If you’ve been in the digital marketing set-up long enough, you’ve probably come across many niche marketing terms come and go. Sometimes marketers create marketing terms for obvious stuff that doesn’t need a special label. The seasoned and grizzled professionals always roll their eyes when a brand new ‘term’ gets trendy on digital marketing blogs and makes people go nuts.
If you are one such seasoned digital marketer and you think social listening is just another ‘trendy’ word, you could be wrong this time.
What is Social Listening?
According to Delhi Courses Academy, The first mistake people make when talking about social listening is equating it with social media. A good part of social listening is premised in social media, but that’s not what it is defined by.
Social listening is the practice of analyzing what people are saying about a given topic online. By ‘online’, social listening stretches its domain beyond social media and extends to blogs, forums, and all kinds of other relevant platforms.
Why Is Social Listening Important?
Think back to the time when you studied at a digital marketing institute or simply learned about it online. What was the biggest challenge you faced? Creating the next big thing.
All of us want our brand and content to go viral. We want to connect with a large portion of an audience. We can do so by understanding the audience more closely.
Social listening is a more collative effort in the same. With the help of the tools at their disposal, marketers can practice social listening and figure out what people are saying about a topic online.
For example, let say you start a fashion blog. Since you want more views on your content, you are incentivized to write content based on popular topics related to fashion. So, you use social listening to find out what is the most popular topic being talked about in fashion. Then, you do research on the topic and look for things most other fashion blogs are covering the popular topic. Then, you write an engaging blog based on this topic and get more page views.
Then, you talk about the content you wrote on social media and get some traction there as well. This careful breakdown of popular topics in a strategic manner to get more views is called social listening.
What Are Some Popular Social Listening Tools?
There are a number of good tools you can use for social listening. The key lies in using social listening smartly. Any marketer with some money in his pocket can get a social listening tool and use it. The smart marketers are those who know how to use social listening smartly and combine popular trends with actionable content.
Some popular social listening tools marketers can use include Awario, Buzzsumo, and SproutSocial.
In Conclusion
Social listening is not just a reference to another entrant on a list of trendy social media trends and tools. It stands apart and remains one of the most game-changing social media changes in the past few years. This article covers some of the basics of social listening
About the Author- Kumar Avinash is a well-known social media influencer and marketing coach with a long history of success with various clients. His current position is that of a guest writer at Delhi Courses Academy, an institute known mostly for its digital marketing course in Delhi.