If you’re a digital marketer or a mobile app creator, you may or may not have heard of social listening. This technique is a powerful tool when it comes to optimizing your social media strategy. It might not seem important, especially if you’ve already come up with a social plan. But social listening can be the difference between an account that collects digital dust, and a robust social media presence that inspires excitement and involvement around your app. Keep reading to learn more about what social listening really is and how it can help you.
How to Monetize in the App Market: #1 Subscription-based platform
This is the most popular monetization model used in the mobile market for apps. Creating a free and premium version of your app allows you to secure high-value, paying users while not alienating your loyal free users. Your free version should do the least amount necessary to provide a basic level of value, and the premium version should provide the complete set of features for the optimal user experience. Make sure to include options to upgrade to premium in as many touchpoints of the users’ journeys as possible.
What is Social Listening?
Social listening is the process of monitoring your social media channels for mentions of or feedback about your brand or its competitors, followed by the analysis of these discussions in order to draw conclusions and take actions.
Social listening allows you to understand the why behind your audience’s behavior on socials. It also helps you gain insight into your audience’s genuine thoughts and opinions, because people are often most honest when their sharing is unprompted.
Social Listening Vs. Social Monitoring
Social listening sounds a lot like social monitoring, both in name and explanation. But there is an important distinction between the two and it’s important to understand it in order to effectively build up your social strategy. To put it simply, social monitoring is the what while social listening is the why.
Social monitoring is the tracking of social content in order to find out what people are saying about your brand, your competitors, your industry, your products or services. Your company can craft responses to this content, but in order to take things a step further, you have to engage in social listening. Social listening involves analyzing social media content for deeper patterns and meanings that you can incorporate into your social strategy moving forward.
For example, social monitoring for a mobile app would be searching all mentions of the app on the internet and possibly creating accounts to respond to mentions on different social media platforms. But social listening might look like using the data to determine which platform or platforms host the most active and engaged users in order to focus your time, money, and effort more efficiently.
Why Social Listening Should Be Part of Your App’s Social Media Strategy
1. Social Listening Can Boost Your Social Media Presence
It’s one thing to have a social media presence, but it’s another thing to have that presence represent your brand fully and in a useful manner. Social listening can help you engage with your audience, something that 64% of users report wanting from the brands that they follow. And in fact, 55% of users report wanting brands to like or respond to their posts as well, according to Sprout Social.Â
The more interesting and engaging your brand is, the more likely consumers are to follow and interact with you on social media. And if you can invite more people to interact with you, then you have a better chance of influencing customers to make purchases. And social listening can help you be proactive with social media optimization in that you can craft a strategy when it comes to posting that maximizes the potential of your profile.
2. Social Listening Can Help Your Brand Build Strength
If you’re already monitoring a social media campaign, you’re in the perfect position to use social listening to help you. Is your campaign being received well? Are people indifferent to it? Or is it crashing and burning due to unforeseen backlash? One of the pros of social media is that you will see near-immediate feedback for everything you do. Another pro is that just because a campaign goes awry, does not mean that your brand’s image is ruined forever.
Social listening can help you not only respond constructively to negative feedback, but it can help you to take motivated action moving forward. By analyzing the response of your audience, you can discover how it has affected their relationship with your brand in terms of following, sales, downloads, etc. T
3. Social Listening Can Grow Your Audience
You know you want your social media presence to have value for your audience, but you should also think about how it can help your audience to grow by reaching targets who are not already familiar with your brand. Through social listening, you can determine what topics, hashtags, and pain points are at the forefront of your target audience’s mind and use that information to position yourself.
For example, you might have a mobile app in the hotel travel niche. If you notice through social listening that many users are frustrated with a lack of availability for last minute reservations, you can use this information to plan social content that highlights that very feature within your mobile app.
Social Listening Tools
Now that you have a firm grasp of the practicality of social listening, you’re likely ready to race to get started. The good news is that there are many tools that you can use to help you engage in social listening, and many of them are ones that social media marketers already know.
- HubSpot – HubSpot’s social media management software boasts the ability to run all your social media from one central location, never miss a mention, especially from the people who matter most, and attribute business value to social media. All of this is promising, and the company even offers a free demo on their site in case you’d like an in-depth tour of the service before you buy.
- Hootsuite – You may recognize Hootsuite from our list of best social media scheduling tools. The great thing about Hootsuite is that the platform has comprehensive social media software that will support you as you implement the day to day work of management, and then allow you to analyze performance without having to worry about transferring data.
- Sprout Social – Sprout Social’s management platform also included scheduling capabilities in addition to social listening features. Audience analysis, customer conversation tracking, competitor comparison, and sentiment research are just a few of the features included when you invest in this comprehensive tool.Â
- Buffer – Buffer has a free plan, which makes it a great place to start if you’re new. You can use the platform to track analytics for individual posts and overall profiles, while also viewing audience demographics. You’ll have to make many calls regarding action items as an organization, but your monitoring will be taken care of.
- BuzzSumo – BuzzSumo’s strength lies in its alerts function which allows you to create alerts for specific keywords, links, and authors around the Internet. You can set alerts for keywords related to your brand, competitors, products, and more. You can also track major blogs, and your own organic growth. The platform is very customizable, which can make all the difference because no two businesses have the exact same KPIs or measure them in the same way.
Social listening is a great tool to help you go above and beyond with your content marketing strategy. And the insights you gain from it can be used to inform your paid advertising strategy as well. With these two factors in mind it’s clear that social listening is something your team should begin incorporating into their social media strategy. After all, social media can play a huge part in the success of your mobile app when it comes to maximizing reach and engagement.