With a large number of users on the social network Facebook, it is not surprising that this is a potential market information land for businesses. According to the report, as of April 2023, the number of accounts created reached nearly 3 billion users, helping Facebook become the most active social media platform on the Internet. This result has given rise to a new term, Social Listening on Facebook, which is being interested and applied by many marketers today. However, businesses should not be too hasty but need to slowly learn and refer to the following advice.
Implementing Social Listening on Facebook is simpler than ever thanks to its roughly 3 billion user profiles.
With social media listening, we are searching, tracking and observing users’ posts, shares or comments about an issue, event, or keyword that is related to a Brand or product or service of a business.
Usually, those comments and reviews have both negative and positive nuances. This is completely understandable because “for nine people, ten opinions”, we cannot require everyone to share a specific perspective, but there will always be different perspectives, enriching the data can be collected.
However, the story about human nuances is nothing to discuss if the comments or reviews on Facebook come from real users’ opinions. The issue that needs to be noted here is that for marketing or user navigation purposes, some individuals or businesses will use article seeding techniques, making the shared words no longer trustworthy or objective highest official.
Comments can be seeding intended to direct public opinion
According to a simple definition, seeding is “planting the seeds” of opinions with strategic and planned comments to attract attention from other users outside the Enterprise, reaching a wide audience in the scope of the business widely. The implementation will require a large team to be effective because viewing comments is a habit of many users of the social network Facebook, it is not difficult to realize that an article with few comments will not attract the attention of too many people interacting. The nuances of seeding will include negative, positive or neutral trends depending on the goal.
Although the above technique brings benefits to businesses when implementing marketing campaigns, it also causes difficulties for market researchers when conducting Social Listening on Facebook. The difficulty is that useful or meaningful opinions will be obscured with the dense amount of seeding. “Spamming” the same comment content makes the analysis data too optimistic or too gloomy, thereby making business decisions unrealistic.
Be wary of the crowd effect on social networking platforms
It can be seen that, with such a large number of users, the social network Facebook is the ideal place for the crowd effect to appear. The crowd effect is the state in which a user is influenced by a group of other individuals and performs unintentional actions. This effect will develop to the level of crowd psychology due to curiosity and curiosity and spread at a very fast and natural speed.
The implementation of Social Listening on Facebook can be affected by such psychological effects. Imagine that, when an unconfirmed rumor appears and many users are directed and led, the Brand image of the Business is seriously affected. When these events occur, it will be very difficult to control because users are influenced by emotions and lack the ability to research and draw conclusions for themselves. At this time, the Social Listening tool will act as a solution for businesses to collect nuanced comments to propose solutions for themselves.
The crowd effect will greatly impact the results of Social Listening on the Facebook platform
However, in cases where users are excited and ready to refute assertions or excuses from the Enterprise, the Social Listening tool in this situation becomes ineffective. The reason given is that the crowd will be led to another issue from the Enterprise’s correction. They will try to find abnormalities and continue to attack and put pressure on the Brand and the results from the Social Listening tool will not be meaningful because no matter how they analyze it, the crowd has already decided negative psychological images towards the event. Therefore, solving the communication crisis cannot be done with just a single Social Listening tool but requires specific management and planning.
The application of Social Listening tools to find R&D ideas has become very practical and appropriate in the context of people using social networks as an information search tool. With search results, questions about a new type of gadget or asking for advice from users posted have become an endless source of inspiration for market researchers. The advantage of Social Listening is that it helps businesses stay ahead of new trends, concerns and current preferences of customers. However, there is one point that businesses need to pay attention to: distinguishing between real needs and temporary trends.
Distinguishing needs and trends will help businesses determine the right direction of development
With real needs, this can be considered a sustainable and long-term development direction for the Enterprise. Customers may be experiencing some difficulty in their working or living life and do not yet have a product or service that can meet or solve that difficulty. Customers may turn to social networking platforms to look for advice or temporary solutions to overcome the current situation. With the social network platform with the most users, if businesses know how to seize this opportunity using the Social Listening method Facebook will create a gap in competitive advantage compared to competitors from the information provided.
On the contrary, instant trends only last for a short time and people quickly forget them. Increasing the number of searches for a new product or service keyword in a short period of time will inevitably attract the attention of businesses with the collected data. In this situation, businesses need to stay alert, analyze and continue to monitor developments to avoid making business mistakes. Trends can be a short-term strategy, but businesses should not mistakenly think that it is a real need that is oriented towards long-term development. Inherently, trending items will only exist because of the expectations and desires of customers. If they already own the product or experience the service but there is not a big difference, the trend will also decline.
Trends often have a short life cycle and are easily replaced once users have fully experienced it
It can be said that Social Listening Facebook is an activity targeting the technology platform with the most user concentration in the world. The benefits that businesses achieve range from data collection to competitor analysis and market research. However, the above notes and advice such as being wary of the crowd psychology effect, seeding marketing activities and distinguishing data that proves real demand from temporary trends will help marketers bring about effective situations.
