20 Key Insights and Stats - The State of Social Listening in 2022!
One of the most significant, yet often overlooked benefits of social media marketing is listening, and monitoring what people are saying about your brand, and your competitors, in order to formulate a more informed, targeted approach to your efforts.
By tuning into what people are posting online, you can get a better grasp on key opportunities, branding blindspots, and customer sentiment. Plus, much of this insight is available for free, if you know how to get it, which is not always easy.
Based on more than 650 survey responses from a range of industry professionals, the below expert agencies sought to get a better understanding of how brands are approaching their listening efforts, how beneficial they’re funding such, and how they think they could improve. The results showcase a range of important learnings, which could help to shape your own approach.
Explore these 20 Key Extract Insights/Findings and Stats from Meltwater and Social Media Today’s 20 pages ‘The State of Social Listening in 2022 Survey Report' that may assist any e-commerce business owners, brands owners, entrepreneurs, any social business in general, or any online marketers who are keen in knowing and learning in Social Listening that would help to plan for the future of Social Media Business Marketing to connect, engage, build relationships with audiences, consumers and looking for progressive opportunities to increase traffic and sales or conversion rates, including staying ahead of the competition in a post-pandemic era:
According to our survey responses, almost 61% of businesses now have a social listening system in place, and are monitoring for keyword mentions.
The majority of respondents also see social listening as highly valuable, with more than 82% now viewing it as a key planning element.
Many brands are also now using social listening to track industry trends as well, while crisis management, competitive analysis and campaign analysis were lesser considerations, based on responses.
The two biggest impediments to effective social listening are ‘Time’ and ‘Employee bandwidth’, highlighting the biggest challenge in effective monitoring. It would seem that the consensus is that social listening is indeed highly valuable, but not all businesses feel that they’re able to get the most out of it, due to cost and time restrictions.
Unsurprisingly, Twitter leads the way here, with the open, real-time nature of the platform better lending itself to social listening.
Still, both Instagram and Facebook came in second and third place in our response data, and with both apps seeing such significant usage and interest, it makes sense for brands to tune into chatter on both where they can. It’s more challenging, and limited than Twitter is in this regard, but there is still opportunity to glean insight from Meta’s apps.
Almost 80% of brands are looking to track brand mentions, with industry keywords and hashtags the next most common elements.
With social media putting more emphasis on the individual, and connecting with a real person, as opposed to a brand, the data here could suggest that more businesses could get more out of establishing a thought leadership program for their staff, in order to help showcase their individual expertise as another brand growth element.
The combined data here also highlights potential in monitoring more social media platforms - particularly YouTube and Reddit, and TikTok as well given its meteoric rise – which could offer new avenues of insight, and may uncover new opportunities.
Interestingly, while Twitter is the key social media platform of focus for social media monitoring in general, businesses are actually gleaning more from Facebook, Instagram and LinkedIn, in terms of direct response and referral traffic.
Facebook and Instagram, of course, have far broader reach, while LinkedIn is big for B2B in particular. But it’s also worth noting the relatively low results here for TikTok, Pinterest and Snapchat here, and even YouTube to a degree. TikTok now has more than a billion users, while YouTube has over 2 billion actives, and Snapchat reaches over 90% of the US Gen Z population. It seems that these platforms are getting less focus, either because Facebook and Instagram are simply better at driving audience response, or businesses don’t quite know how to approach brand building on these other apps.
Indeed, Facebook and Instagram both offer dedicated brand tools, which are not as readily available, or even accessible, in these other apps.
TikTok and Snapchat are developing a range of tools on this front, which could make them more valuable, while YouTube is considered the second-biggest search engine in the world, with many people seeking video answers to questions, which they’re often referred to directly from Google Search.
With increased competition, better listening to personas and topics before putting money behind the ads seems like a clear opportunity and would make the ROI of social media monitoring clear.
Interestingly, most of the respondents indicated that they do not have a defined SEO process in place. If you’re not at least aware of how people are searching for your business, you’re likely missing opportunities, and by combining your social listening insights into your SEO process, that could be a recipe for improved search ranking, and better results from your target customers.
It’s clear that most businesses now see the value of tuning into social media conversations, and that those that do are gleaning significant benefits. But the actual process remains challenging for many.
Indeed, the responses indicate that many businesses don’t feel that they’re getting the most out of their listening effort, purely because they don’t have the expertise available to fully capitalize on their opportunities.
Twitter, for example, is working on new advanced search monitoring tools, its native monitoring dashboard, which make it easier to understand the various parameters available, while various apps have been working to provide similar, enabling faster set-up and better mention filtering.
More data is always better, and social listening may be one of the best, most effective ways to stay on top of industry trends, and build your business based on direct feedback and broader understanding of your specific market.
But our response data here shows that most businesses are not confident that they’re maximizing their listening opportunities, yet even with that in mind, they are still seeing clear benefits from their own, basic initiatives and strategies. There are opportunities available, and they don’t necessarily require significant investment. But devoting the resources into learning, or working with those who have, will pay off over time.
I hope these insights give you the confidence you need, as well as the huge chances you have ahead of you, to streamline your business through social listening perspective with tremendous zeal and drive results!
All the best….
By the way, if you are interested, you can find the complete ‘The State of Social Listening in 2022’ Survey Report here.
Just to mention, if you are serious about learning amazing insights and stats from various business and marketing domains, you can find them here in the most recent form to formulate the right plans and boost your business results.
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