When you’re looking for new information, the first thing that will probably come to your mind is: “I’ll google it.”
Google is, indeed, the most visited website in the world. Do you know which site holds the second place?
It’s YouTube. With 122 million active daily users, YouTube stands right after Google as the second-largest search engine worldwide. Following these stats, it’s understandable why YouTube is one of the best channels for extracting important feedback, following trends, and engaging with the audience.
💡 Read Social Listening Guide: Proven Hacks, Strategies, and Tools
And the easiest way to do it? Social listening.
Read on to find out how.
Understanding Social Listening For YouTube
Social listening on YouTube is a dynamic process that involves actively monitoring and analyzing conversations, comments, and mentions related to your brand, channel, content and competitors. It’s a powerful tool that allows you to tap into the pulse of your audience and the broader YouTube community.
There are two ways of monitoring.
You can do it manually – and risk missing out on some of the content because it is difficult to keep track of numerous channels at the same time. In addition, you might miss on some comments on other channels that you’re not following attentively, but that might gather your target audience.
Or you can use the help of social listening tools, which is a more reliable technique since you get all the information you’re interested in a single dashboard. You simply type in the desired keywords, save them and the tools starts collecting all the mentions from online sources it can get. From there, you can analyze these mentions, follow metrics like sentiment, influence, engagement and pull out reports.
These insights extend beyond basic metrics and offer a deeper understanding of viewer preferences, emerging trends, and areas for improvement. In essence, social listening on YouTube is not just about data collection; it’s about fostering engagement, building community, and making data-driven decisions to propel your YouTube channel to greater success.
Read Social Listening Metrics: What and How to Track
Benefits of Social Listening for YouTube
Monitoring comments
One of the biggest advantages of using social listening techniques on YouTube is the ability to closely monitor and engage with the comments section. The comments section is more than just a space for viewer feedback. It’s a direct line of communication between content creators and their audience.
Responding to comments not only nurtures a sense of community but also demonstrates a genuine commitment to audience engagement. Additionally, addressing viewers’ concerns and queries can lead to increased viewer loyalty and satisfaction, ultimately contributing to higher levels of engagement, improved content quality, and a stronger YouTube presence.
Read 10 Steps to Manage Negative Online Reviews
Tracking competitors
Another significant advantage of social listening on YouTube is the capability to keep a close eye on your competitors. Understanding what other creators in your niche are doing is crucial for staying ahead of the game.
How to do it through a social listening tool? Just type in the name of your competitors, put their YouTube Channel as a source and wait for the results to come to your feed.
By actively monitoring your competitors’ channels, content, and engagement metrics, you gain insights into what strategies are working well and where there may be gaps in the market. Are they capitalizing on trending topics that you’ve missed? Are their viewers particularly engaged with a specific type of content?
These insights can guide your content strategy, help you identify opportunities for differentiation, and ensure that your channel remains competitive.
Analyzing sentiment
Delving into the sentiment of viewer comments and interactions is crucial when you’re creating or rethinking your PR and marketing strategy. It’s not just about knowing what your viewers are saying but understanding how they feel about your content. Through sentiment analysis, you can identify patterns in the emotional response to your videos – whether it’s positive, negative or neutral.
Read How to Conduct A YouTube Sentiment Analysis
This invaluable insight helps YouTubers gauge the impact of their content on their audience and adapt their strategies accordingly. Positive sentiment can indicate areas of content excellence to replicate, while negative sentiment can highlight opportunities for improvement.
Read 6 Best Ways To Find YouTube Influencers
Performance tracking
With so much competition and content on YouTube and not so many chances to stand out, performance tracking is a must. By closely monitoring the keywords, tags, and descriptions associated with your videos, you gain valuable insights into what resonates with your audience. You can identify which video elements contribute to higher views, longer watch times, and increased engagement.
To make the process easier and less time-consuming, you can use social listening tools again. They provide metrics like the number of views, engagement, likes, etc. under every mention. In addition, the tools enable you to segment the YouTube mentions as a separate entity and get the overall image of your YouTube presence through a report.
In this way, performance tracking aids in measuring the effectiveness of your content strategy. By analyzing which themes or topics consistently attract viewers and generate positive feedback, you can shape your future content to cater to audience interests. This not only helps maintain viewer engagement but can also contribute to increased subscribers and overall channel growth.
Top 3 Social Listening Tools You Can Use to Track YouTube
Brandwatch
Brandwatch is a robust social listening and analytics platform that offers comprehensive monitoring capabilities across various social media platforms. It allows you to track brand mentions, keywords, and topics on YouTube, providing insights into audience sentiment, trends, and engagement. Brandwatch also offers powerful sentiment analysis and reporting features, making it a valuable tool for tracking your YouTube presence.
Determ
Determ is a powerful media monitoring and social listening tool that tracks more than 100 million online sources for your mentions across websites, forums and social media platforms including YouTube. Its user-friendly dashboard allows you to easily track important metrics like engagement, virality, influence of the posts, their sentiment, etc. and its filtering and tagging options enable you to segment the mentions via source and analyze only mentions coming from one source (YouTube for example). In this way you can easily do competitor analysis, analyze a specific campaign, do market research or simply nurture and protect your brand reputation.
In addition, it offers a powerful AI assistant Synthia to help you summarize your mentions, draw conclusions and propose actionable steps for your PR and marketing team.
Talkwalker
Talkwalker is a social media analytics and monitoring tool that covers YouTube and other social platforms. It offers features like sentiment analysis, trend tracking, and competitive analysis. Talkwalker’s advanced search capabilities allow you to filter YouTube mentions based on keywords, engagement metrics, and sentiment, helping you gain insights into audience perceptions and identify opportunities for improvement.
To Conclude
Social listening is not merely an option but a necessity for YouTube creators aiming to thrive in this digital realm. It’s a tool that empowers them to adapt and evolve. Especially in a landscape where viewers’ preferences shift, trends emerge, and competition intensifies. If you’re interested in finding out how social listening can up your business strategy, reach out to our experts. We’ll be happy to give you more info.
