Your Guide To Social Listening On LinkedIn + Top Tools

You’ll be missing out on valuable data that could be helpful in building your business without social media listening. 

Did you know that 75% of internet users research products and services on social media before purchasing? That is why almost 61% of companies already have social media listening strategies in place.

Social listening is an in-depth analysis to know what people think about your brand. On LinkedIn, social listening will help you see your audience’s interests, which you can use to appeal to them better.

Today, you will learn the basics of social listening and how it matters on LinkedIn. We will present how to effectively start with LinkedIn social listening and the top tools you can use to improve your brand’s performance and enhance social media strategy to better engage with users/customers.

What is social listening?

Social listening is about monitoring your social media channel mentions in real-time. It can give you insights into how your customers feel about your products or services and what they expect from you. 

However, social listening is not all about mentioning your brand; it takes tracking of competing brands and trending content in your industry. These data can be used for your marketing strategy down to customer support to drive a positive impact on your business.

Spotify has made an entire account on Twitter that listens and responds to users about their inquiries or concerns. @SpotifyCares also offers tips and updates to its followers, building loyalty and improving what it offers at the same time.

Why is social listening important?

In addition to understanding your customers in marketing, social listening helps you gather industry and competitor data, understand the customer’s experience with what you offer, and create opportunities to collaborate with influencers or even other brands. 

As consumer behavior constantly changes, not paying attention to them can cause customer losses to competitors and poor decision-making for the business. Social listening helps monitor how consumer behavior changes and makes decisions to stay relevant and top of mind for customers. 

Mastering the art of engagement through social listening

Mastering engagement on social media connects businesses with their audience effectively. Social listening offers insights into what your audience is talking about, their needs, and the trends within your industry. 

Engaging with your audience based on these insights can lead to more meaningful interactions. Learning from your audience, responding with care, and positioning your brand as a thought leader help you gain stronger relationships and drive engagement.

1. Learning from your audience

To develop engagement in social media, you need to learn what your audiences are talking about. You should focus on conversations that derive meaningful insights, such as brand mentions, industry trends, competition analysis and customer feedback.

To track these, you need to identify the right keywords and hashtags that customers use. It should be relevant to them and the brand itself, like the brand name, campaign-specific hashtags, or industry-specific terms.

After tracking them, you need to analyze the sentiment of these conversations – whether they perceive your brand as positive, negative or neutral. What you learn from your audience helps you tailor your strategy to meet their needs accurately.

2. Responding with care

A response strategy in social media mentions should involve addressing customer service issues promptly, acknowledging and expressing gratitude for positive feedback, and participating in relevant conversations. The essence of responding with care lies in the timeliness and tone of your responses. 

Swift responses prevent minor concerns from becoming major problems. It entails to your audience that you value their satisfaction and are committed to resolving their issues with your brand. Other than the fast reply, acknowledge the feedback to encourage more interactions in the future.

How well you relay your response reflects your brand personality. Still, your tone should be adaptable to fit the specific context of the conversation. Tailoring your responses shows how well you listen, understand and appreciate the sentiment behind each mention.

3. Positioning your brand as a thought leader

Social listening helps you target the topics and interests of your target audience. Through relevant hashtags and industry keywords, you’ll keep close to the conversations happening around you. 

In social media, influencers have the power to shape opinions and trends in industries. These people come with huge numbers of followers and have the capability to influence the sentiments about your brand. When you participate in the discussion they contribute to, engage in a conversation with them and share expertise and insights, it can foster relationships that lead to collaboration, boosting visibility and credibility.

Leveraging the art of engagement through social listening on platforms like LinkedIn can transform how businesses connect with professionals and industry leaders.

What is social listening for LinkedIn?

As one of the social media platforms, you can do social listening on LinkedIn. However, unlike other social media platforms like Facebook, LinkedIn social listening focuses on wider public sentiments and the professional context of industry trends, opinions and interactions. 

