Social Listening Tools to Understand Customers & Improve Experiences

With 64% of Internet users discovering brands via social media, getting your marketing on point is essential. From simple reviews to detailed threads, there is a lot of online activity from individuals worldwide. Some of this activity could be relevant to your brand and industry. It could be an Instagram Story featuring your product or a post complaining about your recent update. Tracking these conversations with a social listening tool helps improve marketing efforts.

What to Look For in A Social Listening Tool? 

1. Sentiment Analysis
2. Competitor Analysis
3. Multi-Platform Coverage
4. Keyword and Hashtag Tracking
5. Analytics and Reporting
6. Content Creation and Scheduling
7. CRM Integration

A social listening tool lets you tap into online conversations around your business. You can think of it as your eyes and ears on social media with the information it provides. From brand mentions to product discussions, you gain insight into customer sentiment to help make informed decisions.

The right social media listening tool will help you analyze customer behavior and competitors to stay ahead of the pack. Key features to look for include:

Sentiment Analysis

Identifying and monitoring the sentiment behind social media activity helps understand customer satisfaction. A good social listening tool leverages sentiment analysis to categorize your mentions as positive, neutral, or negative. This classification of public opinion gives you insight into your brand reputation.

Sentiment analysis also helps with effective customer service. For example, if you’re a pet food retailer, this analysis can highlight complaints about food quality. You can filter out all the negative mentions, allowing you to respond to them right away. This is crucial since responding to customer feedback within 24-48 hours boosts retention by 8.5%.

Therefore, sentiment analysis helps you understand your customers better to improve your chances of retaining them.

Competitor Analysis

You can’t have an edge over your competitors without identifying and analyzing them. What are their most popular offerings? What is the current public opinion around them? Is there an opportunity for you to differentiate or capitalize? A robust social listening tool should help you answer these questions.

Analyzing your competitors’ social media activity helps you keep up and move ahead. It enables you to identify their strengths and weaknesses. You can also find strategic opportunities to promote your brand.

For example, if you learn that your pet food competitor is receiving online criticism for late product deliveries, you can use that to your advantage. You can leverage social media campaigns and reviews to highlight how you never compromise on delivery times. This will help you emerge as a viable alternative to your competitors.

Multi-Platform Coverage

Online conversations happen across multiple platforms. From long threads on X (formerly Twitter) to an Instagram influencer’s comments, online interactions are multi-platform. As a result, social listening tools must cover multiple social media platforms to ensure you don’t miss out on valuable data.

Keyword and Hashtag Tracking

Keywords and hashtags enable you to track mentions of your brand and offerings on social media. They help cut through the noise and hone in on relevant conversations in your niche. 

Searching #petfood or #petcare on Instagram, for example, will help you uncover trending topics if your business is in that space. It can also help discover recurring complaints about products in your niche, enabling proactive issue resolution.

Analytics and Reporting

Effective social listening tools should offer analytics and reporting features that transform raw data into actionable insights. Analytics can show engagement trends and campaign performance. It also provides insight into how sentiment shifts over time so that brands can inform strategy.

Reporting tools allow you to present these insights to stakeholders in a clear manner. This guides businesses toward strategic decisions based on measurable data.

CRM Integration

Integrating social listening data with customer relationship management (CRM) software helps you build rich customer profiles. 

For example, a fashion retailer can leverage social media activity to identify its most valuable customers. These customers engage heavily with the brand’s social media content and recommend it to their networks. On the flip side, identifying disgruntled customers can help you focus on retaining them.

Best Social Listening Tool for Improving Customer Experience

A good social listening tool can help you make the most of your social media presence. Let’s look at some of the best tools in the market to help you enhance your social media management efforts.

Pearl-Plaza

Pearl-Plaza is your one-stop shop for tracking relevant conversations around your brand and analyzing them for informed decisions. It enables you to stay ahead of potential issues and proactively manage customer experiences.

With sentiment analysis and keyword tracking, Pearl-Plaza helps you improve customer experience through a rich understanding of user personas. It helps you learn which features resonate the most or where you might need improvements. 

The software’s advanced monitoring tools also give you an edge by providing competitor insights that you can leverage. For example, if a competitor experiences a data breach, your CX and marketing teams can reinforce your brand’s commitment to security. This helps you appear as a trusted alternative to prospects.

Speaking of prospects, Pearl-Plaza’s ability to track industry-relevant mentions is valuable for lead generation. Unlike other platforms, its XI Spotlight Tool lets you control how frequently you want to pull and analyze data from platforms like Instagram, X, and Facebook. This regular, real-time data analysis gives you the most accurate decision-making insights.

