Businesses are always looking for new and innovative ways to stay ahead of the competition. Are you in on this chase too? In today’s digital age, one of the best ways to do this is through AI-powered social listening. What is social listening? It is the way businesses track and analyze online conversations to gain valuable insights into what consumers are talking about, what they’re interested in, and how they feel about your brand. These insights can be used to create more effective marketing campaigns and better understand customer needs.
And yet, there are relatively few businesses that use social listening to make informed decisions. The reason? They’re not aware of advanced social listening tools and fear they are limited by extremely laborious manual monitoring of social media platforms.
Let’s explore the differences between social listening and social monitoring for businesses. We will also give you top tips on how to implement AI-tools that can automate this process and save you dozens of hours a week while at the same time bringing your branding and customer experience to the next level.
Let’s go!
What is social listening?
Social listening can be broken down into two steps:
Step 1: Monitoring social media profiles for mentions of your organization, competitors, products, and keywords that are relevant to your industry and business.
Step 2: Analyzing the information gathered in Step 1 to gain actionable insights.It might be as simple as responding to a pleased customer, or as significant as completely changing your brand positioning. This is what differentiates social monitoring, from social listening.
The goal is to scan the internet on a large scale, to discover what people are saying about your company. Pair this with AI and your social listening efforts will be far more effective for the growth of your company, product, and brand.
Social monitoring vs social listening
Social Listening vs Social Monitoring
Let's avoid confusion - social listening is different from social monitoring.
Social monitoring alerts you of a problem that needs to be fixed. Social listening goes one step further and gives you the context behind that problem. It helps you understand why it’s an issue in the first place, what was meant by the user who reported it, and what the best way to deal with the problem is.
Without this analysis, your brand will not be able to keep its customers happy. Without listening, all you’re left with is social engagements that are full of noise, creating too many touch-points for manual supervision.
Pair your social listening with AI
Identify key insights with AI-powered social listening. Automate responses and keep on top of your brand image with effortless efficiency!
There is a huge difference in the results of tools who use AI for social listening when compared with the tools who don’t.
Put the information into context
There is 1.145 trillion MB of data generated daily and every minute, 511,914 comments and 293,000 status updates are posted on Facebook, while 6,000 tweets are generated on Twitter.
This ranges from text to video to photos and is where AI-powered data tools show their advantage. AI tools can make sense of all this data, and generate insights based on this data.
What's more, tools like Levity use Deep Learning technologies to understand the entire context of the data rather than focussing on isolated words or themes.
Take advantage of real-time interactions
One of the best ways to communicate and engage with your consumers is through social media. So it comes as no surprise that companies are integrating customer support and care into their social listening plan.
Conversational chatbots on your website and social networking sites can improve your consumer experience by resolving problems fast and addressing inquiries and requests 24 hours a day, seven days a week.
Analyze visual content
Video content is especially popular on social media platforms, so you can't afford to ignore it and only focus on text mentions. Just imagine the potential brand damage coming from a discerned customer recording a video and sharing it with their networks on TikTok or Instagram.
Artificial Intelligence can utilize image recognition to identify logos, brand names, and various other items to detect brand-related content, even if the name isn’t mentioned explicitly in the text. Take a look at how you can use Levity to tag and categorize Instagram photos.
So AI-powered social listening tools can inform your marketing strategy and help you understand your target audience in ways that weren't previously possible. This kind of feedback is crucial when creating customer profiles, generating high-quality sales, and defining other marketing opportunities.
Categorize by topics and tone
AI is able to identify certain keywords that identify a certain subject in the message. like "complaints," "product concerns," or "technical assistance." It also detects the tone and intent of the message, and looks at the whole message contextually rather than focusing on isolated words.
Image recognition
The best AI tools for social listening are able to recognize images through Computer Vision. This lets brands detect not only the contents of a video or photo but also its potential emotional tone This is especially useful for social media listening, where graphic content is common.
Crisis detection
Automate alerts for crisis-related phrases is a proactive method of detecting potential brand catastrophes before they happen. A design company, for instance, could create alerts for words like "copyright infringement", "design theft", and so on, meaning brands can fight-fires before they become too big to handle.
AI tools for social listening
There are various tools that you can use to harness the power of AI for social listening. Here are some of the best ones:
Levity
Of course we had to start with Levity 🙂.
Levity is an AI automation solution that requires no coding. Our tool combines a simple and user-friendly interface with the power of Deep Learning technology.
Levity allows you to track engagement or friction between keywords, identify potential target audiences and influencers, and establish a baseline for your brand. The tool also helps you understand which of the thousands of mentions deserve attention, so you can become part of the discussion your customers are having as it happens.
SentiOne allows you to keep track of how people speak about your business online. It helps you sift through the thousands, if not millions of records – not only those published on social media, but also on blogs, news outlets, and review sites.
Through the use of AI, SentiOne helps you make sense of audience insights and understand whether you’re looking mostly at positive, neutral, or negative user sentiment.
Socialbakers
Socialbakers use AI to analyze mentions and brand-related content on social media. By pointing to the most significant topic trends and recurring questions, the platform helps businesses collect information about their audience, competitors, and more. The solution also integrates with customer support and community management software to help increase customer loyalty and the quality of customer care.
Mention
Mention facilitates real-time search and sets an alert that provides results continuously. With custom plans, you can also gain access to historical data upon request. You can usethis tool to search for influencers and track their future activities directly in your CRM software.
Now you can see that social listening is so much more than the numbers in social monitoring tools. It allows you to understand these insights and respond better.
Are you ready to get started with AI-powered social listening? Learn more on how Levity can help you make the most of reactive and proactive insights!
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