social listening as part of your social media strategy

In addition to post development, customer service and support, and building your brand, social listening should be part of your business social media strategy.

It allows you to track, analyze and respond to conversations related to your brand, industry, or audience online. You can use the insights to influence targeting and marketing messaging, as well as understand how people feel about your brand.

What is Social Listening?

Social listening includes:

  • Monitoring social media channels for mention of your brand, competitors, products and any other keywords relevant to your business.
  • Analyzing that information to look for ways to implement your learnings.

Part of your customer service strategy online should definitely include social listening.

Social listening is about researching and tracking conversations around specific topics, keywords, phrases, brands or industries, and then using those learnings to create content for your audience.

The important part of social listening, that makes it different from just social media monitoring, is collecting the data and taking action to improve your business and marketing strategy.

When you are “listening,” look for content trends, pain points and related phrases. Learn about what sentiment customers and prospects have towards your brand. Look for trends in your industry and with your competitors to build off of and find new opportunities.

Unlike simply monitoring, you are looking for the mood, or sentiment behind the social media posts. This helps you understand how people actually feel about you, your competitors, your products and your industry.

Why is Social Listening Important?

Customers and prospects are likely talking about your brand and products on a variety of channels, not just posting directly to you on your Facebook page.

By using social listening, you can track your overall brand health, create content your audience is interested in, improve your customer experience and drive product strategy.

Just one negative comment or review can be looked at on a case-by-case basis. But a variety of the same type of complaints or reviews represents a trend. If you are not actively monitoring for your brand online, you may miss these trends.

Social listening also ensures that you’re on top of positive or negative comments or conversations about your brand. It helps you to stay on top of online customer service that may not directly happen on your business social media page.

It helps you identify opportunities to engage in conversations about your brand in real time, so you are on top of the conversations and participating in customer engagement.

Social Listening Tips

Not sure where to start? Here are some tips to help you with social listening.

  1. Pay attention to what people are saying and where they say it. Don’t limit yourself to just monitoring Facebook or other popular social media sites. Using some of the tools we provide later, monitor how people are writing about you on blogs and other websites as well.

    Also note how people are talking about you on different social media platforms. People may be saying different things or have a different tone on Facebook compared to LinkedIn compared to Twitter.
  2. Take notes on your competitors. While you shouldn’t copy their strategy, you can learn from the way their customers interact with them and they interact back. Are customers generally happy with the company? Or do they have more of a negative sentiment? What are they saying?

    While you don’t wish harm to your competitors, pay particular attention if they make a mistake and how they handle rectifying it. Are their customers satisfied? Are they wanting or needing more? How can you learn from that situation?
  3. Make sure to communicate with your team members. Sometimes you may come across customer service issues or information that need to be shared with others on your team or in your company. Perhaps someone has a great idea for your website, marketing, or a product improvement. Maybe it’s even a new product idea, or they have a lot of questions about your brand that someone needs to answer.

    Just because someone doesn’t comment directly to you about an issue doesn’t mean it shouldn’t be handled. Make sure you are working with others in your company to provide the best customer experience.
  4. Keep an eye open for drastic changes. If your customers are generally happy with your brand and/or product or service, and then suddenly you are seeing a lot of complaints and negative conversation, that’s something that should be addressed.

    It may mean you need to change your targeting or marketing strategy. Or, you have a product or service that needs changed or discontinued.
  5. Don’t forget to learn from what you gather. Just listening isn’t enough. You need to take what you learn and apply it to your future strategy. Learn how in the next section.

What should I do with my learnings?

One example of implementing your learnings is using them to test a proposed product or service.

Another example is testing two different creative campaigns against each other.

Or, you can monitor brand and product mentions to help measure your social return on investment (ROI).

Perhaps you will find learnings about your products/services, customer service or other aspect of your company that your customers love or hate and you can use their comments to adjust internal processes or procedures.

Understanding how people feel about your brand and products is a key to keeping your marketing and product development on track. Social listening gives you real-time sentiment so you can alter your strategies on the fly.

Are there tools I can use for social listening?

There are both free and paid tools you can use to assist you with social listening.