LinkedIn is no longer just a place to create your professional resume. Today, it is a place where people are actively sharing what they learn in their professional lives and sometimes even personal, for that matter.
This platform currently boasts over 660 million registered users, with 303 million active monthly users. Given its dynamics, LinkedIn has proven to be an effective platform for lead generation and customer acquisition for most businesses across various industries.
In fact, it’s proven to be 277% more effective than Facebook in generating qualified leads for businesses.
But leads come in only when you’re talking about things that LinkedIn users care about or find interesting. They come in when the word around your business is as positive as the promises you’re making through campaigns – words that come from your existing customers, leads, employees or even competitors! !
This is exactly why it is important for businesses to keep a close eye on what’s happening on LinkedIn. And this is where social listening on LinkedIn comes in.
What is social listening?
Imagine you are a school teacher. One day, you overhear two of your students talk about you.
“I love Peter Sir”, one says. “He is so sweet and so much fun!”.
“Yes, I love him too!”, the other student joins in. “But I sometimes don’t understand the geometry classes he takes up. It’s too much for me.”
This makes you wonder and question if you actually rush with the geometry concepts and need to perhaps explain them more elaborately.
To figure it out, you start asking around. You start listening to opinions about your teaching. And depending on the ‘reviews’ you receive, you make the needed changes to continue teaching in the most effective way possible to your students!
This is social listening in a nutshell. Well, add listening on social media and that’s that!
As a brand, you would obviously want and need to track, analyse and respond to any communication about you. The process of monitoring all your social media channels for any mentions of your brand (or even your competitor’s), products, reviews and more is called social listening.
Another way that social media listening can be extremely detrimental is by tracking certain keywords that work best in your target audience. For instance, this can help you extract the most important data points in content – the sentiment, the named entities from various scripts and platforms – with ease and speed. It basically helps you turn statements into concrete data in just mere minutes!
Want to know and learn more about social listening? Read the Complete guide on Social Listening here.
Why use social listening on LinkedIn?
As per statistics and user analysis, LinkedIn is the most popular professional social media platform.
While it is noticed that Facebook and Instagram have more users than LinkedIn, you need to also consider that these platforms mostly boast rather casual and informal conversations. LinkedIn is mainly where professional and corporate networking takes place. When you compare it to its actual competitors like Glassdoor, LinkedIn is far ahead.
With over 690 million users, as of 2020, LinkedIn is available in over 200 countries. Interestingly, unlike most other social media sites, LinkedIn is one among the very few platforms that are functional in China as well.
All demographics, users, and use-cases considered, there are over 2 million posts, articles, and videos published on LinkedIn every day, and even more, conversations happening within those threads every single minute.
That’s exactly why if you’re tuning into LinkedIn, you could be missing out on opportunities to reach out to warm leads and turn them into customers through ‘professional’ conversations.
Get started with LinkedIn social listening here.
How can you do social listening on LinkedIn?
Now you can create a list of accounts that fit into your ideal customer persona profile, then go through all the content they create, follow or engage with. And then repeat that with another hundred sets of accounts – every day.
Or you could take a smarter approach and use a social listening tool like Radarr to listen to everything on LinkedIn.
With Radarr, you can:
- Keep track of content/ topics and themes popular on LinkedIn
- Leverage hashtag analytics to see how and what people are responding to
- Monitor the performance of your competitors
- Create content in line with trends based on different demographic segments
You can also dive deeper by looking into the LinkedIn engagement metrics offered on the platform itself, and then add a layer of audience insights on top of it with the help of Radarr.
What social engagement metrics can be collected on LinkedIn?
LinkedIn lets users leverage the following engagement metrics. This helps indicates how well a post or content was received.
1. Number of views
Views are a basic metric to help determine how well a particular post was/is doing.
2. Number of reactions by type
It’s always necessary to keep a closer look at the reactions along with the views. This shows the user-engagement level.
LinkedIn offers different types of reactions – like, love, support, celebrate, insightful, curious. While all these reactions are positive, the number of reactions are going to vary and will be crucial in concluding how well was your post perceived.
3. Lists of users that reacted to the post
This list can be used as a list of potential leads for outbound sales or even potential brand advocates. They can be of value to promote your brand.
4. Comments
Since the possible reactions on LinkedIn are only positive, you will find the real concerns and queries in the comment section of your posts.
Get to know your audience better with sentiment analysis. By analyzing comments, you can uncover the otherwise unsaid. This can help you
- Predict campaign sentiment
- Automatic entity detection
- Create resonating experiences
- Streamline conversion of content to data
Furthermore, replying to comments demonstrates good client service in general. This enhances your customer’s experience and satisfaction.
5. List of commenters
Sometimes, just replying to a comment isn’t sufficient. You might have to take the conversation further by reaching out to the customer personally to find out what exactly was the issue regarding your product/service/post.
