Why social listening is critical for your content strategy

Leveraging the practice of social listening to help inform your next marketing campaign should be more of a ‘no-brainer’ than ever.

What better way is there to spy on your competitors, find out what’s happening in the marketplace, and pick up on emerging trending themes before they hit the mainstream?

The reality however still appears to be that it’s an eternally underused audience research tactic.

Back in the days of the COVID-19 pandemic, behaviours around how we used social evolved. Brands began paying more attention to both their organic and paid social channels; spending up to 60% more on social advertising (compared to pre-pandemic levels).

But, what many marketers may not have realised is that all of this extra activity and investment in social media over the past few years has resulted in higher, more concentrated volumes of published social content in the public domain. That’s a ton of extra data that’s out there right now — data that’s ripe for anyone with the right know-how to extract and analyse.

And that’s where social listening really comes into its own.

What is social listening?

Social listening is a research method that marketers can use to discover what their audience, customers, or competitors are talking about and publishing on channels like social media and forums. Bespoke query strings are used to pull data from different online channels — for example, forums, social platforms, news sites — and these can be refined over and over again to help pinpoint the most relevant data available.

An example of a basic query. In reality, these can get quite lengthy depending on the objectives of the social listening.

This data can then be analysed to uncover insights.

A dedicated social listening tool is used, often in conjunction with more traditional ‘desk research’ to help fill in any gaps and provide even more context.

Social listening is so much more than just finding mentions of words and phrases. You can actually ‘bend and flex’ the tactic around different use cases to help you:

• Identify current industry influencers

• Conduct sentiment analysis

• Demonstrate the success levels of a branded campaign

Another great use case for social listening? Leveraging it to help provide extra intel to internal colleagues to help them devise more impactful campaign creatives and content strategies, and learn what competitors are up to…

Is social listening already widely used by marketers?

Even in 2024, probably not — and its lack of uptake is essentially due to these four reasons:

1 - Powerful tools like Brandwatch require significant financial investment.
2 - Social listening (real social listening) takes time to learn and practice effectively. It’s not usually a quick exercise, and there is a great deal of manual work involved.
3 - Social listening never seems to have big-time thought leaders backing it and pushing it in their insights and research pieces. This means that it doesn’t ever seem to reach the mainstream and therefore become regarded as an essential tactic.
4 - And because of reason #3, there’s still too much ‘mystery’ about social listening and how it can be used.

Social listening hinges on ‘depth of data’

You need to potentially collect a lot of data upfront so that you can work on dissecting and analysing it later — this is how you end up with real insight.

Ok, so this may already be sounding like it’s all more trouble than it’s worth; expensive… time-consuming… You might be wondering why you’d bother to include it as a tactic at your organisation. Well, here are three possible uses for you:

1. Understand your target audience better

I don’t think it would be unreasonable of me to suggest that it’s just a small proportion of brands that truly understand their customers and target their audience effectively. Most brands either think they fully understand their audience because they’ve gone through the motions of some form of persona work, brand research, etc. etc. — or they’re painfully aware that there’s more work to do, but the time never seems right to really crack on with it.

The beauty of social listening is that it can provide brands with a relatively speedy route to either confirming or discarding certain assumptions they’ve made about their target audience. For example, it could uncover insights that allow your marketing team to make more confident decisions about the tone of voice (ToV) they use in their copy, as well as identify words that may resonate better with audiences.

2. Reliably identify emerging trends and key topics

Whatever industry you’re working in, the pace of change when it comes to ‘what’s topical’, ‘what people are thinking and talking about’, and ‘emerging marketplace developments’ can often be too quick for marketing teams and strategists to keep up with.

So, leveraging social listening for this purpose can be invaluable for helping you to plan your content and stay one step ahead of the competition.

You could take different approaches to conducting this type of social listening research, but here are just two:

• Basing your search on a specific time period and combining this with certain relevant keywords and phrases.

• Targeting your search to pull data from certain industry voices and thought leaders in your industry; using them as a direct source for establishing what the key hot topics, themes, and trends are.

Side note: “Social listening means word clouds, right?”

Using word clouds can certainly help you get to the crux of your results more quickly. It’s simply a data visualisation method that allows things to be presented in a more ‘easy-to-digest’ format.

What a typical word cloud looks like (created with a social listening tool).

3. Reduce the likelihood of sounding (and looking) like your competitors

Wherever you turn in terms of the sector you ‘play’ in, it won’t be uncommon to see that same marketplace saturated with similar-looking competitors all spouting similar-sounding things.

When there’s not enough to differentiate brands from each other, it can create confusion for potential customers. So wouldn’t it be great if there was a way to help a brand differentiate themselves better and cut through all the ‘samey’ creative out there?

There are so many ways in which you can utilise social listening for this very purpose — here are just two:

• Use social data from your competitors’ profiles to help you contrast and compare different creative aspects such as the ToV, formatting style, and messaging, as well as the visual creative used in their social content.

• Use social listening visualization tools like word clouds to help you establish (and demonstrate) any crossover or similarities in competitors’ language.

Ultimately, investing time in exercises like these allows you to identify where the ‘white space’ might be in the marketplace. “What aren’t our competitors talking about which we know our audience is interested in? Could we cover that in our next article/white paper/podcast?”

With your marketing team now mindful of this type of intelligence, new content can be built with the deliberate intention of meeting the possibly unmet needs of your target audience (whilst differentiating the brand from competitors).

You can also use social listening to track, measure and analyse mentions of competitors. For example, you could:

• Collect data on how often they’ve been featured by industry publications and media or how often they feature at important customer-facing events.

• Conduct a Share of Voice (SoV) analysis between your competitors and your organisation.

• Identify which thought leaders, third-party partners, or influencers your competitors are currently working and collaborating with.

• Use social listening to collect social data on responses to your competitors from their customers. What has delighted them? What has frustrated them?

All of this can provide incredible insight to inform your brand’s future content.

Is it worth investing in social listening?

The above are just quick examples of what you’re potentially able to do when you deploy social listening as an audience research tactic. It can’t provide any cast-iron guarantees on what’s going to work for attracting, engaging and retaining your future customers, but it does furnish content marketers with more of a fighting chance at answering classic questions like, “What does our target audience want and need?” and, “What are our competitors up to in the marketplace this month?”

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