Social listening, also known as social media listening, is the process of identifying and evaluating what is being said on the Internet about a company, person, product or brand.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Conversations on the Internet generate massive amounts of unstructured data. For this reason, it’s important to understand what a company is trying to achieve with a social media listening program. Depending on your goals, the right tool can be a set of free Google Alerts or an expensive software suite that includes ad hoc analysis and full integration with legacy CRM (customer relationship management) applications.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Both social media and in-person gathering of information have value, but social listening is fast becoming an important customer intelligence tool. The many ways to use social media to gain insight are as follows:<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Social media monitoring tools can search for text for specific keywords on social networking sites, blogs and forums, and other social media. Monitoring software converts specific words or phrases in unstructured data into numerical values \u200b\u200bassociated with structured data in a database. This allows the data to be analyzed using traditional data mining techniques.<\/p>\n\n\n\n