Whether professionals are leveraging them as a source of leads, using them as a foundation for extensive paid ad campaigns, or relying upon them as a delivery system for content, social media platforms are becoming increasingly important and versatile components in the marketing industry’s standard toolkit. Of all of these and the infinite other use cases for marketing, perhaps one of the most powerful uses of social media platforms in a modern marketing sense is social listening. Using social media mentions of your brand to mine the data for insights and business opportunities is powerful, as it allows you to take steps that are informed by real customer insight into their needs and demands.
In order to explore how businesses have embraced social listening in their marketing strategies, UpCity partnered with Pollfish to gather insight from 600 respondents spread evenly across the United States and Canada. Our poll gathered feedback from business owners and marketing and public relations professionals to determine how many were actively leveraging social listening and to what end. Respondents weighed in on the benefits of social listening, the tools they use to monitor social media channels, which channels they prefer to monitor, and how much of their budget is dedicated to the practice.
Our findings will address the following aspects:
- The benefits of social listening
- Social listening tools
- Monthly budgets: social listening tools and software
To add weight to the data gathered by Pollfish, our UpCity team gathered feedback from social media-focused marketing experts on their own experiences with social listening. We’ve included their tips and ideas here to provide our community with the insight and guidance to integrate social listening or enhance the strategies they already have in place
The Benefits of Social Listening
38% of U.S. and Canadian Businesses Perform Social Listening in 2022
With countless consumers active on social media, it follows that social media platforms would be an ideal source of data for businesses to leverage. The trend towards social listening began before the pandemic outbreak, but with the increased usage of social media throughout the pandemic quarantines, that reliance on social listening is expanding. This explains the large number of respondents who integrated social listening after the pandemic started.
38% – We’ve been performing social listening prior to COVID-19
29% – We began performing social listening after COVID-19 started
13% – We used to perform social listening pre-COVID but we don’t anymore
20% – We never performed social listening and we don’t plan to in the foreseeable future
17% of U.S. respondents primarily use social listening to attract new customers
Social listening tactics help business owners accomplish a number of revenue building goals. The ultimate overarching goal of most social listening programs is to generate business by attracting new customers. However, the tactic also allows businesses to improve customer service, as the insights gained via social listening allow businesses to anticipate customer needs. Online consumer behaviors and conversations can also reveal opportunities to expand or improve services and products, thus adding additional revenue streams and growing your brand name into new markets. Social listening tactics also play a crucial role in helping to manage your brand’s online reputation and awareness and can help your marketing team mitigate consumer issues or complaints more quickly
17% – Attract new customers
16% – Provide better customer service
12% – Remain ahead of the competition
15% – Monitor my business’s online reputation
12% – Seek out new business opportunities
10% – Identify industry influencers and/or trends
16% – Better understand customer preferences
2% – Other
18% of Canadian respondents mainly use social listening to better understand customer preferences
For Canadian businesses, the need to better understand customer preferences is more often at the heart of social listening campaigns than other use cases. While lead generation and customer service enhancements are near the top of the list, social listening for Canadian business owners is a more useful tool for gaining insight into what customers are looking for, services they may feel are lacking, or features that might be missing from a product.
17% – Attract new customers
15% – Provide better customer service
11% – Remain ahead of the competition
11% – Monitor my business’s online reputation
13% – Seek out new business opportunities
12% – Identify industry influencers and/or trends
18% – Better understand customer preferences
3% – Other
In our first inquiry to the marketing community, we explored social listening practices to find out how many were using the practice in their own marketing strategies and whether they’d been using the tactic prior to the pandemic or as a result of changes in their marketing practices post COVID-19.
“At Bella bathrooms, as an eCommerce business, we consider social listening as one of the major tools for us to sustain our position in the market. So, we have been using social listening tools to study social media trends, brand mentions, and customer perceptions. We have been performing social listening in some way since the start of our business. In fact, social listening has been one of our marketing strategies which really helps us to find leads that have a 70% conversion rate. Customer acquisition has been made simple using social listening where we could approach the right customer who was already looking for our products.”
