How To Use Social Listening In Content Marketing

In this article, I want to look at some of the tools that you can use to research the audience in content marketing. You have to know that it will be a fruitless effort if you start pushing out contents without understanding who your audience is. Among the tools you can use for audience research is a concept called Social listening.

Social listening is the process of monitoring digital media channels to devise a strategy that will better influence consumers. Taking information from places that consumers participate in online can be invaluable.

It is not enough to have a snapshot in time. Listening tools may only give you hashtags and content insights from a short, recent period of time. If you want to get to know your audience and competitors, you will have to engage in active listening over a period of time.

It’s important to note here that you shouldn’t focus on what your audience is saying about your brand or even competitors. You are looking for what matters to them in order to facilitate a more personalized engagement.

Benefits of Social Listening in content marketing include…

Before setting up a social channel for your brand or business, it is a wise endeavour to conduct a period of social listening in advance.

This will help you in three key ways.

Identify opportunities to leverage for your brand: it will help you identify any opportunities or platform usage that you can leverage for your brand rather than just “picking it up as you go along”
Spot potential risks or threats to your brand: you can spot any potential risks or threats to your brand by monitoring how the platforms are used, for example, the lack of age gating for content on Snapchat might pose a problem if you’re an alcohol brand who has to conform to over 18s or 21s marketing rules
Understand brand & business position on different platforms: finally, you can understand how brands and businesses fit into the ecosystem of each platform, for example, Facebook brand pages’ work better to engage with consumers rather than Facebook personal profiles for a brand

It’s important to note that social listening has its limitations based on how open social networks are with their access to social listening tools.

Some of the tools that can be used for social listening in content marketing include:

TalkWalker: monitoring of Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn and 150m websites.
Social Mention: shows detail on strength, sentiment, passion and reach. Displays keywords, hashtags and sites.
Hootsuite: one of the best free tools monitoring Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, WordPress. It also has a very useful weekly reports feature.

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