Why Is Social Media Listening So Important and How Does Netbase AI Give You an Edge
What is social media listening? It starts with social media monitoring, something of a counterpart. It’s a process of gathering information and social media exchanges in the form of keywords, phrases and even images and ordering them in an understandable way to make conclusions.
Why do you need social media listening? To stay well ahead of upcoming events, rather than stumbling into sudden occurrences without warning, so you can be ready to catch trends, be proactive and create business strategies and stay ahead.
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The process begins by defining questions you want answered: why, where, when, what, who and how. Answers might be knowing the competition, knowing brand sentiment – which is how customers feel about your brand – or finding emerging themes.
In the social media monitoring phase, social media activity relevant to your business is gathered, largely with AI, according to questions you want to be answered. This noisy or unstructured data is formatted through Boolean logic gates into a database, taking into account the language, region, type – that is images, video or text – the social media platform, the timeframe and even who said it. The data can be analyzed, whether according to mentions or likes or other parameters, to find the answers.
This is where social media listening happens. The information is aggregated and presented in such a way that permits interpretations or assumptions about the social media environment, innovations in the industry, even advocates of your brand who could become potential allies.
The whole idea is to get a baseline on your customer’s sentiment regarding your brand. Sentiment involves customer social media activity that is passionate about your brand. They can love it, in which case you want to know what you’re doing right, or, if not, more importantly, hate it. In this case, social media commenters can be very vocal.
Social media monitoring keeps an ear to the ground. Social listening makes sense of it so you know how to proceed in the event a spike occurs, whether bad or good, in that sentiment baseline and how to manage it, follow up on it or improve it.
There are lots of ways to do this, but to really get an overview takes more than manually checking through social media responses.
This takes AI.
As much information was created between the beginning of civilization and today as happens now every couple of days. AI now uses image and natural language processing to sort through volumes of activity on not just the higher-profile sites, such as Twitter or Instagram, but also Reddit or Tumblr or other newsgroups or forums. It also catches nicknames and misspellings and terms that are near to your industry.
Netbase’s AI Studio does this and presents it in a way that can be used without any extra work or prior training on the part of the user or viewer. This is done in the visual presentation of topic groups consisting of relevant documents and their amount of followers and mentions. These relevant documents lead to themes, derived from millions of points of data and conversations, which might otherwise go missed by simply checking into direct responses to your company.
Netbase takes you past a lot of time-consuming trial and error. It’s also an industry and peer-recognized leader in the field with Forrester, TrustRadius and G2 Crowd ratings.
Not paying attention to social media activity is tantamount to leaving your front desk unattended. A campaign of social media listening keeps you current and well-informed in the event of a sudden event surrounding your brand that goes viral. You know how to react to and mitigate negative events in real time, such as an ill-placed comment by an employee or company representative, or if a sudden positive event takes place, such as an inadvertent Instagram product placement by a leading influencer or celebrity. You know where to engage, promote, find emerging trends and even partner with influencers who are already promoting your brand.
Social media listening is about your customers and how they react to and perceive you and your brand and what you can do to provide the most current solutions to what they’re asking for, now and going forward.
Neha Nidhi
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