With more conversations happening on public platforms and social media networks, social listening has become a valuable resource for companies to understand their customers better.
And when you look at some of the social listening statistics available today, it’s easy to see how effective and powerful it can be for marketers and business decision-makers.
Social listening is a key component of a social media strategy because consumers are talking about your company online. A LOT.
And the foundation for any successful marketing or sales team is to know your customer.
Whether you call them buyer personas, customer avatars, or target audiences – the more detail that you have about the people that want your product, the better your messaging and positioning of your products and services will be.
And social media has made it easy for companies to get direct feedback from potential users and clients. What are their goals? What are their likes and dislikes? Where do they spend their time? How does your product make them feel?
Keep reading to understand the benefits and explore the best data around social listening.
What is Social Listening?
Social listening is the method of gathering consumer conversations on social media and utilizing them to uncover insights and inform business decisions.
Marketing teams use social listening as part of their social media strategy to better understand customer needs and sentiment. And then use that understanding to develop better marketing creative and social media management practices.
But unlike social monitoring, which is the practice of tracking and responding to conversations about a product or brand on social media, social listening takes it a step further by pulling insights from these mentions and using them to improve business strategy.
Social listening is a key component for customer research that can have a major impact on a company’s bottom line. We’ll explain how next!
Benefits of Social Listening
Marketers and sales professionals use a variety of methods to understand their customers better, such as surveys and focus groups.
But they are often costly, time-consuming, and slow to get results. And they can have biases depending on the structure of how the conversations are set up.
Social listening is both faster and more efficient for marketers to track trends and consumer sentiment in real-time.
And the conversations are more natural since they are user-generated and uninfluenced by a survey or market research environment.
Social listening can also provide a more well-rounded look at perceptions of your business because you can pay attention to what everyone is saying about your company online, not just your followers or customers.
And having that knowledge can impact almost every aspect of your business. With access to what people are saying about your brand and the competition in your industry, teams can improve social selling, product positioning, content creation, and customer retention.
Social Listening Statistics
Below you’ll find social listening statistics focused on social media usage, the impact on customer experience, and improving business results.
- Half of worldwide marketers have turned to social listening to understand consumers’ changing preferences during the pandemic. (eMarketer)
- Only 51% of brands utilized social monitoring/listening in any capacity (survey of 200 leading brands). (SocialBakers)
- 63% of social media marketers believe listening will become more important over the upcoming year. (SocialMediaToday)
- Globally, over 3.6 billion people use social media and the number is only projected to increase to 4.41 billion in 2025. (Statista)
- Each person spends an average of 2 hours and 25 minutes on social networks and messaging. (GlobalWebIndex)
- Millennials are logged on to social media for an average of two hours and 38 minutes daily, while Gen Z logs on for two hours and 55 minutes. (World Economic Forum)
- 54% of social browsers use social media to research products. (GlobalWebIndex).
- Over 1 million people view tweets about customer service, and 80% of those tweets are negative. (Reputation Refinery)
- Answering a complaint on social media can increase customer advocacy by 25%. (Convince & Convert)
- 96% of unhappy customers won’t tell you directly but will tell 15 friends about their disappointment with you. (Reputation Refinery)
- 79% of consumers expect brands to respond within a day of reaching out over social media, but average brand response rates across all industries are lower than 25%. (Sprout Social)
- People who share negative mentions of a brand are half as likely to follow a brand than those who share positive mentions. (Reputation Refinery)
- 73% of marketers believe that their efforts through social media marketing have been “somewhat effective” or “very effective” for their business. (Buffer)
- 59% of consumers message brands on social media when they have a great experience (Influencer Marketing Hub)
- Retaining a customer is more valuable than finding new customers as it’s 7x more expensive to land a new customer. (Reputation Refinery)
- 91% of unhappy consumers will never return.
- Customers who feel engaged by companies on social media will spend up to 40% more with them than other customers. (Reputation Refinery)
- The top four reasons consumers will unfollow a brand on social media are poor quality of product or support (49%), poor customer service (49%), irrelevant content (45%), and too many ads (45%). (FastCompany)
- Social monitoring helps brands increase their activity rate by about 25% and decrease reaction time on social channels by 50 minutes. (SentiOne)
- 71% of social media marketers say that they are able to provide consumer insights from social media channels to other departments (SocialMediaToday)
How is Social Listening Measured?
Those social listening statistics really prove the value of using this strategy at your company. To measure the impact of social listening, you’ll want to look at the following metrics:
- Conversation Volume – how many mentions did your brand receive on social media
- Engagement Rate – understand how people are interacting with your brand by monitoring comments, replies, shares, and likes.
- Sentiment – you’ll want to track how much of what people are saying about your brand is positive vs. negative. Gauging sentiment will help your crisis management and provide a better customer experience.
- Competitor Mentions – keep an eye on competitor social interactions, product announcements, follower size, and mentions to improve market share in your industry
One of the added benefits of using an employee advocacy platform like EveryoneSocial is that you can also empower your whole organization to leverage social listening.
Companies are using EveryoneSocial to connect to social media platforms for tracking brand conversations, monitoring keywords, and developing better social listening strategies.
One example of how to implement this is with EveryoneSocial is to set up feeds with your competitors’ content in EveryoneSocial that will help with sales content creation and marketing messaging.
By monitoring competitor feeds and customer conversations, marketing teams can always be up to-speed on competitive messaging in the industry.
Without social listening tools or strategies, you’re losing valuable insights and chances to engage with people that talk and care about what your company provides. Don’t miss out!
