Everyone knows social listening tools scan the web to to identify insights helpful for managing your reputation, strengthening customer relationships, and unlocking market trends.
But there’s even more to it. We talked to marketers and did some scanning the web ourselves to put together this list of less obvious social listening benefits you might not have heard of before.
Bonus: Take action on customer insights and drive impact for your organization with our complete guide to social listening using Hootsuite x Talkwalker.
Let’s recap the main benefits of social media listening first. Here’s your bread and butter, day-in-day-out, must-have intel from social listening.
Then we’ll get into some more sneaky benefits that will blow your give your team a new perspective on social listening — and maybe eben on social media marketing as a whole.
1. Audience insights
Social media listening uncovers what your audience really wants from you.
People are already talking about you every day on social media, forums, and communities; you just need to tune in.
Social listening tools turn what would be a time-consuming, manual process of endlessly scrolling and searching into an efficient and automated process, scanning billions of posts each month with the power of AI.
Find the conversations that matter, from customers posting Reels about how much they love your product(s), to those posting about a negative experience too.
In both scenarios, you learn useful information to improve your business and can take actions to make these customers feel valued.
2. Free customer intelligence
Imagine having thousands of focus groups at your fingertips 24/7. Social listening tools like Talkwalker monitor billions of sources every day to find customer comments about you, and posts about your brand’s competitors too.
Yep, use social listening to snoop on all the major and minor irritations customers have with your competitors’ products, so you can make your products the ideal solution.
Neatly bundled into actionable reports, all this feedback is like a beautifully wrapped gift for your sales, marketing, and product teams. (Seriously, customer comments are what they want for the holidays, thank us later.)
3. Crisis prevention
Instead of manually trying to gauge how people perceive you from individual post mentions, social listening tools track your brand sentiment automatically over time. That includes noticing spikes of either positive or negative sentiment, a warning sign of a potential impending PR crisis.
By noticing sentiment shifts quickly, you can mitigate damage by getting in front of public relations issues before they blow up. A quick response can make a world of difference, from saving your job (eek) to saving the company tons of money and irreparable damage to their brand reputation.
Even if you don’t post about an issue publicly (or Paul from Legal won’t let you), social listening tools still allow you to track valuable feedback during a crisis and measure how it’s impacting your brand.
4. Deepening customer relationships
Social listening can also uncover feel-good moments where you’re trending for a positive reason, allowing you to capitalize on the momentum.
A recent example of this is the rapid rise in popularity of Stanley reusable tumblers following a customer’s viral TikTok in 2023 that showed how her Stanley cup survived a car fire with ice still inside. The video, which is great UGC content on its own, now has over 96 million views, but a crucial early action Stanley took helped it get there.
Noticing the massive attention the video was already getting, president of Stanley, Terence Reilly, responded with a stitch less than 24 hours later offering to buy the customer a new car, which sent organic reach to the moon.
People love happy endings. As the comments and shares started rolling in, so did the sales. Almost overnight, demand for Stanley cups surged and people even waited in line overnight to buy the $54 cups.
Thanks to a mix of product innovation, influencer marketing, and smart social listening to optimize viral opportunities, Stanley experienced a 971% jump in sales in four years, going from approximately $70 million in 2020 to $750 million by 2024..
Imagine if Stanley never saw that customer’s video or responded to it? Oof.
While you may not experience such a meteoric event, you can still deepen customer relationships by replying to posts and engaging your audience.
With a social listening tool like Hootsuite, you can save searches and check on them regularly to make sure you never miss a high ROI viral moment waiting to happen.
By automating the process of finding posts to interact with, you can spend your time actually interacting with customers and building those relationships.
Social listening = less scrolling, more meaningful interactions.
5. Industry trends
When you track keywords, hashtags, and product or company names with social listening, it’s easy to stay on top of industry and marketing trends.
Not to copy your competitors, but knowing what they’re up to is part of staying informed about your industry.
Social listening can even provide opportunities to differentiate yourself in a fun way by commenting on your competitors’ posts to start some attention-getting branter:
Are the normies gone yet? Let’s get into the secret, spicy, unforeseen benefits of social listening.
1. Innovation
Where better to get ideas to improve your products than from the people who love and use them every day? Companies that listen to their customers end up on top.
Zoom revamped their whiteboard feature based on customer requests, and Trello regularly adds new features suggested by their community.
Source: Atlassian/Trello
Of course, Hootsuite also adds new features social media managers everywhere want from customer feedback, like our newly redesigned dashboard.
2. Localized marketing strategies
Want to break into a new region or market? Or create social profiles in another language or for a specific country?
Social listening helps you discover how a new market differs from your current one and identifies data-driven opportunities to grow.
Besides doing good old-fashioned human research, use social listening to discover local trends, phrases or slang your target audience uses, and stay on top of any cultural differences or holidays going on so you don’t accidentally offend anyone.
3. Customer journey analysis
We all want to know exactly where every purchase originated from, right? To be able to track a new customer from the hashtag they clicked, to how long they browsed the website for, and ultimately, what they bought.
