Social media has become an essential element of any competitive company’s marketing strategy. However, the amount of resources that must be dedicated to maintaining all the various social media accounts and, later, analyzing the data provided by social media can become tedious. Therefore outsourcing this task has become a viable alternative. This new area of marketing that focuses on analyzing aggregate keywords, trends, and themes is known as social listening, and options are available for companies who wish to outsource this solution.

What is Social Listening?

With companies turning to social media to grow their followers and align consumers with brand vision and philosophy, a brand’s reputation can become dependent on correct analysis of social media analytics. Social listening captures data from all sources of social media including what consumers are saying about your brand and also where and how your brand is mentioned. These data are then gathered and analyzed into information useful and actionable for the company, and any red flags are pointed out. Media analytics must be used correctly in order to form the correct interpretation of how your brand is really doing.

Where and How to Apply Social Listening?

With quality social media analytics, your company can isolate the content your followers expect and want to see from you. You can also improve customer experience and respond to customer dissatisfaction quickly to stall any negative repercussions to your brand’s reputation.

Here are several useful analytics information that can be gained from social listening.

•  Social Influencers – Social influencers are social media users who partner with brands to convince consumers to purchase a product. Social influencers use a variety of social media platforms such as YouTube, blogs, Twitter, Facebook, Snapchat, and Instagram in order to promote sponsored products. They usually have their own followers and are able to provide feedback on the product based on their own expertise. Prominent influencers can be scouted and their feedback and their followers’ actions can be analyzed.
• Competitor Intelligence – Social media analytics can also provide valuable information about your competitors’ social media followers and marketing and content strategies.
• Product Research – Social media analytics can help when researching for product development. Social media analytics can obtain data about sentiments regarding your own product lines, across your competitor’s product lines, and also across the entire industry.

NetBase: The Social Media Analytics Company

NetBase is a social media analytics company that has won numerous awards since its founding in 2003. With an international customer base, NetBase provides real time analytics information to companies such as Coca Cola, Palisades Media Group, Target, and Taco Bell. From marketing to public relations and from product research to customer service, NetBase’s analytics platform is able to draw reliable insights from the gathered data.

NetBase: Its Services

NetBase offers a wide variety of services. It’s social media analytics platform covers both social media monitoring and social media listening. Here are two examples of the type of data NetBase can capture:

• All Conversation About Your Business – NetBase can help you understand what customers are saying about your brand using aggregate data pulled from over 300 million sources from over 99 different countries, 199 languages, and up-to-date interpretation of emojis.
• Content Performance – NetBase is able to gather data about how each of your content is performing. Analytics can include paid formats such as television, radio, magazine, banner advertisements. Other formats include sources that you own such as your company website, mobile app, and also earned formats such as by word of mouth, conversations on Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, blogs, Reddit, and forums.

There is no reason to sit in the dark when your customers are talking about your brand online. Customers tend to respond favorably when companies reach out to them in response to customer experience issues. And the quicker issues can be resolved, the more likely loyal customers can be retained and new customers can be acquired. With social media analytics solutions such as NetBase, you can receive business insights to make informed decisions on your marketing research, customer service, sales, research and development, as well as public relations.