How can social listening on LinkedIn help your brand?
1. Brand monitoring
By collecting search data of select keywords, you can find out how well your company is doing. It also presents you with an opportunity to improve your brand’s presence on LinkedIn. This will in a result help increase leads for potential clients and hires.
2. Building a successful thought leadership strategy among company leaders
The top executives of your brand are going to be your brand’s spokespersons – the ambassadors. It is necessary for a company to practice thought leadership to improve awareness of your company.
Thought leadership is the expression and portrayal of ideas that show you have expertise in a particular topic, area, or field at large. This is the main concept behind keynote speeches or conferences. Even the tinier meetings where a company’s leader talks about the company’s value prepositions come under this same umbrella.
LinkedIn helps you achieve this – but digitally!
With LinkedIn, you can stand out as a reliable source of insight and information – a company that knows what they’re doing and are the best in the field. It helps you establish credibility in your field, and raise your profile.
3. Competitive social intelligence
In the market, competition is inevitable. The battle is always about who stands out despite the never-ending competition.
To hold an upper hand in this battle, you need to know exactly what your competitors are doing. Now, yes, LinkedIn helps you monitor your own brand, but it can also be used for social listening to your competitors.
Stay updated about your competitor’s new releases or a new pricing plan maybe. They will most likely post it on LinkedIn. By analyzing the reactions and comments to their announcement (or subsequent engagement) posts, you can conclude the user sentiment towards this new initiative and make the necessary additions/integrations/deletions to the product/service offered by your company.
Additionally, keeping track of the people that reacted or commented on your competitor’s post can help you create a list of potential leads for you.
How to implement a LinkedIn social listening strategy?
Creating an optimal LinkedIn listening strategy is not an easy task. However, if you follow a set number of steps, it gets easier. It begins with identifying your listening goals, setting up a listening tool, and finally using the data obtained to derive results.
Step 1: Identify your listening goals
Before implementing a LinkedIn listening strategy. identify the goals you aim to accomplish through social media listening. Once identified, you will realize whether your strategy aligns with the kind of social data you’re aiming to gather. Next, check the branding, marketing, sales, and customer service processes in your company and spot the gaps so that they can be resolved.
Step 2: Define what you are listening to
For good social listening, clearly define what you’re listening for. This means choosing the right (relevant) keywords for your brand.
Fix the keywords which you want to be notified about. Or mentions of your competitors to stay aware of the happenings in the market.
Some of the activities that you should be listening to:
- Your brand name and mentions of your social media handles
- Product and collection names
- Brand/products’ common misspellings
- Competitors’ brands/ products/ social handles
- Industry trends or popular words
- Current slogan and your marketing messages
- Competitors’ slogans
- Key stakeholders and their names
- Competitors’ key stakeholders and their names
- Campaign names and keywords related to them
- Branded hashtags
- Competitor’s branded hashtags
- Unbranded hashtags related to your industry and audience
Step 3: Set up a LinkedIn listening tool
The manual way of listening to social media conversations is exhausting. Moreover, it is challenging to conduct a sentiment analysis of those conversations. You need a social media listening tool to make sure that you stay updated with the current conversations, trending hashtags on LinkedIn and trending keywords.
This is where Radarr comes to the rescue. Radarr is a powerful social media listening tool that monitors and provides analysis for creating impactful strategies.
The Radarr LinkedIn Social Listening tool covers the following areas:
- Daily social media and news monitoring
- Daily brand health and KPI monitoring Campaign Monitoring
- Real-time on-screen alerts and notifications
- Crisis management and mitigation
- Competitor tracking and intelligence
- Influencer discovery and KOL tracking
- Powerful audience insights
- Real-time alerts and automated reports
- Trendspotting and predictive AI
- Sentiment analysis and segmentation
Step 4: Use insights to achieve better results
Just listening to conversations will lead to zero benefits to the brand. Instead, brands must apply the insights gathered to achieve the desired results.
Create social listening reports daily/weekly/monthly and share them with other teams so that each team can assess their role in bringing a change. You can also set KPIs to gauge performance. This will help you know what is implemented and what is pending, along with monitoring the impact it has on the growth of your online business.
Also read: How to use LinkedIn hashtags to boost brand engagement
Do you really need social listening on LinkedIn?
TLDR – Yes.
Considering how it is not just about your own profile now, it is how you project your company to potential customers, clients, future hires, and in case your business is looking for an investor, even then, your brand needs to look good on LinkedIn – that has an impact on the impression you make.
Done right, social listening can shape a positive perception of your brand among your audience and allow you to build meaningful relationships.
Ready to see how social listening on LinkedIn can help you increase your reach faster?
Here is the 37 LinkedIn Marketing Statistics You Need to Know!
Book a Radarr Demo today.
