When PR professionals build on PR objectives for their clients, they depend on the voices of their targeted audiences. As times have shifted and a significant pool of research now depends on the social setting of social media, we PR professionals have also adopted different methods to understand our desired audience for our clients better. While we can still obtain specific details about the audience through surveys, many agencies and in-house public relations have also incorporated the tool of social listening. Social listening has allowed PR professionals to understand audiences better and will enable us to have profound findings.
What Is Social Listening?
Social listening is the monitoring of conversations and mentions on social media platforms. Monitoring these conversations and mentions allows public relations teams to analyze them for insights into your audience, and teams can later apply these insights in future action plans.
What Are The Benefits Of Social Listening?
One of the significant benefits of social listening is that it allows you to see your target audience’s raw conversations without nitpicking the positives and negatives. Social media has allowed everyone to provide honest feedback in a matter of seconds, and you can see in real-time the actual reactions from your audience without having to rally up a focus group before your event, launch, press release, and so on.
Aside from having instant feedback, it allows you to open up more possibilities for listening to your audience. By having surveys, a direct email line for comments, or focus groups with social listening, you have direct access to your audience through social media, which has become a powerful communication tool for many companies and brands.
Why Do We Need To Use Social Listening?
We need social listening because it allows businesses and brands to use social media more effectively. It now forms the perfect way to help with reputation management. Through social listening, we can monitor a business’s and brand’s reputation by understanding the public reaction. For example, social listening allows you to minimize the response gap if there is a reputation crisis. Social listening will let you take in the situation differently and allow you to respond to the crisis ethically and responsibly by taking in the conversations and analyzing them.
Social listening is a tool that allows PR professionals to use social media channels to monitor conversations and mentions that involve our clients. Rather than waiting on feedback or concerns from our audience, we can instantly obtain this information through social listening. The best part of social listening is that we can take every type of conversation/ mention and analyze it to understand our audience better and quickly have an action plan.
If social listening helps you have a better direction regarding your PR objectives, click HERE for more PR tips and information.