While analytics have come a long way, so has data privacy (and with good reason). The reality is more often than not, companies have a fragmented customer journey map with plenty of holes and assumptions.
Our journey mapping methods that aren’t scalable. Like me, fellow freelancer Kawusara Salley relies on more old-fashioned methods:
I’ll ask [clients] how they found me and keep track of it in my project management tool. Some [freelancers] even ask right away on the contact form of their website.
Kawusara Salley, Freelance Writer
A social listening strategy closes those gaps by not only finding out where people are hearing about you, but providing the ability to jump in and connect with new leads.
We’ve seen a number of times people asking, “Can anyone recommend a tool to schedule my posts?” Or, “I wish I could schedule Threads.” These help us identify exactly what step 1 is: Lack of awareness of our product or service.
Using social listening, we’re able to search for specific keywords or phrases that speak to the problem our services are solving, jump into the conversation, and make a new connection.
Trish Riswick, Social Media Team Lead at Hootsuite
By scanning billions of social media posts, websites, forums, communities, and podcasts — yep, podcasts! — a good social listening tool like Talkwalker can identify all the places your company or products pop up. Talkwalker can even identify your products in images, videos, GIFs, and memes.
4. Partnerships and influencer marketing opportunities
Social listening tools can identify the types of influencers that make the most sense for your next marketing campaign, and accurately measure campaign performance during and after.
For example, cosmetics maker L’Occitane en Provence used Talkwalker to measure performance during a micro influencer campaign (those with 10,000-25,000 followers). Talkwalker allowed them to easily do brand sentiment analysis and track engagement metrics, as well as unique visual data features, such as key sentiment drivers and a dashboard of the most engaging posts about the campaign.
Source: Talkwalker by Hootsuite
The detailed tracking Talkwalker provides gives you real data on the effectiveness of influencer campaigns, as well as the (arguably) more important “soft benefits” of these campaigns: positive brand sentiment shift and the value of earned media.
5. Social media trends
Staying on top of the latest social media trends is a side benefit of social listening. Besides knowing what people are saying about your company and products, you also know the general things they’re talking about.
Are TikTok dances still in? What’s the latest hilariously grim, existentialist meme going around?
Memes are no laughing matter: when done right, jumping on these trend posts can garner tons of attention and new followers.
The key is in doing it “right.” Meaning stay true to your brand voice. If your brand isn’t usually cheeky or funny, steer clear of posting memes just to get likes. It won’t work.
Psst: Check out our Social Media Trends 2024 guide for ones to watch, and which are best for your organization.
6. Refine your brand voice
Social listening can uncover the phrases your customers use to find and describe you, as well as the way they talk about your industry. Incorporating the language your customers use helps you better connect with them and attracts new people into your audience.
You don’t need to do a 360 if your customers speak informally but you prefer to keep a formal tone of voice, but consider updating your brand voice to include even a few key phrases your customers use.
7. Live event measurement
Follow what people are saying at your event, share their content, and get ideas for your own content in real time with social listening. You can’t ask for faster or easier feedback than that.
You can even use social listening to create immersive experiences at your event. Many apps let you create feeds using a specific hashtag, but Talkwalker steps it way up to identify posts about your brand or product, even if they don’t include your hashtag or name. Plus related conversations to identify trends, common themes, and new content you wouldn’t otherwise see.
Source: Talkwalker by Hootsuite
8. Unlock new marketing channels
Social listening will tell you if customers are talking about you on platforms that aren’t part of your usual analytics, like SEO darling Reddit or other hidden communities.
For example, if you see a spike in social listening mentions about stock prices, like this one from Verizon…
Source: Talkwalker by Hootsuite
… you can correlate that with new mentions on social, websites, or podcasts. In Verizon’s case above, the spike in discussion came after being mentioned on the Bloomberg podcast. With a large audience, the positive mention likely influenced more conversations about the stock.
Source: Talkwalker by Hootsuite
Thanks to this information, you can evaluate if it makes sense to reach out to the source of the spike for further advertising or partnership opportunities.
Without social listening tools, it’s almost impossible to track and correlate information like this. Talkwalker scans billions of sources from social media channels to forums, websites, communities, and more to give you a full picture of where your customers are and how to reach them… even for the marketing channels you’re not currently using.
9. Fill your content calendar
What’s easier than brainstorming all your own content ideas?
Answer: Posting what your customers actually want to see.
Social listening tells you what they want to see. You make the content. It really can be that easy, friends…
Even easier? Don’t create any content at all: use social listening to find user-generated content (UGC) that’s already out there about your company, then share it. (Okay, you still need to make some of your own content too, but UGC is influential and saves you time.)
Source: Talkwalker by Hootsuite
10. Efficient customer service
Social listening shouldn’t be your main customer service channel but it can play an important part.
For example, I was having issues with Google Docs and vented on X (Twitter) about it, not expecting any reply. To my surprise, the Google Docs account replied very quickly with a link to a helpful article. As a customer, I felt seen and valued.
Discover valuable insights you can’t find anywhere else with Hootsuite Listening. Get started managing all your social profiles in one place with a free 30-day trial.
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