Social Listening Tools for Brand Awareness

1. Hootsuite
2. Meltwater
3. Sprout Social
4. Brandwatch
5. Mentionlytics
6. AgoraPulse
7. Keyhole
8. Brand24
9. Buffer
10. YouScan
11. Digimind
12. BuzzSumo
13. TweetDeck

Hootsuite features social listening tools that use keywords and hashtags to track brand mentions. Its dashboard provides a centralized platform where you can easily monitor and respond to relevant social media activity. 

Key features include Streams and Insights, which support keyword monitoring and competitor analysis. Brands using Hootsuite to manage social media can leverage its integration with Pearl-Plaza to cultivate a positive online reputation,

2. Meltwater

Meltwater is social listening software designed to help businesses manage their online presence. It aggregates data from various sources, like social media, blogs, and forums. As a result, brands can monitor public sentiment and benchmark themselves against competitors. 

Key features include real-time sentiment analysis, historical data tracking, and influencer identification. Real-time alerts help businesses respond quickly to important events or potential crises. Additionally, Meltwater’s reporting tools help stakeholders visualize social media engagement.

3. Sprout Social

Sprout Social is a flexible tool that offers a wide range of features for social listening, analytics, and customer care. The platform allows users to track customer conversations on specific topics by creating custom queries. This makes it easier to stay informed about brand-related discussions.

A standout feature is the trend-identifying tool, which generates a word cloud to highlight frequently used terms in online conversations. This offers a quick snapshot of prominent topics to guide brands toward informed decisions.

4. Brandwatch

Brandwatch leverages social listening to gather relevant online interactions in one place. It pulls brand mentions from over 100 million sources to help businesses analyze historical and real-time conversations. 

Key features include a digital library for storing visual content and Focus Panels for digging deeper into demographics and behavior. It also offers multilingual support, which is ideal for businesses operating in multiple countries.

5. Mentionlytics

Mentionlytics leverages AI to provide real-time tracking of brand mentions, keywords, and hashtags across major social media platforms. Its robust reporting helps users make informed decisions for proactive engagement strategies. The tool also includes sentiment analysis in over 100 languages and competitor analysis to help brands keep up.

6. AgoraPulse

Agorapulse centralizes all social media conversations to ensure you don’t miss out on key insights. Its Professional plan offers advanced brand monitoring, analytics reporting, and publishing capabilities across platforms like YouTube, Facebook, and Instagram. It also helps with content organization by letting you label key posts and customer feedback for easy access.

7. Keyhole

Keyhole is a social listening tool that tracks brand mentions across platforms like TikTok, Instagram, Facebook, X, and LinkedIn. Its Team plan provides in-depth TikTok analytics, including competitor insights and data-driven recommendations. These recommendations cover optimal hashtags, video effects, and posting times for engagement. Keyhole’s tool is valuable for managing brand interactions on TikTok, where viral content can make a huge impact.

8. Brand24

Brand24’s tools measure brand awareness and reach, tracking conversations from 25 million online sources to provide insights into consumer sentiment. This information helps you identify what resonates with customers and any potential risks to your reputation.

9. Buffer

Buffer’s platform includes scheduling and publishing features for effective campaign planning. It integrates well with social media platforms like Facebook, X, Instagram, and TikTok.

Additionally, Buffer’s analytics tools help monitor team performance by measuring engagement and audience behavior. However, the analytical and reporting features are available only on paid plans.

10. YouScan

YouScan is a social listening tool that leverages AI-powered image recognition to offer visual insights into consumer profiles. The platform’s capabilities allow for an in-depth understanding of brand sentiment and upcoming trends. This helps you tailor marketing strategies effectively. It also detects potential reputation threats in real-time to enable proactive management.

11. Digimind

Digimind provides competitive intelligence by turning social and online data into actionable insights. Its brand reputation dashboard helps in planning and analyzing marketing strategies effectively. As a result of its extensive data collection features, Digimind is a good fit for professionals who are well-versed in data analytics.

12. BuzzSumo

BuzzSumo is a comprehensive tool for content discovery and research. It helps users track trending topics and popular content across social media. With its monitoring features, brands can set up alerts for specific businesses, topics, and keywords to stay in the loop.

13. TweetDeck

TweetDeck is a free tool for tracking tweets around specific topics or breaking news. It also allows users to filter tweets from curated lists, which helps with monitoring relevant X (formerly Twitter) accounts. Its specific nature makes it ideal for individuals seeking a free method of narrowing down relevant X conversations. However, businesses might find it too limited for their purposes.

