#WhatisWednesday – What is Social Listening?

Photo by Tomasz Gawłowski on Unsplash

We often hear people emphasize how important it is to listen to understand instead of listening to reply. Not only is this effective for our day-to-day conversations, but it is a practice that PR agencies use to observe the conversations that are being had about their clients and their client’s industries.

According to Sprout Social, social listening is analyzing the conversations and trends happening not only with your brand, but happening in your industry and using those insights to make better strategy decisions.

Social listening differs from social monitoring since social monitoring is simply responding to individual brand mentions on social media. While, social listening takes it a step further by drawing conclusions and insight from those conversations to help tweak your strategy where needed and help you make better marketing decisions in the future.

Taking the time to listen and understand what your audience is thinking and saying will help you improve your communication strategy, messaging, a future campaign and build stronger partnerships.