Discover the fastest way to understand your audience and superpower your brand comms.
In today’s marketing world, cultural relevance is key to everything from getting your content seen by the right people to creating communities and, ultimately, conversions. You’re no longer competing with just your competitors; you’re competing against the latest memes, and cat videos, and don’t forget the platform algorithms.
Social listening is your fast-track way to becoming a culturally relevant brand.
What is social listening?
There’s been a lot of buzz about social listening recently, but what does it actually mean? In short, social listening just means tracking conversations on social media platforms.
Many brands use social listening to track brand mentions, analyse sentiment and track comments to respond to (brand monitoring). While this is extremely useful, social listening’s often overlooked value is in the consumer and cultural insights it can uncover.
In fact, many social listening tools allow you to listen to multiple other digital sources such as video sites, blogs, review sites, news, and even some messenger services, ensuring that you can find your online audience, wherever they are.
How can it help my brand be culturally relevant?
Social listening has many uses for different teams, but it excels in four ways for marketers who are looking for cultural relevance.
- Understanding your audience. This is incredibly important to marketers, and social listening can help you do that in real time and with real data. Moving beyond marketing personas, you can see what actual people are saying about any topic you desire – as they’re saying it. More than demographics, you’ll learn what your audience is interested in, what they like and dislike, what motivates them and much more.
- Understanding conversation around a topic. What are people saying about your brand? Your competitor’s brand? The holidays? Summer vacation? How people are cleaning? Whatever you’re interested in learning about, social listening allows you to quickly tap into conversations about the things that matter to you. You can analyse this content to identify pain points, white spaces, and moments of opportunity.
- Tracking Trends. We all know how important trends are to social media, regardless of the platform, but how do you know which trends are relevant to your brand and your audience? Social listening can help you identify the right trends for you and stop you from making missteps or posting after a trend has peaked.
- Optimising your social strategy. Once you’ve gathered all your data and uncovered game-changing insights, you can apply these to your social strategy, ensuring that your brand moves at the speed of culture. The same audiences often engage in different ways on different platforms. Using social listening to supercharge your social strategy with robust data is the best way to ensure social success.
Isn’t social listening just for huge brands?
No! It’s a common misconception that you need a team or specially trained analysts to get started with social listening. While all brands can benefit from social listening, smaller brands with more limited budgets often see the biggest benefits, as a social listening-informed strategy can help you cut through the noise and even identify the best ways to spend your social ad budget.
Getting started is easy.
Setting up a social listening search in YouScan, a top-rated social listening tool, is intuitive and simple. It is suitable for both beginners and seasoned professionals. Right from the homepage, you can see what’s trending in your search, what the sentiment is, and where in the world the posts are coming from.
Traditionally, to analyse social data, you’d already have to have some understanding of the topic that you were investigating. But with YouScan’s AI agent, Insights Copilot, you’re able to use an AI chat function to analyse and interrogate your data for you, removing the need for in-depth topic understanding. Ask CoPilot to perform a SWOT analysis, who the biggest influencers are, which brands appear in the conversation, or the key insights. This tool makes social listening insights available to all marketers, regardless of experience.
In short, social listening helps you know your audience better, and those insights mean that you can create better content for the people ready to engage with you.
Contact YouScan for a demo today.