Why ‘Social Listening’ is Important: A look at GoPro

Vinny Steves
Nov 5 · 3 min read

Whether you have a large or small company, it is important to know what people think of your company. You want to know if customers are happy with your product, or if they have feedback that may actually be beneficial to your company. Social media monitoring is when you gather information on social and use it to measure success or feedback; which is completely different from social media listening, which is used to analyze information and look at the big picture of your company. Social listening can be considered a two-step process, where as you need to monitor and analyze your findings, then take action on what you have found. You may be asking yourself, “well why does social listening even matter?” By using social listening, you can track customer engagement, understand your brand image vs your competition, and develop new sales leads, among many other positives. If you are interested in social listening, you should use tools such as Tweetdeck, Hootsuite, and Brandwatch, but you can also just track mentions on social media sites.

I decided to track and conduct a social listening exercise for the company GoPro, the popular action cameras that can be taken on the go, wherever and whenever you want. To do this, I used Tweetdeck and social media platforms like Instagram. GoPro has a strong social media presence, with over 2 million followers on Twitter and 16 million followers on Instagram. During my research, I found that overall, GoPro receives mainly positive or mentions and comments, many showcasing GoPro footage that they recorded. For instance, motocross rider Nate Adams shared a tweet of footage of him on a course and wrote “Absolutely loving my #GoProHERO8 The clarity of video & built in stabilization is SO GOOD. Here’s a list of the features I’m pumped on: • Built in mounting (no cage needed) • 14% lighter • HyperSmooth 2.0 Anyone else using a #GoProHERO8?” Another tweet came from professional bicyclist Peter Sagan who wrote, “Well, it seems I’m not that bad in axe throwing, @tvb_osttirol style. It even looks more impressive in slow motion… @gopro #GoProHERO8”.

People love sharing their GoPro videos because they are the best cameras to use when doing something in action. In this tweet, Deer Valley Resort posted a video of skier McRae Williams going down a course writing, “Do you remember February 2019 and the 108” of new snow at #DeerValley? | ⛷ McRae Williams 🏔 @Deer_Valley | 📷 @GoPro #GoPro”, and in this tweet here, a soccer team showed their goalie making an amazing save. The same can be said for people on Instagram, as many Instagram users have shared videos of themselves in action and using a GoPro camera. For instance, here is a video of someone who posted a video of GoPro footage underwater.

Just by doing a search on Twitter and Instagram, I was able to find that GoPro users are athletic people who enjoy taking videos of themselves in action, and that they are satisfied with our products. Through the use of social listening you can not only understand what your target audience thinks of your company, but you can then develop a new marketing strategy based off of what you have found.

Vinny Steves

Written by

Public relations professional. Graduate student at the University of Florida studying Communications. Publicist at ABC News.

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