Optimizing social listening with AI tools | AI in business #87

What is social listening?

Let’s start from the basics. Social listening is the process of monitoring conversations on the internet to understand what people are saying about your brand, products, services, and any issues relevant to your business.

It involves two steps: monitoring social channels for mentions and analyzing those mentions to draw practical conclusions. AI social listening tools automatically sum up findings and provide actionable insights, streamlining the entire process. For example, with AI, we can learn not only how many times a brand has been mentioned but also the context of those mentions and the emotions surrounding the discussion.

How does AI help in social listening?

Artificial intelligence significantly accelerates and enhances the process of social listening. It enables real-time monitoring of online conversations, providing instant insights into the tone of expressions and their reach. AI improves social listening by:

• categorizing mentions as positive, negative, or neutral – through the analysis of emotional undertones in expressions, known as sentiment analysis,
• Natural Language Processing, NLP – to understand human language in a way that goes far beyond simple keyword analysis,
• identifying trends – especially when handling thousands of mentions,
• providing recommendations based on the collected data to increase social media presence.

Best AI social listening tools

Choosing the right social listening tool can have a significant impact on the success of a social media marketing strategy. It’s worth taking a closer look at several tools that are recommended by experts and use advanced AI features. Here are some of the best options available.

Brand24

Brand24 (https://brand24.pl/) is a tool with a user-friendly interface that provides access to mentions and insights on a regular basis from a variety of sources including social media, news, blogs, videos, forums, podcasts and reviews. It offers a range of features, such as:

• sentiment analysis – allows you to identify emotions such as joy, sadness, anger or fear,
• tracking key metrics – enables tracking such metrics as brand awareness, social sentiment, and brand participation in social conversations,
• notifications in real time – users can receive information about new mentions through in-app notifications, email or Slack.

Users can try the tool for free for 14 days, while an individual plan costs $79. The dashboard includes a mentions tab, advanced filters, sentiment analysis, social media reach and other analytics.

Source: Brand24 (www.brand24.pl)

Sprout Social

Sprout Social (https://sproutsocial.com/) provides AI-based image recognition and deep listening capabilities across all major social networks and online sources. This social listening tool processes up to 50,000 posts per second and approximately 600 million posts per day.

With such a large scale, it helps effectively identify trends, key business insights and customer sentiment, and offers integrations and partnerships to improve social media management. Despite the higher cost compared to other tools, the advanced features and insights are considered valuable by many companies.

Source: Sprout Social (https://sproutsocial.com/)

Brandwatch

Brandwatch (https://www.brandwatch.com/) manages multiple social channels and tracks conversations from a database of 1.6 trillion historical conversations and real-time social media monitoring.

It offers segment analysis to categorize conversations, dividing them into, for example:

• opinions,
• complaints, or
• comments.

It also includes an influencer marketing tool with a database of more than 30 million creators. An additional advantage of this social listening tool is an intuitive and detailed analytics dashboard with reports on competitors. Brandwatch is priced individually, and the tool is considered a leader in social media analytics and digital consumer intelligence.

Source: Brandwatch (https://www.brandwatch.com/)

Hootsuite

Hootsuite (https://www.hootsuite.com/) offers a free 30-day trial, while the professional plan costs $49 per month. It provides a dashboard for managing multiple social media accounts.

Social listening features available in Hootsuite include:

• content planning and publishing,
• social media monitoring,
• analytics and reporting,
• team collaboration,
• customer engagement, and
• AI integration.

Hootsuite aims to be the world’s best social media management platform. It is used by 200,000 customers in more than 200 countries and by more than 4,000 companies using the Enterprise Account, such as Ikea, Allianz and Domino’s Pizza, and its popularity continues to grow.

Source: Hootsuite (https://help.hootsuite.com/)

Hubspot

HubSpot’s social listening module (https://www.hubspot.com/) is part of its social media management software, which allows users to monitor social interactions and create custom keyword monitoring streams. Key Hubspot features include:

• social media monitoring – allows you to track conversations related to your brand, industry or competitors,
• content scheduling and publishing – allows you to manage the schedule for publishing content on social media,
• forwarding to the appropriate inboxes – effectively dividing the work among those who manage social media,
• analytics and reporting – provide the data needed to measure the effectiveness of social media activities,
• CRM integration, and custom X (Twitter) streams.

HubSpot lets you monitor social media conversations related to your brand, industry, or competitors, tracking mentions, hashtags, and keywords.

Source: Hubspot (https://www.hubspot.com/)

Summary. The future of AI in social listening

Social listening is driving a major shift in organizations’ social media strategies. With 61% of companies using such a system, more than 82% consider it a key part of planning. The main goals of social listening include sentiment analysis, increasing brand awareness, and tracking industry trends. AI tools integrated with social listening help in processing and analyzing data generated by internet users every day.

Social listening helps find leads by monitoring relevant mentions and using filters to identify potential customers. Metrics like sentiment analysis, brand share in conversations, social media reach, and more are key to understanding customer engagement and brand perception.

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