The amount of user-generated content produced on social media these days is staggering. In 2021, statistics showed that every minute, 694,0000 videos were viewed on TikTok, 510,000 comments were posted on Facebook, 350,000 tweets were sent, and 4100 sponsored Instagram posts were clicked.

In this abundance of content, your ideal customers are sending messages about what they want and care about, data that can be useful to help your business generate more sales. However, you have to know how to separate and track the signals from the noise.

One useful strategy your business ought to be employing is social listening.

Social listening (which more formally can be referred to as social media analytics or social media measuring) is the process of extracting and tracking information from social media channels to gather customer feedback and insights.

There are increasing levels of depth when it comes to social listening, and understanding the different levels can help you craft and deploy a more effective digital marketing strategy.

Primary Listening

The first level of social listening involves creating and analyzing posts that feature your brand’s hashtags or handles.

For example, you might want to create a post in which you ask your audience a question, and then “listen” to the answers you get in response. For example, you might ask a question about a recent product launch and post it to your Facebook page, your Twitter feed and/or your Instagram account – ideally with hashtags that let you follow the replies.

At this level, you will get some information, but it’s not yet deep insight. Unless you can spend every minute examining the profiles and content of each user who engages with your posts, you won’t really have enough data to effectively segment your audience. However, primary listening will still give you a valuable “first impression glance” of your overall audience reaction.

With primary listening, you want to focus on any patterns or trends that clearly jump out at you. These might be fruitful to explore further. Primary listening can also keep you in touch with what’s going on and the general sentiment of your audience in the current moment.

Deeper Listening

At a deeper level, you want to start tracking posts around a certain topic. This kind of listening goes beyond posts about your brand in particular, and starts to focus on your wider market or industry. 

For example, if you’re a sneaker company, you don’t want to just pay attention to posts about your particular brand of footwear but about sneakers and shoes generally. You probably also want to start paying attention to opinions expressed regarding the fashion industry broadly.

At this level, you’re going to want to start utilizing third-party and other social media tools to help you track different keywords, or even filter data by different variables. With deeper listening, you should start to get a sense of which topics matter most to your audience and which kind of content produces the most engagement. You can also start to generate data to help you segment your audience to help you plan more targeted digital marketing campaigns.

Social Monitoring

Social monitoring is an even deeper level of social listening that involves monitoring mentions of both your brand and your competitors and analyzing how your performance stacks up.

With social monitoring, you’ll track your brand to determine your overall reach and the types of content that generate the most engagement from your ideal audience. Then you’ll also want to actively track the activity around your competitors to get a comprehensive sense of the social media landscape surrounding your business.

For example, you’ll want to perform a competitive analysis and see, for example, where your strongest competitors are posting, how often they post, their content strategy, as well as their response strategy. With insights from competitive analysis, you’ll have data and inspiration to improve your own brand’s social media strategy.

If you’d like more guidance and an expert partnership to help you create and execute your social media strategy, find out how our team here at JXT Group can help. Learn more about strategies that can be customized to your unique business by speaking with one of our digital marketing specialists at 718-690-7302. Or get in touch via our online contact form.