In this digital era, it is indispensable for businesses to create an online presence. Apart from having a website, businesses have to establish their brand visibility through various social media channels. Social media channels are becoming a part and parcel of our day-to-day life because of the ever-growing mobile users all over the world. Since social media channels are easily accessible through mobile phones, it is easy for people to join social media channels of their choice.  

Nowadays, majority of the people are considering social media handles to understand more about the product/brand and make purchase decisions based on the opinions shared by other social media users. Hence, social media engagement is essential for businesses to connect with customers, gain business insights, create brand awareness, and establish your brand as the thought leader in your industry. 

What is Social Media Listening

Social media listening is the process of monitoring the social media handles of the brand for conversations relevant to your brand, competitors, and the industry in which your brand operates. Social listening is used to gather this information and analyze them to gain business insights that help to differentiate your brand from the rest and in brand positioning. 

Social listening is used to scrutinize the internet extensively to understand what social media users are communicating about your brand. Listening to customer conversations is essential to enhance the brand image without destroying the relationship between customers and the brand. 

Social media listening helps you to track your brand wherever it is mentioned in real-time and offers valuable insights from customers’ opinions, expectations, and pain points of the product or service. It can also be used to track the performance of your competitors, content that is trending, and topics discussed related to the brand. These insights will help the brand to make data-driven decisions to create a positive impact on the brand. 

Why is Social Listening Important?

Customers share their experiences and opinions about the brand because they expect their concerns to be addressed by the business. Social listening enables the brand to respond to the customers’ concerns within a short time, which help them to receive the solution based on their requirements. Based on a study conducted by HubSpot, 83% of the customers are happy when the brands address their queries and 63% are pleased when the brands become a part of their conversations. This proves that brands need to build connections with the targeted audience, both existing and new as it leads to sales. 

According to a survey conducted by Sproutsocial among 1000+ consumers, when the audience feels connected to the brands, 57% of the potential customers tend to spend on the brand and 75% decide to buy from such brands than their competitors. 

Social media is also used as a medium by consumers not only to celebrate the brands but also to voice their complaints and negative experiences. Apart from responding to their complaints, brands can address the pain points of the customers promptly, and thus enhance their experience positively. Social listening enables brands to dig out tons of insights on what is appropriate and what is not for both existing and new customers. This information is helpful for businesses to enhance their customer service, marketing strategies, and product/service.

AI-Powered Social Listening

Businesses are in search of innovative ways to stand out from the competition. The success of brand marketing campaigns depends on how effectively the brand can connect with its customers. Since different types of posts in the form of videos, images, and text are posted daily, social media channels of businesses create enormous amounts of data on a day-to-day basis. Incorporating AI tools with social listening helps to extract insights from complex data sets created by the daily posts. 

How AI Helps in Social Listening

The power of AI makes it more effective and contributes to the progress of the brand image, business, and product or service. 

Here are some of the benefits of using AI tools for social listening:

Extract Insights 

Huge chunks of data are generated daily on social media, and using AI tools enables businesses to extract valuable insights from this data. The valuable insights are extracted from comments, messages, tweets, posts, images, and videos. AI-powered tools excavate insights from structured, unstructured, and semi-structured data. 

Sentiment Analysis

AI tools use Natural Language Processing (NLP) to analyze people’s sentiments from online conversations. NLP categorizes the text data and analyzes it to extract information. It identifies keywords from different categories like positive reviews, complaints, product issues, discussions on product features, suggestions for improvement, brand mentions, and spam messages.

Visual Content Analysis

Videos and images are popular on various social media channels that play an important role in branding. For example, customers recording videos with reviews on the brand that might damage or enhance the brand image. These videos are identified by AI and are analyzed to detect the emotions involved. AI-powered tools use image recognition and computer vision technologies to identify brand logos, brand images, videos, and brand-related visuals. 

Visual content analysis helps the brands to understand the judgments of the target audience about the brand. This helps to enhance their marketing and promotional strategies to generate more sales. 

Industry Research and Competitor Analysis

Businesses can use social media platforms as valuable resources to conduct industry research and understand their competitors. AI-powered industry research and competitor analysis help to use historical data to stay ahead in the industry and build the credibility of the brand. 

Wrapping Up

Social media channels are the best mediums for businesses to interact with their customer base. By analyzing the data of different social media platforms, businesses can figure out the taste of their customers and act accordingly. AI-powered social listening tools will allow businesses to engage with customers without much effort. The effectiveness of these tools enables the brands to communicate and find solutions to problems in a real-time manner. The data extracted through social listening helps in identifying customer sentiments, expectations, and perceptions related to the brand.