According to most people, TikTok is a social media platform where teenagers build dances and respond to trending challenges. Unfortunately, the great potential this platform offers for engaging with existing customers, connecting with new ones, and building brand loyalty remains untapped by companies.

Most fail to recognize that the platform has the potential to influence and impact even culture and lifestyle because its ecosystem is built on virality and catalyzing trends that resonate beyond the app and can permeate everywhere.

So, to understand this ecosystem, connect through conversation, learn, and co-create, companies must indulge in TikTok social listening. Let's dive in and examine why TikTok social listening is essential and how to maximize it to increase brand awareness, have a successful online presence, and stand out.

Social listening involves tracking online behaviors, conversations, and mentions across digital platforms. It is a branch of audience analysis that involves strategic research, including social monitoring, to extract relevant data and insights to support long-term growth. 

Companies can identify how customers interact with their brand, product, industry, or competitors so that they can attract, retain, and serve both new and loyal customers better. In a way, they are better equipped to identify and address areas for improvement, mitigate risks, respond to customer needs, and make informed decisions. 

Click here to find out the difference between social monitoring and social listening.

TikTok social listening is of paramount importance in today's digital landscape. As an ever-evolving platform, understanding the pulse of TikTok's dynamic community is crucial for businesses, marketers, and content creators alike. 

Harnessing the power of TikTok social listening empowers brands to stay relevant and authentic and build meaningful connections with their audience, ultimately driving growth and success in this fast-paced, competitive ecosystem. 

Check out some Benefits of Social Listening and Monitoring in our blog.

Benefits of TikTok Social Listening

Tiktok Is Among the Most Popular Social Media Platforms

TikTok is one of the most popular social media platforms. Here are some statistics to back this up.

1. TikTok has more than one billion users worldwide and two billion downloads.
2. 90% of TikTok users access it every day
3. Forty-six minutes is the average time each user uses the app each day.
4. 71% of users believe the biggest trends start on TikTok
5. It is the most engaging platform for influencer marketing; here’s why

TikTok has also proven to play a significant role in users' decision-making. According to reports,

1. 43% of users try something or go somewhere new after seeing it at least once on the TikTok platform
2. 67% of TikTok users said the platform "inspired them to shop even when they didn't want to."
3. 66% of TikTok users claimed the platform had aided them in deciding what to buy
4. 74% of users on TikTok claimed that the platform had motivated them to research more about a product or brand online.

Source: TikTok

Get Opportunities to Improve Business & Marketing Strategies

In the realm of social listening and intelligence, TikTok is still an unexplored territory. With no accessible API and enterprise tools, most of TikTok's data cannot be tracked, so the platform remains relatively untapped. 

However, as a predominantly public network, solutions like Exolyt, which offer comprehensive TikTok Analytics and Social Intelligence, can capture relevant TikTok insights for you that have the potential to reveal a treasure trove of valuable information about your current or potential customers. Leveraging TikTok social listening, your corporation will be in a position to:

1. Improve customer service and experience
2. Increase brand awareness and engagement
3. Identify relevant influencers and UGC
4. Manage brands reputation and crisis
5. Boost product development
6. Explore competitive advantage 
7. Conduct market research

TikTok listening data can be extremely useful in understanding user behavior and finding opportunities to tweak and improve your brand's TikTok marketing strategy. 

But, with the increased volume of conversations on social media, it can be challenging for businesses to keep track of what is being said about their brand, products, or services.

Exolyt's TikTok Analytics and social listening and monitoring features can help uncover these market perceptions through comment monitoring, for example.

This offers a golden opportunity to learn, engage, and thrive in the realm of social media, as it offers a direct glimpse into the minds and hearts of your audience.

But how do we put the insights into use?

For example, a consumer brand may use TikTok listening insights to understand their audience with a broader perspective on their sentiments and interactions, encompassing perceptions of the brand, product, industry, and competitors. 

Exploring deeper consumer intelligence insights like these might reveal certain new and trending cultural or socio-economic aspects like a preference for a new product type, values for or against certain moral issues - for example, all-inclusive beauty products for various skin types, or eliminating animal tests; farm produced non-GMO items among others.

With Exolyt's TikTok Analytics and Industry Insights feature, you can tap into specific industry-specific insights that may help determine these impacts, with access to industry-niche trends or a content matrix that segments topics/trends between saturated and most engaged.

Armed with this information, the brand can impact or disrupt the industry with targeted campaigns that trigger conversations, partner with relevant influencers to build a brand reputation, or make some shifts in customer service or product development to boost competitive advantage.

Similarly, companies can use TikTok listening data to gain insights into sentiments regarding their products or services to identify what to address and improve. Social listening also helps to keep up with what’s popular or gaining traction and make a timely jump on the bandwagon of trends. 

Qualitative Research

Social intelligence consumers across various industries can find multiple applications for data from TikTok. This goes beyond boosting brand visibility, engagement, influencer marketing, or competitive analysis, as it can be an excellent asset for qualitative research.

While users may create private accounts, the allure of being featured on the For You feed, a gateway to TikTok fame, incentivizes keeping content public. This aspiration resonates particularly with the younger demographic, driving their voice on the platform. 

So, with an entire generation shifting their social channels of communications into one platform, it offers a huge untapped market research opportunity to understand their perspectives, experiences, evolving cultures, and the issues that are important to them.

For instance, many talk about diseases they are living with, their mental health, experiences of living abroad, struggles with their jobs, or their fight for gender equality, among others—stories they want to share with the world to reach out to them and vice-versa.

Taking time to learn the content of such people can help you understand your target audience better, their needs, preferences, and pain points, empowering you to conduct better qualitative research. Plus, comprehend the customer journey for various products and services comprehensively.

So, what metrics should brands keep an eye on as part of their social listening strategy?

Find out more in Exolyt's blog - Building a TikTok Social Listening Strategy: What to Consider?