social listening on linkedin feature
LinkedIn Analytics Social Listening

Social Listening on LinkedIn: How To Do It And Why It Matters

Andreea Udescu
Andreea Udescu
Table of Contents

When you have already gained popularity on all social media platforms and you want to keep creating great content and experiences for your audience, social listening is a must.

This kind of in-depth analysis will help you discover what people think about your brand.

Social listening on LinkedIn allows you to see what are your audience’s interests, what other companies activate in your niche and how to improve your strategy.

Today you will learn how to do social listening, step by step, and understand why it's important to do it right, for the sake of your brand's growth.

Social Listening on LinkedIn


1. What is LinkedIn social listening and why it matters
2. How to perform social listening on LinkedIn

3. How social listening can improve your LinkedIn strategy

4. The benefits of social listening on LinkedIn


1. What is LinkedIn social listening and why it matters

LinkedIn social listening implies tuning in to your customers’ and prospective clients’ discussions in the online world to retrieve useful data about your brand.

It is the process through which every conversation, comment and reaction about your brand is analyzed, while also offering you data about the latest trends in your industry and niche.

By learning how users evaluate your work, you will know what there is to change: your marketing strategy or your products.

A brand that is continuously growing is a brand that never stops experimenting, taking into account different perspectives and angles until the “Evrika” moment arrives.

If you are wondering why you should do this, the answer is simple. The biggest advantage is that you can quickly find negative feedback and offer your customer support.

2. How to perform social listening on LinkedIn

Now that we know what social listening is and why it's important, let’s see how to perform social listening on LinkedIn to improve your business’ strategy.

Identify listening goals

To extract important data about your brand, you should first establish what are your goals when it comes to social listening.

If you are only looking for the latest trends in your niche and industry, then you will get plenty of useful ideas you could test for your brand.

To find feedback regarding your products and services, you can analyze conversations, comments and mentions to find users’ opinions.

Once you establish your goals for social listening on LinkedIn, you will be able to discover a lot of hidden insights in other posts and comments.

Join groups on LinkedIn

To perform social listening on LinkedIn efficiently, you should join groups where you can find users with the same interests as you.

Find relevant groups that focus on the same topics as your brand does. You might be surprised to see people already discussing your brand.

By joining these groups, you will easily be able to keep up with the conversations about your brand.

And this is not something all your competitors do, so you can use this to your advantage.

Adjust your newsfeed

When you want to implement more changes that could attract a larger number of people, it is advisable to analyze your newsfeed.

The way your brand presents in front of people is really important. Think about your LinkedIn page as your brand’s passport.

social listening on linkedin natalia wiechowski quote

Make sure you customize your newsfeed and set automatic filters to avoid spamming your audience with unnecessary content.

It is better to keep in focus only your native documents and content about your products and services. At the end of the day, these are the things that stir people’s interest.

Track your LinkedIn mentions

One very smart and easy way to do social listening on LinkedIn is to track your mentions on this plaform. To count as a mention, someone has to directly tag you in a post (using the @ in the body of the post or comment).

To access this data, you only need to connect your LinkedIn account, head to the analytics dashboard and scroll all the way down.

social listening on linkedin tracking mentions

Don't forget to adjust the time range to track mentions across a longer period of time!

The search button featured on your LinkedIn page is not there only to search for new connections. You should also use it to search for topics of your interest or popular trends in your industry.

social listening on linkedin search

When performing social listening on LinkedIn, you need to know that the search button can be used to find people, groups, companies, jobs and messages sitting in your own inbox.

After you decide which is your topic of interest, isolate the search only to “people” so that you can spot who your future connections should be.

It means that you have a lot in common with the users included in that list and you should chat with them.

Measure brand health

LinkedIn social listening is a great opportunity to measure your brand’s health. If you find posts where customers complain about your products, make sure you alert your team.

Even if that specific issue might not be your fault, make sure you apologize to the customer for their disappointing experience and promise to fix things.

The key to maintaining a healthy relationship with your customers is honesty. Answer their queries as quickly as possible to avoid their little issue to grow into a huge problem.

Maybe some of the conversations people have about your brand regard your customer support. Think about implementing some changes into that system to cater customers’ needs.

Research your competitors

If the insights you gather from your own customers are not enough, then consider expanding your search to your competitors. Watch and understand how they react and respond to specific situations and messages.

Notice if they're saying anything about your brand - and if you must, join the conversation. Your audience will surely appreciate the transparency.

3. How social listening can improve your LinkedIn strategy

Social listening on LinkedIn helps marketers find insights in users’ conversations and posts about their brands.

Doing LinkedIn social listening can help you boost brand reputation and build  better-oriented content to attract a wider audience.

  • Brand monitoring

By conducting social listening on LinkedIn you can monitor your brand’s performance and evolution so far.

Doing it every quarter will help you develop a more efficient marketing strategy.

If you decide to search by specific keywords related to your niche and brand, you will be able to track your company’ progress and see what’s missing.

  • Develop a thought leadership strategy

The people working for your brand, and especially the executives, are the image of your brand. Building together a thought leadership strategy can help you increase brand reputation.

Your thought leadership strategy shows that your company is specialized in a certain field.

Due to your LinkedIn page (if built right), people will consider you a trustful source of information when it comes to your niche.

This is how thought leadership, through your representatives, helps you develop brand awareness.

  • Competitive social intelligence

Since you are not the only one in your industry, competition will appear and you have to be ready to face it and overcome it.

Through your values, ideas and services you offer, you need to try to surpass your competition’s progress.

Even when the battle turns into a war, you still need to have the necessary resources to face it.

By overlooking your competitors’ evolution you get access to many insights regarding their marketing strategy.

Keep  an eye on your rivals’ new products and services and see what feedback they receive from their clients.

This will help you put in place a better LinkedIn strategy for your brand and find new leads.

4. The benefits of social listening on LinkedIn

Social listening on LinkedIn can boost your brand’s strategy efficiency. And this is not the only benefit.

You can find out immediately if a customer complains about your products or services to solve the problem before everyone on LinkedIn sees it.

Through social listening, you will be the first to read your clients’ feedback and you will learn about the latest trends in your industry.

If you think you still need more reasons to perform social listening on LinkedIn, we gave you a few more.

  • Find out what your audience wants

Your audience’s feedback tells you what they want and what data they need to see to keep them engaged.

Take notes and rethink your marketing strategy on LinkedIn based on your customers’ likings and dislikings.

social listening on linkedin louise brogan quote

By satisfying your clients’ needs, you also manage to increase brand reputation since they will continue to talk about you, praising you for your products and customer support.

And if you have happy clients, you certainly have a prosperous business.

  • Discover leads

A social media listening tool shows you in what type of discussions your brand is mentioned. By discovering users’ interests, you manage to develop a buyer persona.

This will help you build the profile of your ideal client. All you have to do next is to find out what keeps them interested and deliver.

Finding out about the evolution of your competitors also offers you insights about what people think about their services.

This way, you can convert those users into leads. Maybe you have better products or offers for them and you can attract them to become your customers instead.

Final Thoughts

Social listening on LinkedIn allows you to keep up with the latest trends and follow up on customers’ feedback to offer them the best customer support experience.

This complete guide on LinkedIn social listening can you help dive into the nitty-gritty and use data to grow your brand on LinkedIn.

Andreea Udescu

Andreea Udescu

I love helping people make sense of things. Especially data.

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