Even with that definition, however, you may not immediately see the value of social listening. Or, you may find that your existing social monitoring suffices for your purposes. To address these possibilities, then, here are a few of the benefits of social listening:
1. Increased Engagement Quality
Initially, social listening enables you to “thoughtfully craft responses that provide real value”, as HubSpot asserts in the above article. That’s because it offers a solid overview of your brand’s image online, and a deeper understanding of discussions around it.
2. Enhanced Customer Journeys
By the same token, social listening enables you to identify unseen pain points. Where social monitoring would only uncover metrics like engagement rates, social listening will delve deeper into exact customer journey paths. This will allow you to craft more accurate buyer personas as well as refine their journeys from promotion to conversion.
3. Competitor Tracking
Similarly, your audiences may discuss your competitors as they, too, attempt to court them. Listening to such discussions adds another layer to your competitor analysis practices by focusing on what actual audiences say. They may, for example, discuss a new product launch you have missed and will need to respond to.
4. PR
Finally, social listening also enhances PR teams’ arsenals by providing additional information. By gauging the overall sentiment around their brand, they can react more swiftly to crises as they emerge.
At the same time, it can help quantify positive and negative reactions for more calculated actions – as it’s often easy to mistake minor, isolated outbursts of negativity for much larger crises than they really are.