Some useful tips for building a social listening strategy may assist you in keeping an eye on the world’s more than five billion active social media users. After that, you’ll be able to keep an eye on what clients are saying about your company on several different channels. This enables you to communicate with, listen to, and understand more about your clientele.
Additionally, you may find potential new clients and gain knowledge about your sector or rivals. Social listening must provide results. You must take full advantage of discussions that occur around your brand and industry if you want to leverage them to your benefit.
How To Develop A Social Listening Strategy
1. Define Your Purpose
One of the tips for building a social listening strategy is to define your purpose. Many different company objectives may be supported by social media listening. It may provide an almost overwhelming quantity of information if it isn’t focused enough. Your social listening strategy has to have a clear goal if you want to utilize social listening strategically. You might use social listening for:
- Reputation management, crisis avoidance, and supervision.
- Audience analysis (disagreements, anticipations, and client comments).
- Lead generation.
- Competitive intelligence.
- Customer engagement.
- Obtaining material created by users.
- Locating possible influencers and partners.
You don’t have to confine all of your social listening efforts to one purpose. But you do need to pay attention to what’s most essential. It’s about limiting your focus, not dismissing other alternatives.
It’s a good idea to start by analyzing your organization’s present strategic objectives and KPIs. Look for chances to give social listening assistance. Don’t restrict yourself to the social team’s aims here. Social listening can assist with strategic objectives across the company.
Then, link social listening skills directly to those company objectives. Identify the main areas where you can have the biggest influence. In the process, you’ll establish your social listening KPIs. These are the backbones of your social listening approach.
2. Develop Leads
You may identify customers in your target market who might not be aware of your company by monitoring a variety of phrases. Keep an eye out for phrases and hashtags associated with your specialty that represent:
- Trade journals.
- Usual procedures.
- Problems in your industry.
- Leading individuals and goods.
Depending on the industry and social scope of your organization, it might take anything from a few seconds to many days to locate postings that include your phrases. In any case, treat people who post using such phrases as potential customers. Putting on your social media sales hat is the next step. Respond to them to join the discussion.
For instance, share your thoughts on a trend with the prospect or direct them to a relevant page on your website. You could gain fans and interest in your brand by doing this. The person could visit your website and ultimately convert, or they might interact with you in the future.
3. Determine The Most Important Keywords And Subjects
Identifying important keywords and topics is an answer to how to build a social listening strategy. Following the establishment of your goal, you may schedule the keywords and subjects to watch.
Let’s take the example of concentrating on reputation monitoring. It is advisable to keep an eye on keywords associated with your company name, product names, and brand executives’ names. Or maybe competitive intelligence is your main concern.
In this scenario, you should monitor every variation of the phrase that is associated with your main rivals. Additionally, you should keep up with discussions regarding your specialization and the industry at large.
Additionally, you should decide which channels your social listening strategy will focus on first. Multiple social channels may be monitored from a single dashboard with the appropriate tools. However, it’s still important to talk about the places where social listening is most likely to provide insightful information.
4. Interact And Engage Your Audience
Sometimes it’s better to keep things simple, particularly if you want to keep your audience interested and the discussion surrounding your business flowing. Setting aside time regularly to engage with your audience humanizes your company and conveys your appreciation for their feedback.
Active engagement is a necessary component of effective social listening, which goes beyond passively observing discussions. It is essential to interact with your audience personally by answering their messages, reviews, mentions, and comments.
This degree of involvement greatly influences consumer views and improves their overall opinion of your brand, whether it is by recognizing good comments or resolving complaints and concerns to avoid escalation. These sincere, humanized interactions strengthen bonds and create a devoted following for your company.
5. Select A Social Listening Tool
Using a social listening tool is one of the tips for building a social listening strategy. As you can see, a well-thought-out social media listening approach yields a wealth of data. To assist in gathering, compiling, filtering, and analyzing such data, you need a social listening tool. If not, you’re left with a bowl of data soup that’s overpowering.
Everything you need to get started with social listening is included in every Hootsuite package. To find popular hashtags, brands, and events across the globe, use Quick Search. You can also go deeper to get individualized insights about your business. For seven days, you may monitor up to two keywords that track any mention of you, your top rivals, your goods, or your services.
