Alice and Bob were best friends who owned restaurants across the street from each other. Both of them had active social media pages, but Alice took the time to monitor and listen to her customers' feedback, while Bob just kept the pages active with regular posts. Alice's restaurant grew and attracted more new customers as time passed, while Bob's remained stagnant. 

Alice's attentive approach to social media allowed her to address customer concerns and tailor her menu to their changing tastes and preferences. Meanwhile, Bob's lack of attention to his customers' feedback meant that his menu became outdated, and he failed to keep up with it. In the end, it was clear that listening and engaging with customers on social media had paid off for Alice, while Bob's passive approach had left him struggling to keep up with his friend's success.

From the story, we can understand how Alice has grown her restaurant using the power of social media. The world today is a global village and so connected over social. Survey conducted by

We are Social, an initiative by Meltwater reveals that more than 4.76 billion people are active users of social media. That’s almost 4 out of every 6 people are socially active on the internet. The numbers look very promising, and so are. 

In this article, I would like to focus on the power of social media and how advanced technologies like Artificial Intelligence can be used to its maximum extent to enhance the growth of brands and businesses in today’s connected world. 

Businesses today focus on reaching more audiences and voice of share which helps in their growth. Here are some techniques that businesses use: 

Define goals:

Before businesses start using social media, they need to define their goals. What do they want to achieve? Is it to increase brand awareness, generate leads, drive sales, or something else? By defining their goals, businesses can create a targeted social media strategy. 

Identify target audience:

Businesses need to know who their target audience is, what social media platforms they use, and what content they engage with. By understanding their audience, businesses can create content that resonates with them and target their social media ads effectively.

Create engaging content:

Creating high-quality content is essential to engage the audience on social media. Businesses need to create content that is informative, entertaining, and adds value to their audience. They can use various content formats such as images, videos, infographics, and blog posts. 

Use engaging hashtags:

Using relevant hashtags can increase the visibility of businesses' content on social media. Hashtags allow businesses to reach a broader audience beyond their followers.

Engage with the audience:

Social media is a two-way conversation. Businesses should actively engage with their audience by responding to comments and messages, asking for feedback, and creating polls and surveys. 

Leverage social media advertising:

Social media advertising can help businesses reach a larger audience, increase brand awareness, and generate leads. Businesses can create targeted ads based on audience demographics, interests, and behavior. 

Monitor and measure results at regular intervals:

Businesses need to monitor and measure their social media performance to understand what is working and what isn't. By analyzing their data, they can adjust their social media strategy to achieve their goals effectively. 

By implementing these strategies, businesses can increase their visibility and engagement on social media, reach a wider audience, and ultimately achieve their business goals.

The major challenge is to understand the audience pulse and perform an analysis. The big question is how to perform this analysis - Manual or automated? Let us look at the comparison of manual and automated social media analysis. 

Automated social media analysis is time-efficient, cost-effective, and scalable. It also provides quick insights and can analyze vast amounts of data. However, it may be somewhat prone to errors, lack contextual analysis, and require a certain level of human intervention. Manual social media analysis, on the other hand, is highly accurate, but it's time-consuming, expensive, and limited in terms of scalability and data volume. 

That’s exactly what social listening and monitoring tools offer to businesses. There are a number of platforms and companies offering social listening/monitoring tools to brands and businesses and helping them strategize their business decisions and driving them towards successful growth.

The question is which one to choose and what to expect. 

Any social listening or monitoring tool must focus on the following aspects of a brand or business’ social presence. 

Understanding customer sentiment:

By monitoring online conversations about their brand, businesses can gain valuable insights into how customers feel about their products, services, and overall brand. This information can be used to improve customer satisfaction and tailor marketing and advertising campaigns to better resonate with the target audience.

Identifying customer needs:

Social listening can also help businesses identify gaps in the market and customer needs that are not currently being met. This information can be used to develop new products and services that better meet customer needs and preferences. 

Monitoring competitors:

Social listening can also be used to monitor the online conversations of competitors. This can help businesses stay up-to-date with industry trends, identify areas where they may be falling behind their competitors, and make informed decisions about how to stay competitive. 

Crisis management:

Social listening can help businesses detect and address potential PR crises before they spiral out of control. By monitoring online conversations about their brand, businesses can quickly identify negative sentiment and take proactive steps to address any issues before they become major problems.

How do these social listening tools work?

Social listening tools are designed to monitor and analyze social media platforms for mentions of a particular brand, product, or topic. The architecture of social listening tools generally consists of several components:

• Data Collection:

The first step in social listening is to collect data from various social media platforms. This is typically done using APIs provided by social media platforms, which allow developers to access data such as posts, comments, and tweets. 

• Data Storage:

The collected data is stored in a database or a data warehouse. The data storage system is usually designed to handle large volumes of data and support high throughput for real-time analysis. 

• Data Processing:

Once the data is collected, it is processed to extract insights and actionable information. This can involve natural language processing (NLP) techniques to analyze text data, image recognition to analyze visual content, and machine learning algorithms to identify patterns and trends. 

• Visualization and Reporting:

The insights and information generated from data processing are presented in the form of visualizations and reports. These can include dashboards, charts, graphs, and tables, which provide a comprehensive overview of the social media landscape and enable users to track their brand’s performance over time.

• User Interface:

A user interface (UI) is designed to enable users to interact with the social listening tool. The UI is typically web-based and allows users to set up searches and filters, view visualizations, and generate reports. 

• Integration:

Social listening tools can be integrated with other software systems, such as customer relationship management (CRM) systems and marketing automation platforms. This allows users to take action based on the insights generated from social listening. 

Overall, the architecture of social listening tools is designed to provide a comprehensive view of the social media landscape and enable businesses to make data-driven decisions based on the insights generated from social media data.

Source: Datareportal, We are Social, Meltwater and more.