At present, enterprises must employ an extremely prudent attitude towards their public image because one terrible remark online can drive customers away or even send them to their competitors. In order to prevent this situation, businesses have to be proactive in monitoring how they’re being discussed online. That’s where social listening comes in.

What is social listening?
Social listening refers to tracking and analyzing conversations on social media sites to get insights about particular topics, brands, or industries, staying you up-to-date.
Social listening can observe your customers’ online sentiment and help you get a pulse on how your brand or products are perceived. And it is convenient for you to recognize potential customers and connect with them.
Social listening helps companies gauge their reputation and make necessary adjustments to increase customer advocacy.
Here’s how it works:
Step 1: Monitoring
Firstly, you monitor social media platforms where your target audience frequents, which makes you get a pulse on the online conversations that are happening.
Step 2: Analysis
Next, you analyze collected data to extract insights that can assist with your business improvement. For example, you analyze the sentiment conveyed by customers to assess the proportion of affirmatives and negatives.
Step 3: Response
After analyzing the data, you can take appropriate measures to improve based on your findings, especially those negative mentions of your product or brand.

Strategies/Tips
Social listening can help brands determine opportunities and risks, monitor brand fame, and track the competition. There are some key points to remember when doing it:
A. Know what you care about.
Before you start social listening, take a moment to consider your brand’s goals and objectives and what kind of information would be beneficial.
Do you want to listen only for direct mentions of your brand? Do you need to learn your industry trends?
B. Expand your circle proactively.
Apart from direct mentions and messages of your brand, you need a well-rounded view of the current landscape to make an informed decision, including listening to remarks on your industry, your city or country, and even the news of the economic and political situations.
C. Concern your customers.
You must spend some time and energy digging out customers’ requirements, desires, and pain points and make an effort to view things from their perspective. Then you are more likely to supply them with a superior experience with the help of social listening. Pay special attention to the tone and emotions implied in their words. If someone holds a negative mood regarding your brand, understand why he feels that way, and find the possible solution to remedy it.
D. Follow your competitors.
Your competitors are also using social listening to monitor what people are talking about their brand, industry, and even you. So, it is essential for you to do the same.
You can utilize social listening to judge what makes a good effect on your competitors and what causes an adverse result. Then, respectively, spare no effort to surpass them, and avoid and learn from their failings.
E. Be cautious.
Social listening can give you access to rich insights, but you need to leverage the data to complement your existing information instead of jumping to conclusions.
Furthermore, focus on the sentiment behind the information rather than the data itself. An overwhelming response doesn’t necessarily mean your current social media strategy is performing well, sentiment plays an important role.
F. Choose the right tools.
You may be at a loss when determining which social listening tool is suitable for your brands because of the various options on the market. Do some research in advance and hunt for a tool that meets your specific needs. As far as I am concerned, the right tool should be easy to use, provide valuable insights and be compatible with other marketing tools.

Tools
Social listening tools are tailored to collect data about a brand or topic from social media platforms and to help brands enhance their marketing strategies.

Scraping bots
Web or data scraping is the action of collecting and gathering information from the website, making it available and utilizable for your business.
Scraping Robot is an effective and fast way for scraping the web and social media sites for data. It can help you enlarge your database and get crucial information about customers and competitors in your industry. However, you may be in danger when extracting data for social listening without proxies.

Proxies
Proxies help mask your identity by providing you with different IPs. If you send thousands of requests through scraping robots, you won’t get blocked or banned while scraping data. YiLu Proxy offers you a secure and reliable environment for social listening.