Social media listening can mean big things for your business. The information you can learn from this strategy will teach you about how your brand reads to the public and will impact the greater marketing strategies your company uses. That kind of value can’t be ignored. That being said, let’s back up and look closer at what this is and how it can help your business.
What A Social Media Listening Strategy Is
At its core, social media listening is audience research.
The first part of the process is building a system that allows you to monitor what is being said online. You want to look at what is being said about your company, your brand, your products, but also your competitors and keywords relevant to your business.
You are listening to what is being said about your company, and wider than that, you are keeping a finger on the pulse of your market.
Some of the data collected includes your engagement rates. By looking at the numbers for the overall accounts, trends emerge and the numbers define how your audience reacted to individual posts. Similar information can be collected on your competitors.
Once you have a system set up so that all of this information is being delivered to you, the second part of the process is to take that data and make sense of it. You want to analyze what is out there and use it to create plans of action that will positively impact your business.
Sometimes these plans of action are as simple as replying effectively to your customers. Other times, you may have information that tells you your brand isn’t reading well to the world, and you can use this knowledge to change how you are presenting your brand to the world.
Why It’s Important To Do This
From social media listening, you can better learn who your true customers are. You can discover their needs and how your products fit into their lives. You can build connections with these customers. You can learn more about how your content reaches them.
Without using this strategy, you are cutting yourself off from these details. You may know that your brand isn’t connecting with your customers, but you won’t have an understanding for where your company is hitting the mark and where it isn’t.
Having this data means that when something isn’t working, your company can pivot faster. Company campaigns can react quicker and be fine tuned to get the best results.
How to Start a Social Media Listening Plan
The first thing you need to do is decide what you want to listen for. This will probably change over time as different things become important to your company, but determining a goal from the beginning is essential. Goals may be customer service oriented, connecting with a specific audience, or possibly leading the way with news in your field. Consider this before you get started.
While you will want to set up things specifically to meet your goals, there are many common things you will always want to be adding to your monitoring campaign. Some of these include: your brand name, your account user names, your product names, your slogan, your brand’s hashtags, and important keywords in your industry. For these examples, you will also want to monitor common misspellings. For anything specific to your company, like account user names, you will also want to listen for your competitors’.
The above are only a few examples for where to start with the basics for a strategy. Once you have your goals set, your company will expand this by a lot. Hiring a specialist to do this work for your company can be a great option for effectively making this happen. NetBase is a leader in social analytics. If you want to hire a company to deliver real-time customer insights and build a social media listening strategy tailored to your company, consulting with NetBase will help you reach your business goals.
