“Great support for individual solutions and requirements. Highly accurate sentiment 
and categorization tools deliver new insights of the state of public opinion on the brand.”

Niklas Wiesauer Managing Director, Innovation & Strategy

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Reading about Neticle Media Intelligence is one thing, but we know that the proof is always in the pudding. Book a demo and one of our Insights Managers will contact you as soon as possible. Take the first step towards data-driven decision-making!

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Péter Szekeres

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