42. Social Media Listening: User Response in Digital Platforms

Digital communities around social media are increasingly becoming vibrant, impactful and inevitable in daily life, with over a billion users regularly engaging  within groups. The business and communication centred around mega influencers is now making transitions to smaller and more authentic communities. Sharing, connecting and listening have become more important and indispensable in digital-oriented social media platforms, and the media has evolved and elevated into a medium that is user based, user centric and user oriented. User response in these platforms plays a significant role in crisis communication, socio-political agenda setting, strategic business decisions, product developments, etc. Social listening is a key trend for organisations and brands that partner wisely with creators through social media channels, to connect with audiences, gather insights, earn their trust, make strategic decisions and gain cultural capital. The concept includes social media monitoring, a quantitative component that deals with collecting data, counting likes, shares, tweets, retweets, brand mentions, etc., thus measuring what has already happened in terms of numbers. Social listening is a qualitative component, that deals with finding mentions and discussions linked to a topic or brand, analyse them to draw insights from online conversations, apply them as strategy and find out opportunities to act. It looks ahead of the numbers to reflect on the online mood behind the data. This is part of social media sentiment. Real-time monitoring makes it an incredible online research. This chapter elaborates on social media platforms, monitoring and listening with tools and worksheets.