How to Utilize Social Media Listening to Identify the Latest Trends

To stay on top of the game, it is key for every brand to understand their customers, who they are, how they behave, and what influences them.  One way of doing this is always emerging yourself into the latest  trends that demonstrates your knowledge of what is going on. Social media listening  is the tool that will bring you closer to your audience. It will help you listen to the voice of customers to understand how they communicate with each other and with brands as well. 

Tracking brand mentions is a necessary part of social media monitoring, but it is also critical to put the data in a broader context to identify the topics that will be most relevant to your  target audience and create useful and engaging content around them. It could be challenging to make sense of unstructured data coming in all at once. This is where artificial intelligence comes in. Using an AI social media listening tool, will empower your brand to make the right decisions to engage with the audience and gain their trust. 

We put together the best practices and techniques that you can start implementing to make the most out of social listening to discover key trends that will help you create engaging content, identify the most preferred format, and which channels are mostly used. 

Determine a focus 

Just like everything, the best results are given when there is a specific purpose and goal. Depending on your  use case, you will be able to gather the relevant information. In the world of social media, there is a lot going on; there will be many voices and topics to pay attention to, but if you have a goal you will filter out what is irrelevant to focus on the relevant data that would answer your question. Hence, it is important to be able to select the right keywords, filters, trends, and hashtags that would allow the business to attain the needed information to reach the intended goal. 

Find the bigger picture 

While social media listening could be an overwhelming source of information that involves endless data, it is not presented that way. Fortunately, social media listening tools are well equipped with the AI technology needed to gather the information into filtered categories and themes. Social media listening with trends analysis helps cluster those insights into unified themes that feed into your overall marketing strategy. A broader picture of customer behavior actually presents more accurate information about the social media trends and customer interaction. 

Identify the source 

One of the key advantages of using a social media listening tool is the access to the source of information. Social media is a world where anything can happen and anyone can say anything. Once you’ve been able to identify a trend, you need to look into the origin of the information to guarantee its authenticity.  Traditional marketing research captures data from a specific point of time. However, social media can give a more holistic insight that provides much more information that can be valuable to understand certain spikes in mentions and discover what factors are contributing to this spike. 

Keep an eye on potential opportunities 

Those insights extracted from the tool are just the start of what you need to do to differentiate your brand from other competitors. Once you have a clear view of what trends are shaping customer sentiment, you can start thinking of the most effective strategy based on certain patterns and connections. Understanding your  audience can be what takes your strategy from good to great. Social listening can help you spot opportunities for creating ambassadors for your brand. So instead of you talking about your brand, your audience will be doing the talk for you. Once you’ve identified the relevant influencers for your band, reach out to them and start building a relationship. Nowadays, people trust peer to peer reviews more than advertisements.  So brands need to accept that, and use it to their advantage; they need to promote and encourage user generated content. 

The Crowd Analyzer  tool can help fuel your social media strategy into the right direction for 2022. Using AI technology, our tool can provide a  clear framework of what your customers are saying and what are the emerging trends in any specified industry. We can help you get the most out of social listening through customized dashboards with features that include: 

Real time monitoring helps you translate the data and translate it into the needed action right away. This is critical to prevent a crisis before it happens and puts you in control of the situation. 

This is one of the most important elements our tool can offer, an unlimited access to the different ways data can be viewed and put in different categories. You would be able to view the bigger picture, then zoom into the specified data. 

Sentiment Accuracy 

For the information to be valuable, it needs to be segmented into categories based on sentiment. We use artificial intelligence and natural language processing (NLP) to analyze over 174 languages. 

Information will always be available to you no matter where you are. Our clients can also download an app that will keep them up to date with all the ongoing conversations. You can get notifications with all the updates on the go.