—James Chapman, Operations Manager, BELLABathrooms
“I’ve been utilizing social listening for the last year because I generate all my leads online so the online perception of my business brand is very important. If people read my business blog and want to find out more about us, they will do a search to find out what people are saying about our business.”
—Shawn Plummer, Owner & CEO, The Annuity Expert
“I’ve been performing social listening for my business for the last year now to get in-depth knowledge about consumer behavior and industry trends. It allows me to expand my user base through effective marketing campaigns. I use social listening tools to build a brand image that is responsive to the needs of the consumers.”
—Zephyr Chan, Founder, Better Tools
Whether you’re looking to give a boost to lead generation or improve customer experience, social listening is a great way to enhance your brand’s agility and ability to meet ever-evolving consumer demands. Social media can also be useful in development as a way to improve your services or products in response to consumer feedback and comments across social channels. Though less often leveraged, social listening can also provide your organization with the necessary data to identify new revenue streams. Combined, these benefits position social listening as a way of establishing key performance indicators throughout your organization’s inbound marketing strategy in order to gauge the effectiveness of the tactics you have in play.
Social Listening Tools
A majority of U.S. businesses use social listening tools to monitor customer questions, comments, and complaints
The feedback from our respondents in the United States showed that business owners and marketing professionals use social listening tools and tactics primarily to get ahead of the needs of customers. Other uses include tracking online reputation and mentions and trends related to the competition in order to establish competitive advantages. Other uses mentioned, ranging from tracking news and trends relative to your industry, as well as other products or services adjacent to your industry, can help your marketing and development teams pivot your marketing efforts and make improvements to your services or products to match consumer expectations and demands that don’t make it to your feedback channels. Social listening can also reveal opportunities for link building and media exposure by either revealing opportunities where your brand might be relevant or instances where you’re already being discussed.
(On a scale of 1-9, 1 being the most important use for social listening tools)
Customer questions, comments, and complaints
My business’s name
Online competition
Industry news, terms, and trends
Relevant brands and products
Link building/media opportunities
Mentions of my business’s executive team
Geographical locations for potential business expansion
Other
Meanwhile, Canadian businesses mainly leverage social listening tools to keep track of relevant brands and products
To the North, our Canadian respondents are more likely to leverage social listening to keep up with competitors by tracking mentions of industry adjacent brands and products and tracking what competitors are doing to meet the needs of their own customers. Social listening is still leveraged to quickly engage with customers by Canadian companies, but the respondent feedback shows that business owners prioritize a number of benefits that combined show they would rather mine the data gained through social listening to establish competitive advantages.
(On a scale of 1-9, 1 being the most important use for social listening tools)
Relevant brands and products
Customer questions, comments, and complaints
Online competition
My business’s name
Mentions of my business’s executive team
Industry news, terms, and trends
Geographical locations for potential business expansion
Link building/media opportunities
Other
Most U.S. respondents also cite that social listening helps them use customer feedback to shape product development and/or business strategy
Drilling down into one of the benefits of social listening, many companies rely on it to inform project management and the research and development process for both existing and new products and services. The insight gained from consumer interactions, questions, inquiries, and other behaviors online allows organizations to determine what features or services are in the highest demand and then build their brand reputation around those customer needs. It can also help to inform and drive marketing strategies and lead generation tactics.
(On a scale of 1-7, 1 being the biggest benefit of social listening)
Use customer feedback to shape product development and/or business strategy
Proactively respond to customer feedback/complaints
Create new products/services
Conduct better competitor research
Attract/hire new talent
Monitor the performance of my business’s communications/ content
Other
However, Canadian respondents mainly noted that social listening allows them to proactively respond to customer feedback and complaints
Managing your online reputation is difficult if you’re constantly only reacting and responding to feedback and complaints from your customers. Social listening through chatbots, messaging, and post engagement allows your marketing team to open channels of communication with customers before issues escalate into complaints or negative reviews. In line with the Canadian propensity to rely on social listening for informing product development, they accomplish this largely by using social listening to minimize barriers and give velocity to customer engagement by inviting insight.
