Social media listening is very essential for every enterprise. It aids marketing teams to form more strategic plans through comprehensive insights on online users. However, do start-ups also need a social media listening tool? To answer such a question, we need to know more about what social media listening tools in order to know whether they are fit for startups or not.

What Do Social Media Listening Tools Do?

Social media listening tools serve a company/agency through several methods.  It helps a company throughout the planning process from knowing the demands of online users to measuring the performance of a brand. In a nutshell, social media listening does the following:

• Get insights about the online sphere
• Assess your brand’s performance
• Identify the target audience of your sector
• Know the influencers in your field
• Know the type of content an audience interacts most with
• Track keywords that relate to your business
• Retrieve historical insights (a few tools have this feature)
• Measure the impact and interaction of online users with a campaign

Do Startups Need All of This?

Well, you would think that the previous features are more suitable for enterprise and large companies. However, this is not entirely true. Social media listening tools have an extremely important role to add to a start-up’s success. Here’s a list of what startups can do with a social media listening tool:

• Know who’s dominating online platforms in your field

When an entrepreneur is in the first stages starting up a new company, he will need to conduct a lot of research in order to know what his/her target audience needs. Insights and complaints about existing service providers or products add a lot to the business goals of the newly established company and the purpose of its existence in the first place.

• Identify what your customers and prospects need

Online monitoring and social media listening will allow you to spot the loopholes in your sector and tailor your products and services according to these needs. Thanks to the insights efficient social media listening tools provide, you can easily track the complaints and sentiments of online users who mention your keyword of interest. Sentiment analysis will allow you to instantly access negative content and fully analyze it to know the most mentioned words and brands.

• Spotting influencers in the market

It’s almost mandatory now to use influencer marketing to reach your target audience. Whether you’re running an enterprise or a start-up, influencers are an essential tool to promote your brand on digital media.  Start-ups need to utilize the most renowned influencers in their field to raise brand awareness. Influencers give your brand access to a target audience through a very reliable source to them. Some social media listening tools, such as Crowd Analyzer, allow entrepreneurs to know the following types of influencers:

• Influencers with the most interactive audience.
• Influencers who are most active about a brand or keyword.
• Influencers who have the largest number of followers.

Monitor the new word of mouth: Online conversations

In the past, new brands would hit the road of success through personal recommendations. Word of mouth is gradually being replaced by online conversations. Many people share links to pages leading threads to occur as people comment on these links. This generated content is the feedback through which an entrepreneur understands the pros and cons of their brand and develops the possibility of attaining more customers.

In brief, social media listening tools are essential to the planning, development, and promotion of any start-up. Although it may seem that huge enterprise need a lot of data in real-time more than start-ups and small companies, the latter will crucially benefit from the social media listening.