How to Use Twitter Data for Social Listening
Tags: twitter, sociallistening, twitterdata
Published: 2022-04-11 16:23:14

Social listening may appear to be a trendy term in social media marketing. Let's take a closer look at why social listening is important for everyone from businesses to academics.

We'll go through what social listening is and how to use Twitter data for it in this article.

Companies, governments, and individuals use Twitter to find out how others feel about a particular problem, event, person, or hashtag. Collecting this data can help companies make business decisions, follow the trends in their industry, improve their products, and meet customer demands.


Journalists, researchers, and governments, on the other hand, can gather information on public perceptions of national and international issues, policies, news, and movements.

**What is Social Listening and How Does It Work?**
Social listening, or social media listening, is just what it sounds like; you track the content users share publicly on social media platforms related to brands, events, public figures, news, national or international issues, trends, and more. Online conversations can provide you with useful information and statistics.

Contrary to popular belief, social listening is not the same as social media monitoring. When you watch social media, you keep note of terms and phrases that are related to your company or brand. Social listening digs deeper into this data by identifying public views about a search term, issue, or person you're interested in.

**How to Start Social Listening on Twitter**

If you’re investing time and effort in social listening on Twitter, the first thing we recommend would be to use a Twitter data extractor or social listening tool. (More on this below.)

These tools help you look at the data and categorise public sentiment often in 3 categories:

_Positive
Neutral
Negative_

**Step one: Choose and track the right keywords**
The first thing you should do is find the relevant keywords your customers or audience is using when they are searching for your brand, product/service, or topic. You can then track these keywords on a social listening tool such as Audiense.

If you are researching a brand, you may come across customer complaints, reviews, demands, recommendations, and questions by social listening on Twitter. All of this insight can help you improve your relationship with customers, provide new or better solutions, come up with new products, and even feed into your marketing or comms campaigns. You can also catch on to emerging trends in your sector.

If you are a researcher, academic, journalist, or government agent, you can monitor keywords, trending hashtags, or mentions to a specific account. For example, if you’re searching public opinion on Covid-19 vaccines, you can track keywords such as; COVID-19, vaccines, Covid-19 vaccine, Moderna, Pfizer, Sinovac, BioNTech, Johnson & Johnson, and others.

**Step two: Leverage your social listening data to understand public sentiment and predict future trends**
You’ve got your keywords, you’ve monitored the data, now what?

Analysing the social listening data can help you understand the public’s sentiment and to predict future trends. You can analyse what people think and how they are feeling about a certain topic, brand, product, or person by using social listening tools.

So what kind of metrics should you analyse? Here are a few examples:

- When you see sudden peaks in mentions
- When sentiment on a topic, product, brand, service or industry changes
- Seasonal trends that are relevant to an individual, a brand, a company, or for research.
- Differences between demographics
- When there is a change in the words being used to describe a product/brand/issue/individual etc.
- When location-specific data changes

**Use Cases of Social Listening in Different Sectors**

- Brands can use social listening to establish a solid marketing & communications strategy, strengthen their online presence, protect their reputation, monitor their customers’ experience, and more.
- Researchers can use it to gather data about their research topic (i.e. video games, Covid-19, Olympics), its effects on the general public, public sentiment, and more.
- Journalists can use it to spot breaking news stories, gather data for an investigative article, or find necessary media or even interviewees.
- Governments can use it to understand public sentiment about political candidates, new policies, when there are big changes such as #Brexit and more.

**Step three: Engage in online conversations to protect your reputation**
It’s vital to respond to negative and positive comments and be a part of the conversation to protect your reputation.

When someone mentions you, your company, your brand or your hashtag, acknowledging it can build loyalty on your customer’s or audience’s part. Your online reputation is now more important than ever. So your PR strategy on social media needs to be consistent and attentive.

Sometimes you may come across customer complaints or attacks on your online reputation. While you need to attend to your customer’s needs or negative comments, some attacks may be baseless. But when you genuinely make a mistake, the public backlash needs to be addressed. For example, when Adidas sent an insensitive email about the Boston Marathon, they apologised on Twitter.



Social listening tools will help you pick up on events relevant to your brand as well, so you can ride the wave of social media. For example, during the lockdown, takeaway food restaurants, streaming services, and many more brands closely followed online conversations to lighten up the public, offer support to frontline workers, and more.



You can also monitor the sentiment about your competitors and learn from their mistakes. Every once in a while poking fun at your competitors may even increase your reach and following.

By using social listening tools, you’re likely to find influencers who mention your brand, and you can increase your reach by engaging with them, or you can build new partnerships with other brands that mention you.



**Why Would Your Business Need to Use Social Listening?**

We’ve listed many reasons why your business needs to use social listening, but the main reason is understanding their customers/audience through data and sentiment analysis. Unless your business is a social media platform, chances are it’s difficult to collect customer opinions or reviews. Surveys are always an option, but often customers avoid them and they can be time-consuming.

Public accounts on social media platforms are easily trackable and the data is accessible. The only tricky part is transforming this data into actionable insight, and thanks to social listening tools, you can.

In addition to learning what your customers think or feel about your brand and products, brands can use social listening to quality control new products. Furthermore, you can see how these conversations differ according to demographic factors such as age, gender, geographical location.

_Here are some reasons Twitter listed on why your business needs social listening to understand online conversations:_

- 50% of consumers include brands in these milestone conversations to recommend them
- 34% say they want to thank the brand
- 34% do it because they’re looking for reciprocity from the brand in the way of a discount/incentive

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