(On a scale of 1-7, 1 being the biggest benefit of social listening)
Proactively respond to customer feedback/complaints
Create new products/services
Use customer feedback to shape product development and/or business strategy
Conduct better competitor research
Attract/hire new talent
Monitor the performance of my business’s communications/ content
Other
As we stated at the head of the article, social listening is perhaps one of the most versatile strategies that can be leveraged in your marketing repertoire. We took the question to the marketing community to find out how they were benefiting from the practice.
“We use social listening to discover user-generated content (UGC), which can be a very cost-effective and low-cost digital marketing tactic. Customers who are happy with your products are more likely to share images, videos, and other sorts of content that show them in action. Your public relations and marketing teams will be able to find this content via social media listening as part of their own social content strategy. Finding and repurposing user-generated content will allow you to market your business and compete with other businesses without having to rely only on more expensive types of advertising because customers tend to believe other people’s recommendations, particularly if they come from friends, family, or influencers.”
—Gerrid Smith, Chief Marketing Officer, Joy Organics
“We use anonymized social listening data to determine which neighborhoods our marketing messages are most likely to resonate in. We use a mix of proximity data (where people tend to post about specific topics) and mobility data (where the people that post tend to travel to and from).”
—Anne Saulnier, CEO, HexIQ
“Social listening provides information on your brand’s health, or how well your company is delivering on its promises. You can get a sense of how people feel about your brand, what they link it with, and how your company compares to competitors by reading social media mentions. You can then design action plans to assist improve your business or tackle existing problems before they worsen once you have the answers to these questions.”
—Liam Quirk, SEO & eCommerce Strategy Director, Enofaber
34% of businesses don’t perform social listening and have no plans to start, noting that it simply isn’t relevant to their business/industry
Despite the extensive benefits from social listening practices, 33% of our respondents to the survey gave a myriad of reasons as to why they either no longer or never have used social listening. Given the extensive negative impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on our economic landscape, it follows that a large portion of those who aren’t leveraging social listening don’t have the resources to dedicate to the practice specifically. A majority, however, claim a lack of relevancy for such tactics in their industry. Perhaps most telling are the 27% of those who aren’t using social listening because they have attempted to do so, but didn’t find the practice to be beneficial or valuable.
27% – We don’t have the time and/or resources
34% – Social listening isn’t relevant to our business/industry
27% – We simply didn’t find it to be beneficial
12% – Other
25% of the businesses that don’t perform social listening or plan to have been operating for over 10 years
A majority of those not performing social listening have been in operation for more than 10 years and likely have other systems or practices in place serving a similar function. It’s interesting, though, that a fairly equal mix of companies not using social listening is spread across the survey’s inquiry as to the number of years in business. Even newer businesses that exist at a time when you cannot avoid the impact of social media are avoiding social listening as a valid strategy that provides the benefits we’ve covered.
(Businesses who don’t plan to perform social listening)
21% – Less than 1 year
21% – 1-2 years
13% – 3-5 years
15% – 6-9 years
25% – 10+ years
Very few respondents to our inquiries with the general marketing community claimed that they don’t use social listening, and even then, still use the tools and strategies related to social listening.
“I used to do social listening when I first started my social media management company. Through the use of tools like Twitter search and hashtags, I was able to monitor keywords, conversations and specific accounts to be aware of the latest trends. Social media was young and there were not a lot of users, but it helped me keep track of the most important discussions. I stopped social listening when I realized I could just check the news more than once a day. Social listening is a valuable tool, but there is a minimal amount of effort involved in getting the latest news as it’s happening.”
— Maria McDowell, Founder, EasySearchPeople
14% of businesses use HubSpot as their main social listening tool in 2022
Every marketing niche has its superstar software solutions. In the social listening arena, some of the best-known titans of productivity, such as Hootsuite, Buffer, and Mention, have been trying to topple the leading choice by many marketing teams: Hubspot. As a multifaceted solution for many marketing use cases, the CRM functionality of HubSpot has a robust free tier that startups and entrepreneurs can use to get off the ground and start to scale their business. Down the line, the paid tiers are designed to provide all of the powerful, in-depth social listening tools a small- to medium-sized business might need to stay ahead of the competition. The platform helps to monitor the major social channels such as Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram, and Twitter, and can be used to easily engage across all of the platforms through a single interface.
