Social Listening
What is Social Listening?
Social listening is the process of monitoring and analyzing public conversations on social media platforms and online forums to gain insights into customer sentiment, trends, and feedback, enabling businesses to make data-driven decisions.
The Basic Idea
Imagine you have recently launched a fitness apparel brand you hope to grow. There’s a lot of competition, and you must find a way to stand out and appeal to your target audience. As a small business, you may not immediately have the time or resources to conduct a traditional market analysis.
To better understand your market, you decide to engage in social listening. Social listening is the process of analyzing online conversations about your brand, your competitors, and the industry at large to gain insight into your audience.1 AI and natural language processing tools can aid in collecting and analyzing data by scanning social media platforms, forums, blogs, and news sites for mentions of specific keywords, hashtags, or brand names. This method provides insights into target audiences, customer sentiments, and competitors, allowing you to refine your marketing messages, improve products based on real-time feedback, and support crisis management in case a negative sentiment emerges. One of the most popular social listening platforms is Hootsuite, which tracks mentions, analyzes customer sentiment and highlights trending topics in a specific space.
To understand how to market your fitness apparel and grow your business, you review your brand anytime it is mentioned or tagged on social media and set up alerts to see any posts that hashtag #fitnessfashion and #activewear. This allows you to monitor trending content for fitness apparel, know the kind of products people like, and understand people’s sentiments toward your brand.2
Over time, you notice that many people are complaining about the lack of eco-friendly options in fitness apparel. Luckily, you already use sustainable materials for your clothing and decided to emphasize it in your marketing campaign. By social listening, you have gained a better understanding of customer needs and can adapt your strategies accordingly to position your brand as a leader in sustainability in the fitness apparel market.
In the fast-paced digital age, where we spend a great deal of our time online and use it as a means to express ourselves, social listening is a key tool for businesses. Social listening allows businesses to gather industry and competitor data and track industry trends to identify potential risks, inform product positioning, and discover influencers and brands to collaborate with.3
“A brand is no longer what we tell the consumer it is—it is what consumers tell each other it is.”
— Scott Cook, co-founder of financial technology company Intuit.4
About the Author
Emilie Rose Jones
Emilie currently works in Marketing & Communications for a non-profit organization based in Toronto, Ontario. She completed her Masters of English Literature at UBC in 2021, where she focused on Indigenous and Canadian Literature. Emilie has a passion for writing and behavioural psychology and is always looking for opportunities to make knowledge more accessible.