Business owners and marketers should listen to the direct and indirect mentions of your brand as well as your competitor’s mentions to understand how they are perceived. Customers’ feedback about your brand helps you identify areas for improvement and provide timely responses.

Like any other social media platform, pay attention to industry-specific keywords to keep up with the trends, opportunities for collaboration and conversations where you can engage and show expertise to establish your brand as an industry leader.

Why does LinkedIn listening matter?

Engaging in LinkedIn listening can greatly impact your business, as you can improve customer engagements, discover new leads, build a brand, and gain customer insights and competitive advantage that can transform your business strategy.

1. Improve customer engagement

Tracking mentions and discussions that revolve around your brand directly engages you with your audience and addresses queries, concerns and feedback in real-time. This builds trust and creates relationships with your audience.

2. Discover new leads

When you keep track of your competitor’s mentions, you can identify potential customers who discuss their needs and challenges that your brand can resolve. You will be a helpful resource and create opportunities for lead generation.

3. Brand building

Engaging in conversations and discussions within your industry, at the same time contributing valuable input, establishes a positive brand image and reputation. Being an authority in your field attracts more followers and customers.

4. Gain customer insights

Listening to what your audiences say about your brand can guide product development, marketing strategies, and customer service improvements that align with customers’ needs and preferences.

5. Competitive advantage

Monitoring audience conversations about your competitors can reveal gaps in their strategies or areas where you can excel, allowing you to stay ahead of the competition.

How to get started with LinkedIn social listening

Businesses can leverage LinkedIn to achieve goals through social listening. As people are more vocal on social media platforms, they freely share opinions, experiences and preferences – an ideal source of information for businesses to enable their brands to engage effectively with customers and foster connections and community.

Here’s how to get started with LinkedIn social listening:

1. Define clear goals for your social listening efforts

A clear objective directs efforts to what matters to your brand. Align your overall business objectives to how your social listening enables business growth.

You should identify the right metrics for measuring your social listening efforts, such as engagement rates, mention volumes or sentiment analysis, and set realistic and measurable goals for these metrics. Regular monitoring helps you identify the impact of your LinkedIn activities and determine if they align with your goals.

2. Choose the right LinkedIn listening tools

Social listening tools automate brand mentions, keywords, and relevant keyword tracking on LinkedIn, then extract valuable insights. While we will be tapping into the top 7 social listening tools on LinkedIn in the following section, you should prioritize looking for the tool’s key features, like advanced analytics, sentiment analysis, and real-time alerts, when looking for the right tool.

Choosing the right tools for social listening on LinkedIn helps the brand to effectively listen, understand and engage with its audience on a deeper level.

3. Define relevant keywords and queries

With the vast topics people talk about, keywords guide businesses in filtering conversations and trends on LinkedIn that are relevant to their industry, products, or services. Targeting specific discussions enhances engagement, leading to higher conversion rates and customer satisfaction.

Identifying the right keywords starts with brainstorming terms directly associated with your industry, brand, and competitor. Incorporate broad and wider terms that cover wider discussions and niche discussions. 

Search queries are combinations of precise keywords with LinkedIn’s advanced search capabilities to unearth the most relevant conversations and insights for your brand.

You can use quotation marks on phrases to search for exact matches, ensuring your query captures the specific discussions of interest. Utilize Boolean operators like AND, OR, and NOT to combine or exclude keywords, fine-tuning your focus to target the most pertinent content.

4. Leverage LinkedIn’s search filters

LinkedIn’s advanced search filters enable users to sift through content, conversations, and profiles based on specific criteria such as industry, company size, location, and job title. It gathers targeted insights that are highly relevant to your brand.

To effectively leverage LinkedIn’s advanced search filters for targeted insights, identify the specific keywords, company names, or industry terms you want to monitor to sharpen your focus. You can save these preferred search criteria for future use, enabling more efficient monitoring of the trends in your industry and addressing concerns and preferences effectively.

