The Key Platforms For Social Listening

Social listening, which is different than social monitoring, is the continual act of analyzing conversations and trends around your business or brand, competitors, and the industry in general. Social listening allows you to understand the conversation around your industry and gain insight into what consumers need and expect from your multi-location business.

Why Social Listening Is A Must

If the information above didn’t convince you of the power of social listening, consider these statistics:

Globally, over 3.6 billion people use social media, which is projected to increase to 4.41 billion by 2025.

Ninety-six percent of unhappy customers won’t tell you directly but will tell 15 friends about their negative experiences.

Eighty percent of consumers say UGC (User Generated Content — photos, reviews, comments) highly impacts purchase decisions, 8.7x more than influencer content and 6.6x more than branded content.

If your multi-location business isn’t already leveraging social listening, think of all the conversations you could miss. While social listening can help you understand what consumers are saying about your brand, it can also help you uncover conversations around your industry, competitors, and potential user-generated content that you wouldn’t have seen otherwise. So which social platforms should your multi-location business focus on when it comes to social listening? We will discuss that next.

Top Platforms for Social Listening

A recent research report asked 650 social media professionals which platforms they consider most important for social listening. Those surveyed agreed that brands could gain the most insight into consumer sentiment by paying close attention to Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram. Platforms such as LinkedIn, TikTok, YouTube, and Reddit made the list but weren’t as popular. If your multi-location business has a presence on any of the platforms mentioned above, it’s essential to implement a social listening strategy. The report also asked respondents what the three most important things are to track.

The results included tracking:

Brand name mentions — 80 percent of brands track this
Hashtags
Industry keywords

It’s worth noting that respondents also mentioned relevant thought leadership and product keywords. While tracking competitors was not there, it’s still something your multi-location business should consider to stand out as an industry leader. Now that you understand which platforms you should be leveraging for social listening and what you should be tracking, it’s time to get started. Monitoring conversations across 100s or 1,000s of business locations can be challenging, but SOCi can help. Get more information here.