9% – BuzzSumo
9% – Sprout Social
10% – Hootsuite
7% – Meltwater
7% – Cision
9% – Mention
9% – Buffer
14% – Hubspot
7% – Falcon.io
7% – Awario
9% – Keyhole
3% – Other
As you might imagine, social listening tools are abundant in the modern market, and we posed the question to our marketing community to find out what they were using most often to engage and monitor the behavior of leads across social channels.
“While there are several solutions that allow you to monitor and post to social media accounts, we prefer Hubspot, which allows you to not only monitor and publish but also get closed-loop reporting data. That means you can see not only which channels generate the greatest interaction, but also which content and channels generate actual leads and sales farther down the funnel.”
—Ricardo Pina, Founder, The Modest Wallet
“To do a deep dive into a subject, I use Social Mention and Mention. Social Mention is good for tracking keywords or phrases. You can see all the buzz around a topic or a particular brand or product and it even shows you related articles, recent blog posts, and tweets. Mention, on the other hand, is great for tracking brands, products, and people. Every company is on social networks and Mention allows you to see the brands that your customers love and engage with. Next, I also use Buzzsumo to find popular content. I use it to search for top-performing blog posts on a particular topic.”
—David Rowland, Head of Digital Marketing, EcoOnline
“We use Mention most often and we are fans of its competitive analysis tool that lets us compare our brand against any number of competitors. This enables us to ensure that our marketing is always one step ahead of our rivals.”
—Dean Kaplan, CEO, Kaplan Collection Agency
11% of businesses also noted that they monitor Facebook most often with social listening tools
Social media channels are constantly evolving and in the last ten years, the number of active users across the channels has exploded. That’s one of the primary drivers causing organizations to turn to social listening tools, so as to keep up with the ever-expanding streams of data. Of the social channels being monitored, those owned by Meta—Facebook and Instagram—are together the most monitored social channels, closely followed by YouTube and Twitter.
With more than 2.9 billion monthly active users on Facebook and 1.48 billion active Instagram users, the potential advertising reach across the brand’s social channels makes it one of the most actively leveraged platforms for consumer engagement. Facebook and Instagram are also powerful drivers of social proof marketing, which leaves businesses relying on data-generating social activity of users to gauge the impact and effectiveness of their marketing efforts.
11% – Facebook
8% – Twitter
10% – Instagram
10% – YouTube
7% – Google+
7% – LinkedIn
6% – Pinterest
5% – Blogs
5% – News platforms
7% – TikTok
6% – Snapchat
4% – Forums (Reddit, Quora, etc.)
5% – Review websites (G2, Yelp, etc.)
4% – Online marketplaces (UpCity, Clutch, etc.)
5% – Job boards (Glassdoor, Indeed, etc.)
1% – Other
Having the right tools to carry out an effective social listening campaign does little good if you’re not targeting the proper social channels. We asked the marketing community to weigh in on their preferred targets for social listening campaigns, and their feedback is largely aligned with the findings of the survey, but there were also some approaches that had a little more breadth than what the survey revealed. .
“We often monitor social media, online marketing places/reviews sites, and forums. These are the most effective platforms for getting insights into our customers and how they feel about our products. We also use them to identify potential areas of improvement for our marketing and product development efforts.”
—Fanny Surjana, Founder, Quenchlist
“I monitor review sites most often, as it helps gauge an insight into the consumer’s perspective. Reviews are an ideal way for us to identify any issues on the consumer side and then solve problems accordingly.”
—Evelyn Smith, Professional Photographer, Fox Backdrop
“Social media is certainly the most prevalent and active channel we monitor. However we do utilize the whole of the interest to monitor and manage brand sentiment and craft our marketing campaigns based on intelligence and analytical information.”