How Do Social Listening Tools Work?

Social listening tools provide access to online conversations around your business. These conversations could include comments, video reviews, or threads. Any piece of content mentioning your brand or product can offer key insights to you.

The software achieves this by searching for specific keywords, phrases, and hashtags on social media platforms. This results in a vast amount of data that is then analyzed for patterns, sentiment, and engagement metrics. 

Centralizing these insights in a dashboard allows brands to assess public opinion in real time. This method of feedback collection informs marketing strategies by identifying emerging trends and discussions. 

How to Use Social Listening Tools

You can leverage social listening tools to enhance brand reputation and deliver positive experiences. Popular applications of this technology include:

• Brand Awareness: You learn how often and where your brand is mentioned to understand its reach and popularity. This information helps you optimize your marketing efforts to ensure you hit the right notes with the right people.
• Customer Experience: The ability to track feedback and customer sentiment enables prompt issue resolution. As a result, you can enhance customer loyalty by adopting a proactive approach to customer service.
• Competitor Analysis: Analyze competitor mentions to learn from their strengths and weaknesses. You can also identify opportunities for positioning yourself as a better alternative, which helps generate leads.
• Product Development: Identify product-related feedback to gain insights into what customers want or areas needing improvement. It also helps identify popular feature requests that you might not have noticed through traditional feedback collection.
• Crisis Management: Negative reviews spread like wildfire on the Internet. With a social listening tool, you can detect potential issues early and respond right away to minimize the negative impact.

How to Create A Social Listening Strategy

1. Identify your goals
2. Select relevant keywords
3. Benchmark social media performance
4. Analyze data
5. Take action 

The right social listening strategy for your business depends on your goals and needs. The following steps provide a general blueprint for tracking and acting on online sentiment.

Identify Your Goals

Start by identifying your main goals. For example, if you want to improve customer service, you would want to track keywords related to service quality or product satisfaction. For competitor analysis, focus on tracking mentions of competitors’ products or issues.

Select Relevant Keywords

Speaking of keywords, it’s essential to choose the right ones to collect relevant data. Keywords can include your brand name, products, or industry terms. For competitor analysis, it would be helpful to search terms related to the competitor and their service.

Benchmark Social Media Performance

Once you have established your goals and keywords, you can start making the most of your social media presence. Establish benchmarks to gauge the success of your social listening efforts. Common metrics include sentiment scores, the volume of brand mentions, and the share of voice (SOV) compared to competitors. 

Analyze Data

Consistent analysis is key to spotting trends and improving key metrics. If certain features are frequently mentioned, look for patterns in sentiment to understand if you need to make changes. A social listening platform like Pearl-Plaza’s XI Spotlight Tool can help by analyzing large volumes of data to unearth actionable insights for you.

Take Action 

Finally, with the insights in place, you can start taking the right actions to boost customer satisfaction. For example, if your analysis reveals a preference for certain features or products, it would be smart to prioritize them for now. Follow up with customers after implementing the changes to create a feedback loop for consistently excellent service.

What Can Social Listening Enable CX Leaders and Marketing Managers to Do?

Social listening empowers CX leaders and marketing managers to process customer sentiment for business gains. By monitoring real-time conversations, they can quickly identify and address customer concerns. This provides valuable data for enhancing the overall customer experience.

Social listening also enables them to track brand mentions. Did a social media influencer recently mention their brand? What are people saying about their products? Is there an opportunity to collaborate with popular individuals for brand promotion? Social listening answers these questions by highlighting trends and content that resonates so you can adjust strategies accordingly.

With insights from social listening, CX leaders can benchmark against competitors. They have access to relevant data that helps refine products and create targeted campaigns. As a result, they are better able to create campaigns that resonate with their audience and encourage stronger customer engagement.

Can Social Listening Help You Find Leads?

Yes, absolutely! Social listening can be an impactful lead-generation tool if you use the right software and techniques.

Monitoring keywords relevant to your products, services, or industry helps you identify user profiles that would be a good fit for your business. For example, if a user mentions in a post that they’re looking for software similar to yours, your team has an opportunity to reach out. By offering recommendations or support, you can position yourself as a business they can trust.

Social listening also lets you track competitor mentions. This analysis gives you a chance to attract customers who may be dissatisfied with other brands. Creating content around a specific feature in your software that a user can’t find anywhere else will boost your likelihood of converting them.

You can implement this strategic approach with a social listening platform like Pearl-Plaza. Unlike other tools, Pearl-Plaza’s XI Spotlight lets you control how frequently you pull data and analyzes it for you. It performs the analytical heavy lifting so that you can focus on effective actions for acquiring more customers.