6. Use Cross-Channel Analysis
Investigating your audience’s behavioral patterns is crucial to understanding them as a person, their interests, and their character. It’s critical to use social listening to identify platform preferences. A strategy that works across channels may be informed by knowing whether or not your audience utilizes numerous social media platforms and how they engage and behave differently on each of these sites.
By integrating cross-channel research into your social listening approach, you may gain a comprehensive and sophisticated insight into your audience. Think about these inquiries: Which demographics use Instagram the most often and are lured by its visual storytelling? Who are the Twitter debate-starters who are conversationalists? What is the effectiveness and resonance of your campaigns on various platforms? Are you successfully reaching the appropriate audiences on the best platforms at the right times?
You may adjust your plans to the tastes and routines of your target audience groups by utilizing social listening to investigate these types of queries. This will make your marketing efforts more focused, effective, and well-informed.
7. Visit Regularly
The frequency at which you review your social listening data will be determined by the objectives you choose. Check-in is necessary for some social listening data, at least once a day. Let’s take an example where you identify important customer interactions via social listening. You must give them precedence.
You may check in less often if you’re utilizing social listening to get information for longer-term strategic choices. As a general rule, it’s a good idea to match the frequency of your check-ins with the duration of your objectives.
Additionally, you may utilize the alert feature in your social listening program to be informed when there are sudden shifts in social sentiment or discussion peaks. This enables you to anticipate problems before they arise and be proactive as opposed to reactive.
8. Know Marketing Opportunities
Knowing marketing opportunities is the answer to how to build a social listening strategy. You are in a wonderful position to identify distinctive and interesting marketing chances that appear on social media because of all of your hard work in monitoring and strategizing.
A well-thought-out plan offers a strong base, but it’s also critical to remain flexible to seize chances to capitalize on trends that emerge quickly, interact dynamically with your audience, or establish connections with powerful people. The capacity of social listening to record these new trends as they develop in real-time guarantees that you’re constantly aware of what’s popular, which is one of its biggest benefits.
But as is often the case, the important thing is relevancy. Marketers must evaluate how your brand might organically fit into these trends. Engaging with popular subjects in a manner that aligns with your brand’s identity and your audience’s expectations is the aim. This strategy makes sure that your brand not only joins the debate but does so in a manner that upholds its principles and improves its relationship with your target market.
9. Give Stakeholders Access To Strategic Knowledge
According to over half (56%) of social marketers, their companies lack social media expertise. Therefore, it is your responsibility to draw attention to the strategic benefits social listening offers the company.
Many available excellent social listening applications have reporting and analytic features. Professional reports may be written and sent to stakeholders at different levels. You have the sophisticated data to support continuing strategic initiatives, from shifting audience demographics to gradual changes in the sector.
Uncertain about the best way to analyze your data to get the most profound insights? AI may be quite helpful in this area. It sorts through a ton of data to pinpoint the regions with the most potential influence. Talkwalker’s AI technologies use natural language processing to create personalized data models that emphasize observable, useful outcomes.
Some Benefits of Social Listening
Sixty-six percent of the more than 18,000 marketers who took part in Hootsuite’s social media trends poll said that social listening has grown in importance and value for their company.
Some tips for building a social listening strategy give your company other advantages, in addition to improving your comprehension of your target market and consumers and helping you make more informed marketing choices. These advantages include:
- Collecting information about competitors and the industry from the viewpoints of your target market and current audience.
- Recognizing the experience your goods provide for customers.
- Having the ability to prevent or lessen PR problems.
- Establishing chances for cooperation with other influencers or companies.
FAQ
Q: To what extent is social listening effective?
A: Using social listening to monitor your competitors may be a highly successful strategy. Positive encounters may serve as a source of inspiration for your marketing and customer service staff, while unfavorable interactions can inform your team of adjustments that are required.
Q: What aims does social listening seek to achieve?
A: Businesses may better comprehend the discourse about their brand, goods, and services by engaging in social listening. Businesses may utilize the useful customer data they offer to assess brand recognition and enhance their goods and services.
Q: How common is social listening among brands?
A: Currently, 61% of companies use social listening tools to keep an eye out for keyword mentions. Furthermore, over 82% of respondents now consider social listening to be a crucial component of planning, reflecting the majority of respondents’ perception of it as a very important activity.