5. Identify and monitor the right channels on LinkedIn

Monitoring the right channels allows businesses to gain valuable insights into industry trends, customer feedback, and engagement opportunities. By tuning into discussions and content shared within the company pages and personal profiles, companies can better understand their audience, tailor their communications, and respond promptly to queries or concerns, thereby enhancing their brand presence and loyalty.

You can join industry-specific groups and follow thought leaders’ or influencers’ profiles to gain a wealth of information and networking opportunities. LinkedIn also has a ‘Content Suggestions’ feature within your company page that can help identify trending topics and discussions relevant to your audience.

However, common mistakes to avoid include monitoring too many channels simultaneously. It leads to missed opportunities for meaningful engagement. Also, focusing solely on promotional content without contributing value to conversations can alienate potential connections. So, attain a balanced approach, focusing on channels most relevant to your business goals while offering insightful contributions.

6. Analyze and interpret data

Analyzation is important when gathering data such as sentiments and trends. Sentiment analysis helps you understand whether users perceive your brand as positive, negative or neutral. Determining which helps your business adjust and tailor strategies to stay relevant to your audience.

You can also identify trends and make comparisons with your data. It provides valuable insights into your market positioning and areas for improvement. However, these data can be hard to interpret.

Using data visualization transforms raw data into an easily understandable format, allowing businesses to identify correlations that might not be apparent from text-based data. It provides more in-depth analysis and interpretation of data, allowing businesses to make informed decisions and strategize accordingly.

7. Extract insights and take action

Social listening on LinkedIn is not just about gathering data but in extracting actionable insights that impact a business’s decision-making process, strategy and operations. Aside from monitoring, businesses should look into the patterns, understand industry trends, recognize customer pain points, and pinpoint areas for improvement.

Businesses that adapt and take action on the insights gained from LinkedIn social listening can anticipate market changes more accurately, adapt their strategies more swiftly, and engage their audiences more effectively. 

8. Join LinkedIn groups

As of 2021, LinkedIn has 2.9 million groups – a member can join up to 100 groups. Joining LinkedIn groups relevant to your industry allows you to gain deeper and more insights by engaging in meaningful discussions. 

LinkedIn groups are concentrated platforms for professionals, potential customers, partners, and industry influencers to share knowledge, trends, and opinions. Joining these groups and participating in their discussions can help you understand the preferences of your potential customers, establish your brand as a leader, and gain opportunities for collaborations and partnerships.

9. Research your competitors

Your competitors are your prime source of information. You should analyze their data meticulously. Monitor the types of content they post that resonates most with their audience, the engagement rates (likes, comments, and shares), and the growth of their follower base. Also, pay attention to the customer feedback visible in the comment sections, as it may reveal strengths and weaknesses in their offerings or customer service.

Competitor research is not about imitation but rather about differentiation. Understanding your competitors’ strategies on LinkedIn can help you anticipate shifts in consumer preferences and identify gaps in your own content strategy, allowing you to position your brand as unique and valuable.

10. Optimize your LinkedIn presence

A well-optimized LinkedIn profile increases your visibility on the platform, making it easier for customers and industry peers to find and engage with your brand. To optimize your LinkedIn for maximum presence:

• Integrate relevant industry-related keywords into your profile so your brand ranks higher in search results when people are looking for a business like yours.
• Fill out every section of your LinkedIn page with accurate information about your company, including the mission statement, products and services, contact details and more.
• Share regular updates and posts, participate in industry groups and comment on relevant content to boost your engagement rates on LinkedIn.

With Keyhole’s YouTube analytics dashboard, you’re covered from competitor insights to keeping tabs on influencers. And that’s not all – you also get expert tips on boosting channel engagement, whether it’s through strategic tag use or perfecting your posting schedule.