—Claire Curzon, CEO, Brighter Directions
Both in the year leading up to and throughout the pandemic, businesses have been working to streamline operations by either leveraging software solutions or outsourcing marketing tasks. In the case of social listening, the software tools leveraged by many organizations are designed to allow minimal marketing staff to gather, collate, and analyze the massive amount of incoming data streams generated by consumer activity across multiple social channels. Knowing what to look for in a social media management suite can help your team get the most out of social listening by maximizing customer engagement and providing leadership with access to the data necessary to make informed business decisions.
Monthly Budgets: Social Listening Tools and Software
40% of businesses across the board spend $101-$500 per month on social listening tools/software
Social listening tools, often integrated into larger social media management software suites, can be expensive undertakings and require a degree of preparation and budgeting in order to integrate into your existing Martech stack. With some of the most powerful and popular tools having free versions that can be scaled into monthly subscriptions with pricing that is often based on the type of monitoring you plan to do, it makes sense that most of our small business and entrepreneur-owned startup respondents would dedicate up to $500 a month.
(Overall breakdown)
26% – Less than $100 per month
40% – $101-$500 per month
22% – $501-$999 per month
12% – $1,000+ per month
As you can see in the chart below, budgets in excess of $500 a month seem to often be the purview of either extremely aggressive SMBs with large revenue streams, social media marketing-focused agencies, or larger enterprise-level entities.
| Annual Revenue | Monthly Social Listening Tools Budget | |
|---|---|---|
| Less than $500,000 | Less than $100 per month | 52% |
| $500,000-$2M | $101-$500 | 54% |
| $3M-$5M | $101-$500 | 39% |
| $6M-$9M | $501-$999 | 37% |
| $10M+ | $1,000+ per month | 38% |
“My question for brands doing social listening is, how exactly are they using it. Initially, brands used it to get a sense of sentiment and trends in conversation. That can be interesting, but to me, it’s a bit like Fitbit data. Neat at first, but once it keeps coming out the same, it’s not that helpful. Brands who use the conversations to engage with customers, prospects, and relevant conversations are likely getting more out of it, but it may take a significant investment in labor to do well.”
—Jim Tobin, CEO and Founder, Ignite Social Media
The monthly budgets revealed by our community of marketing specialists are largely in line with these findings, with the exception of the few on the list who are using HubSpot, which proves to be somewhat expensive, but delivers top-end social media management tools.
“It usually depends on the budget and response I get however currently, I am connected to two monitors rounding up to 100 dollars per month.”
—David Morgan, Owner, Snorkel Mart
“I spend around $200 on social listening tools per month. This includes package updates as well.”
—Lily Wili, CEO, Ever Wallpaper
“HubSpot costs around $890 per month. It is slightly on the expensive end, but it is an all-in-one social media management software with different metrics. It saves me a lot of money hiring an expert.”
—Lauren Proctor, Marketing Head & Designer, BenchMade Modern
The free tiers offered by many of the social listening tools on the market are often enough to get the ball rolling or identify the right tools to fit your business’s needs. However, as with most social media marketing software tools, you’ll get more impact and results with a dedicated budget designed to maximize the return on your investment.
Make Sure You’re Prepared to Listen to Your Customers This Year
The importance of social listening in the post-COVID economy cannot be overstated. Consumers are more active than ever across social media channels and more willing than ever to let brands know what they are looking for in the services and products they consume. In order to help our community take advantage of this trend, we’ve provided them with the results of our survey, performed in partnership with Pollfish, that shows how professionals are already using social listening tools and tactics and how much they are paying a month to do so.
Learn more about how to round out your social marketing campaigns at UpCity’s marketing hub and connect with B2B service providers that can guide you in establishing your own social media strategy or take the reins and run your campaigns for you.
UpCity’s Survey Method
UpCity surveyed 600 respondents in the United States and Canada about their business social listening methods, tools, and budgets in 2022.
Twenty-six percent of the respondents are owners or partners, followed by middle managers (9%) and non-management staff (8%).
The largest portion of respondents own or work at businesses with either 51-100 or 2-5 employees (both at 10%), followed by 1,001-5,000 employees (7%), and 501-1,000 employees (also 7%).
Fifty-eight percent of the respondents are male and forty-two percent are female.