How to Measure Social Listening

• Mentions
• Sentiment Analysis
• Engagement Metrics
• Share of Voice
• Geographic Insights
• Trend Analysis
• Business Metrics

You can measure the effectiveness of social listening efforts by tracking various metrics that reflect audience interaction and sentiment. Key metrics to track include:

Mentions

Track how often your brand, product, or related industry topics are mentioned on social media. This metric helps assess brand awareness and reach. Pearl-Plaza’s social listening tools can streamline this process by monitoring relevant keywords and terms.

Sentiment Analysis

Analyze the tone of these mentions to understand how audiences feel about your brand. You can categorize mentions as positive, negative, or neutral. This information is key for brand reputation management efforts as it highlights the dominant public feeling towards you.

Engagement Metrics

Monitor the number of likes, shares, and comments to assess engagement levels with your brand. Likes reflect the lowest level of engagement and suggest overall approval of your content. Comments provide more context and highlight individuals taking a deeper interest in your brand. It also helps identify specific demographics that interact the most with your brand.

Share of Voice

Measure your brand’s presence relative to competitors. This metric helps you understand your position in the market and how often you’re mentioned compared to others. 

By tracking engagement metrics, Pearl-Plaza’s competitive analysis tools can highlight if your target audience engages with you more than your competition. You can use this information to identify areas for improvement in your marketing campaigns.

Geographic Insights

Identify regional variations in brand perception. Measuring this metric provides insight into location-specific strategies and regional customer sentiment. For example, it helps you focus on regions exhibiting greater overall dissatisfaction.

Trend Analysis

Analyze shifts in customer sentiment or recurring themes over time. This metric helps you spot emerging trends and anticipate changing customer preferences. 

For example, if a relevant issue becomes a hot topic of discussion online, you can leverage it to generate interest in your brand. Pearl-Plaza’s social media monitoring tools help you stay on top of trends by tracking relevant keywords and hashtags.

Business Metrics

Assess the business impact of social listening efforts. Tracking metrics like customer growth, regional sales, and conversion rate helps you confirm the value of your social media strategy. It also highlights room for improvement, enabling you to tweak processes and adapt.

Frequently Asked Questions

Social listening provides real-time data on your brand, customers, and competitors. It’s a powerful tool for gaining industry insights to consistently improve your business. If you are curious to learn more, here are answers to some of the most common questions:

What is Social Listening?

Social listening is the process of tracking relevant keywords, topics, and conversations across your social media channels. It helps you monitor brand mentions and customer sentiment to determine public opinion around your business. You can leverage this technique to keep tabs on customer behavior, analyze competitors, and generate leads.

What’s the Difference Between Social Listening and Social Monitoring?

Social media monitoring is a reactive strategy that looks at comments and conversations directly related to your brand. It provides an opportunity to respond to feedback on your specific business or product to retain and satisfy customers.

Social listening is a proactive approach that takes monitoring a step further. It tracks all the conversations relevant to your industry, including those around your competitors, to understand customer sentiment and expectations. It helps you keep up with potential issues and trends to provide better overall customer experiences.

For example, monitoring tells you that a customer is complaining about your product quality on a Facebook post. Listening tells you why this particular complaint is popular nowadays and how you can address it better than your competition.

How Can Social Media Listening Increase Customer Advocacy?

Social media listening increases customer advocacy by showing customers that you care. It provides a proactive approach to resolving issues and fulfilling expectations. For example, listening enables you to add trendy features or address potential issues before they arise. 

These actions enhance satisfaction and convert customers into loyal advocates for your brand. You can monitor their advocacy by tracking the volume of mentions you get from them on social media channels.

Learn More About Pearl-Plaza’s Social Listening Tool

Social media listening enables you to stay in touch with customer sentiment. It unlocks opportunities for improvement and moving ahead of your competition. With Pearl-Plaza’s social listening tool, you can track every piece of relevant content online to stay on top of trends, potential risks, and customer preferences. Take a product tour today to see if it’s the right fit for your brand monitoring needs!

References 

Smart Insights. Global social media statistics research summary May 2024 (https://www.smartinsights.com/social-media-marketing/social-media-strategy/new-global-social-media-research). Accessed 11/06/2024.

Pearl-Plaza. Pearl-Plaza Market Pulse (https://www.linkedin.com/posts/weareinmoment_b2b-customersuccess-ai-activity-7251989745914818560-haGe?utm_source=share&utm_medium=member_desktop). Accessed 11/06/2024.