Top 7 tools for social listening on LinkedIn

Social listening tools monitor social media mentions, trends and conversations relevant to your brand, industry and competitors. These tools provide insights into your audience’s feedback, allowing you to engage with them more effectively, enhance customer service, and inform your content strategy. The following tools are the top LinkedIn social listening tools in the market:

1. Keyhole

Keyhole offers monitoring of campaign and brand mentions, influencer tracking, and powerful competitor research tools. It helps marketers measure the impact of their marketing campaigns. Its best feature is the easy-to-navigate all-in-one dashboard for social media listening and analytics, making it extremely user-friendly.

Keyhole can also identify the accounts and influencers that mention your brand and conduct an in-depth sentiment analysis.

2. BuzzSumo

BuzzSumo excels in discovering influencers and trending content on a certain keyword or topic. It also allows you to track brand mentions, competitors and industry updates.

3. Sprout Social

Sprout Social is an all-in-one social media management platform that performs social listening. Some of its features include customer sentiment tracking, demographic analysis, influencer identification, competitor comparisons, and campaign analysis.

4. Hootsuite

Hootsuite can do much anything on social media, from publishing to tracking. It helps you identify thought leaders and influencers and track brand mentions and sentiment.

5. Brandwatch

Brandwatch offers sentiment analysis, social media management, and influencer discovery through the use of AI. It also allows you to manage all your networks in one social inbox. 

6. Mention

Mention, just like its name, lets you track you track every single mention of your brand online. It provides daily recap emails and alert emails when your brand gets mentioned.

7. Determ

Determ offers deep sentiment analysis and influencer tracking. It also provides notifications on mobile and Slack.

Common mistakes to avoid in LinkedIn social listening

When leveraging LinkedIn for social listening, there are some common mistakes that some may overlook and may take a toll on the effectiveness of your strategy. 

Firstly, not defining clear objectives for your listening efforts can result in a lack of focus. Without a clear goal, measuring your social listening efforts’ success becomes difficult—a clearly defined objective guides your approach to help you achieve your business goals.

Another frequent mistake is ignoring the importance of engagement. Simply monitoring brand mentions without interacting misses you out on opportunities to connect with your audience or industry influencers. Engage in conversations, where appropriate, to build valuable relationships.

Focusing solely on quantitative data is also an error. While engagement rates and follower growth are important, qualitative insights from comments, posts, and shared content offer invaluable context that numbers alone cannot provide.

Case studies: Successful implementations of LinkedIn social listening

1. Shopify

Shopify embraces the value of social listening, as they believe that the information from social listening helps make better decisions to be a profitable business.

Shopify encourages entrepreneurs to share their stories of success with other Shopify customers. They also add contest prizes to encourage them to share their stories. With social listening, they can identify influencers from LinkedIn that interact with the Shopify profile.

Also, when users share their success in LinkedIn posts/articles, Shopify representatives engage in the discussion and congratulate them for building loyalty and for the post to reach more people.

2. Semrush

Semrush offers search engine optimization tools. They use their LinkedIn profile to play a new brand personality – informational with humor – to which their target audience can relate.

Semrush incorporated a mix of memes, polls, questions, and advice into their LinkedIn posts. They also joined in conversations and continued to widen their reach with these posts. 

During the first month of this action, they generated more than 250,000 impressions and almost 180,000 engagements.

Putting it all together: The power of LinkedIn social listening

LinkedIn social listening aims for brands to understand and engage with their audience better. By observing and analyzing interactions on LinkedIn, companies attain insights that inform strategies, enhance customer engagement, and drive success.

It’s important to clearly define objectives and engage with the audience rather than just monitor and value qualitative data alongside quantitative metrics. The brands that listen attentively are the ones that will flourish.

Meanwhile, you can also do the same using Keyhole! Add your LinkedIn profile and start auditing your presence.

Author Bio

Kevin is the CEO, Founder of Aemorph. A seasoned entrepreneur and digital marketing expert. Kevin started in digital marketing, specializing in Search Engine Optimisation since 2010, and is helping Finance, Insurance, E-commerce, Medical, B2B, and SaaS companies.

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