Drugi jezik na kojem je dostupan ovaj članak: Bosnian
Author: Jelena Spalatin, Content manager, Dialog komunikacije
Social listening is a process of monitoring digital conversations which helps us understand what customers are talking about the brand and industry. Simply put, ignoring social listening is like creating your business strategy with your eyes closed.
Social listening can give you an insight into what your consumers expect from you and how good you are in meeting their needs and how they perceive you in relation to your competitors.
Social listening is simplified through the use of third party software to help with aggregating data through platform APIs. Since December 2017, social listening software mainly relies on publicly available social networking and digital media data. Publicly available sources of data include Twitter, blogs, forums, websites, and Reddit. Private data sources include Facebook, Instagram and Snapchat, and can not pull data and analyze it, which is a problem for this data collection approach.
Global players and most popular platforms are Facebook, Facebook Messenger and Instagram, which have the largest number of monthly active users and time spent on the platform.
With a large number of active users, it is expected that these platforms will have numerous conversations and information that could be very valuable to brands. Current social media listening cannot mine for these insights, so is it wise to make decisions based on incomplete data? Probably not.
How to access this private or dark social network data?
- Manually searching your Facebook and Instagram pages for your brand or company: See reactions, comments, and shares related to your content
- Analyzing Facebook and Instagram pages of your competition
- Searching for Facebook or Instagram through relevant hashtags
- Creating content that requires feedback from users. Think about ways to encourage your audience to participate.
- Although not considered dark or private, it’s important to remember that a large number of social network users are just observers who will consume content without interaction
When you collect all social networking information, it’s always wise to validate some of the hypotheses that you have using:
- Traditional quantitative and qualitative methods (telephone and electronic surveys, focus groups and in-depth interviews)
- Third-party research data
- Keep in mind that no tools or software will generate insights and conclusions, you still need people to conduct analysis and validate
Before relying solely on the information provided by social listening for your next strategy, product roll-out, or customer service response, consider that you actually get only one part of online conversations. Increase the listening volume of your social media listening and dominate the competition.
