Social listening software
Social media data is now a critical resource for competitive companies. Social-savvy brands use social listening software, or tools combining social media monitoring and social media analytics technology, to collect and analyze data from social media platforms. They employ social listening to find out who is talking about their brand, what is being said, and what the general trends and keywords driving online conversations are. Firms can use social listening software to measure and track brand health, analyze campaign performance, identify and better understand their target audience, monitor their competitors, and inform and improve their marketing strategies.
Choosing the best social listening software for your organization
For firms new to the social listening space, choosing the right tool can be difficult due to the abundance of programs on the market today. While many social listening software companies offer free demos, most of us don’t have a lot of time to experiment. It can be helpful to narrow down the list of solutions by comparing the most important features and functions to one’s business and use cases. Here are some things you may want to consider when carrying out your social listening tools comparison:
- How many keywords do you plan to track? Many social listening tools allow you to monitor only a limited number of keywords and/or limit access to a certain number of mentions depending on the plan you choose.
- What platforms, channels, and geographies do you need to monitor? Not all social media listening platforms offer the same coverage of data sources, and language support differs widely among services.
- Do you need access to past data? Some social listening software solutions charge more for past data or fail to provide access to it completely.
- Are you interested in visual listening, such as monitoring your brand logo, for example? Some social listening tools now offer image recognition technology that can help you do that.
- Do you need alerting and reporting functions? Alerts can help you detect a potential crisis early while reporting allows you to more easily share social listening insights across your organization.
- Does the solution offer any proprietary metrics? These can help you more efficiently sort through your social data and obtain actionable insights from your social listening streams.
How to use social listening software to support your business
Before deciding on a tool, or as you consider your options, you may want to start developing a social media listening strategy. By creating a strategy for your social listening initiative, you can make sure that you choose the best social listening software for your needs and get the most value from your investment. To do so, you’ll want to start by defining your use cases, considering what it is that you want to achieve and deciding who or which teams in your organization will be using the tool.
Once you’ve found a social listening software solution that meets your needs, you’ll need to choose the keywords you want to monitor. These will likely include your brand name as well as the names of your products and services, your top executives, your competitors, and industry-related terms. You will then need to set up alerts to get notifications when certain thresholds are crossed. Depending on the tool you use, you can also leverage powerful analytics capabilities such as audience analysis and trend analysis to find and learn more about your target audience, detect emerging trends, and surface other useful insights about your brand and your business from social data using machine-learning algorithms.
Social listening software in action: How this global brand uses Synthesio to boost their social ROI
As you develop your social listening strategy, you may want to consider how other brands are using social listening software to support their business. In the social listening case study linked below, you can read more about how Celcom, a leading telecommunications brand, used Synthesio’s Social Listening Platform to upgrade their social media and digital marketing strategies. Embarking on an extensive digital transformation at their organization, Celcom used Synthesio to gather mentions of their brand, products, and competitors on social channels. They used social listening software to measure and track brand health, find key influencers to amplify their marketing assets and evaluate the performance of their influencer marketing programs.
Comprehensive social listening software and robust social analytics from the industry leader
Synthesio is a mature Social Intelligence Suite integrating robust social monitoring software and sophisticated social media analytics into one easy-to-use toolset. Providing you with access to the widest range of social data sources on the market and extensive language coverage, Synthesio is an excellent choice for brands that require global reach.
Using Synthesio’s Social Listening Dashboards, your teams can view real-time engagement and reach metrics for your owned, paid, and earned media across social channels. Scroll through your brand’s social mentions, microblogging platforms, forums, customer reviews, and news media, and filter them by keyword, media type, source, geographic location, sentiment, Synthesio Rank, and more. Leverage Synthesio Rank, a proprietary metric, to focus on the conversations, people, and sources that have the greatest impact, and Social Reputation Score, another metric unique to Synthesio, to gauge consumer sentiment around your brand, or your competitors.
