Businesses can better understand their audience, competitors, and industry trends by monitoring social media conversations and mentions. Armed with this data, you can make more informed decisions about your influencer marketing strategies and achieve results.

So, let's dive in and explore why social listening is crucial for influencer marketing.

What is social listening?

Social listening is monitoring and analyzing social media posts to understand conversations' tone, sentiment, and trends for mentions of your brand, competitors, and relevant industry-related topics. Social listening helps you keep tabs on what people say about you, so you can respond to them in real-time when necessary.

For example, let's say that a customer tweets about how unhappy they are with the customer service at your company. You can respond to them directly or use social listening software to find out who else is talking about similar issues at other companies and reach out to them as well.

Social listening helps businesses understand how people perceive them as a company. If customers say positive things about your brand and products, you'll want to ensure that continues—and possibly even amplify it by sharing more information with them! But suppose negative comments are coming up repeatedly (especially if influential voices are making them). In that case, it's best to address those issues immediately to head off any potential problems before they become full-blown crises.

The same idea applies when figuring out industry trends or niche market trends. You can use this information to create content that resonates with your target audience, thereby increasing engagement and conversions.

Let's understand the basics - Social monitoring vs. Social listening

Social Monitoring

• Focuses on tracking brand or product mentions on social media and identifying customer service issues or negative feedback.
• It involves monitoring brand mentions, reviews, and comments on social media platforms to respond to customer feedback and address concerns in real time.
• It helps businesses manage their reputation and respond to customer complaints, allowing them to build trust with their audience.
• It can be used to measure the success of social media campaigns and track the impact of social media on brand awareness and engagement.

Social Listening

• It focuses on understanding the sentiment and behavior of a brand's audience by analyzing conversations and mentions on social media.
• Involves tracking keywords, mentions, and hashtags across various social media platforms to identify trends and insights.
• Provides businesses with valuable insights into their audience's needs, preferences, and concerns, allowing them to improve their marketing strategies, product development, and customer experience.
• It can help businesses identify influencers who are talking about their brand or industry and engage with them to expand their reach and drive brand awareness.

9 social listening statistics you should look into

1. 86% of marketers use influencer marketing to improve brand awareness. Social listening for influencer marketing can aid in this.
2. 63% of social media marketers believe listening will become more important over the upcoming years. (SocialMediaToday)
3. Over 50% of marketers turned to social listening during the pandemic to understand consumers’ changing preferences. (eMarketer) 
4. 54% of social browsers use social media to research products. (GlobalWebIndex).
5. Over 1 million people view tweets about customer service. Interestingly, a whopping 80% of those tweets are negative. (Reputation Refinery)
6. 73% of marketers believe that their efforts through social media marketing have been “somewhat effective” or “very effective” for their business. (Buffer)
7. Customers who feel engaged by companies on social media will spend up to 40% more with them than other customers. (Reputation Refinery) 
8. Social monitoring helps brands increase their activity rate by about 25% and decrease reaction time on social channels by 50 minutes. (SentiOne)
9.  71% of social media marketers say that they can provide consumer insights from social media channels to other departments (SocialMediaToday)

Benefits of using social listening in data-driven influencer marketing

1. Identifying the right influencers

Finding the right influencer is a major component of your influencer marketing strategy. This is because the choice of influencer can make or break the campaign -

• Choosing the right influencers is important to reach the target audience
• The choice of influencer can significantly affect your ROI
• Influencer reputation affects your brand

Social listening tools can help brands identify the right influencers for their campaigns based on their social media activity, virality, affinity, audience size, demographics, and engagement, etc.

Read more: How to choose the right influencers for your brand

2. Gain insights into audience sentiment

Did you know that while more than 50% of businesses believe their customers are satisfied with the service and have a positive sentiment toward their brand, only 15% of customers agree?

Unnveling and understanding the truth about what your audiences think about your brand is crucial.

Social listening allows businesses to monitor conversations about their brand, products, or services, and gain insights into the sentiment of their audience. With granular audience sentiment, brands can penetrate new markets or improve influencer marketing strategies, product development, and customer experience.

Here are some ways to leverage social listening for influencer marketing for audience sentiment analysis -

1. Identify influencers already talking about your brand or industry
2. You can identify influencers already engaged with your audience by tracking brand mentions or industry on social media. By partnering with these influencers, you can gain valuable insights into your audience's preferences and sentiments.
3. Monitor influencer conversations
4. Use social listening tools to track conversations and mentions about your campaign influencers. By analyzing the sentiment of these conversations, you can gain insights into how your audience feels about your influencers and the content they create.
5. Conduct audience research
6. Before launching an influencer marketing campaign, conduct audience research to understand better your target audience's needs, preferences, and concerns so you can tailor your influencer marketing strategy.

3. Tracking influencer marketing performance

Social listening for influencer marketing can help brands track the performance of their influencer marketing campaigns' performance, measuring engagement, reach, and sentiment.

Here are some ways to use this social listening tool for influencer marketing -

1. Monitor brand mentions: Use social listening tools to track mentions of your brand on social media. This can help you gauge the impact of your influencer marketing campaigns on brand awareness and perception.
2. Track campaign hashtags: Create unique hashtags for your influencer marketing campaigns and use social listening tools to track their performance. This can help you measure the engagement and reach and identify influencers who are most effective at driving campaign results.
3. Analyze audience engagement: Use social listening tools to track engagement metrics, such as likes, comments, and shares, on influencer content. This can help you identify which influencers and content are most effective at engaging your audience.
4. Monitor competitor activity: Use social listening tools to track your competitors' influencer marketing activity. This can provide insights into their strategies and tactics and identify opportunities to differentiate your brand and gain a competitive advantage.

4. Measuring influencer marketing ROI

Social listening data can be used to calculate the ROI of your influencer marketing campaign by tracking conversions and other metrics.

5. Responding to consumer feedback

Social listening allows brands to monitor and respond to customer feedback in real time, enabling them to improve their products or services and address any issues consumers raise.

6. Keeping up with industry trends

By monitoring social media conversations, brands can stay up-to-date with the latest trends and adapt their influencer marketing strategies accordingly.

7. Improve brand reputation

Social listening can monitor and respond to negative conversations about a brand, helping businesses improve their reputation and build trust with their audience.

8. Improving the influencer marketing strategy

Social listening data can provide insights into what type of content resonates with the target audience, enabling brands to create more effective and engaging influencer campaigns.

9. Competitive analysis

Social listening tools can monitor competitors' social media activity and influencer marketing campaigns, providing insights into influencer marketing strategies and allowing your brand to stay ahead of the curve.

Social listening for influencer marketing can help you with better insight, strategy, and creativity

Social listening is a powerful tool for data-driven influencer marketing that enables businesses to gain valuable insights into their audience, competitors, and industry trends.

Armed with this knowledge, you can craft data-driven influencer marketing strategies that are tailored to your audience's needs and preferences. Plus, social listening can inspire creativity by providing you with new ideas for new influencer marketing campaigns, content, and collaborations. So, if you're looking to elevate your influencer marketing game, social listening is the key ingredient you need.

However, along with social listening tools, your business will also need an effective influencer marketing data infrastructure to maximize your results.

Boost your influencer marketing campaigns with InsightIQ

InsightIQ is a Comprehensive, Secure, and Reliable API-based solution for Influencer Marketing. insightIQ allows you to find influencers from any platform, with possibly any & every filter you could need. You can now track your IM campaigns and optimize for ROI.

Schedule a call to learn more about how InsightIQ can empower your influencer marketing business.