Observing the internet and social media provides tons of information. And social listening is a true method to effectively find insights that really matter.
Owned, earned, and paid.
These three words above have to be the main words in your social media strategy
Earned media fills the gap between your paid strategy and your organic content. It permits you to understand what people do think about you, making social media listening inquiries precious for seeing how your products and brand are discussed among your social feeds.
You can find below 5 ways social media listening can be utilized to put together all the precious pieces of data your brand may need to use.
1. Campaign Monitoring
Social listening is an amazing way to get a full image of how your social media campaigns are received by people. You may make a great tweak or stop anything that doesn’t appeal to your target audience.
Also, why would you need to miss the great chance of having your customers working as part of your marketing team?
Establishing social listening projects on your present campaigns -by tracking your campaign hashtag for example- will allow you to find all the best content generated by users that your fans are producing across all digital channels and provides you the opportunity to grow these consumer voices, yet including your customers.
Pro tip: Establish a word cloud around your campaign to guarantee clarity on what should be observed and create an alert to be on top of peaks.
WWF Fight for your world campaign
2. Content Inspiration
You can also use social listening to be inspired by the trends of the industry, or other brands that are good on social media. Evaluate your content strategy to determine potential whitespace. Rather than imitating what’s already done out there, you may put new content topics that have not got much love from your industry.
For example, the sports fashion industry. Estimating their content fast shows us there are two strategies for content. Athletes that do not break a sweat or these that climb the Himalayas. As a sports fashion brand, I would show genuine people practicing with the risks they may face on their 10k run.
3. Crisis Management
Are you prepared for any crisis? Social Listening (particularly paired with good community management) is a way that you can be ready for any incoming crisis.
It may happen to each brand: a sub-par customer service incident, a post that just misses the mark, or a missed message. It doesn’t take a lot for your brand name to stay in the social media hot seat.
When this occurs, reacting and taking decisions quickly can decrease the burst. So, social listening may assist you to avoid the worst of social media disasters by being ready and prepared for any crisis.
Understand everything early by monitoring and tracking relevant keywords and know how people are talking about your brand. Make sure to understand where is the problem and to determine the crisis and what is just a critique. It can be an effort you have to take it as a team to set up social listening. Also, it will be very great if you begin with a workshop, keeping in mind that inviting people from other departments for extra perspective sharing.
But if it turns out to the worst, keep in mind that your target audience only needs your honesty. You have to listen to what they say about your brand and how they talk about it behind your back. Ask them to open up and ask you questions that reflect their needs. Also, you need to avoid normal replies and address the faults that you have made openly.
Pro tip: Don’t forget to download a guide for social media crisis that includes easy steps and examples of the best practices on how you should avoid social media crisis. If you need more help with that matter, you may attend workshops in management strategy that will help you understand the social media crisis.
4. Brand Sentiment
If you don’t really know how people think about your brand, you have to use Brand Sentiment monitoring, which means to be able to respond to both negative and positive events. So, using social media listening to do that will provide you the chance to determine where negative and positive feedbacks are coming from and enable you to dive deeper into what it’s told about your brand.
Also, you may get brand critics and advocates to work with you to know if there is something you may understand from the reason for their negative sentiment.
So, if sentiment takes a quick dip, it grants you an opportunity to discover the real reason behind the negative events and make changes as fast as possible. This may even mean deleting a post, taking a conversation privately, or even addressing something openly.
5. Competitor Analysis
Social listening is not just about observing and knowing what people say about your brand. I will also allow you to get deeper through into what they are saying about your competitors.
Getting deeper into what’s being stated about others open regular insights. Here is the question, what can we learn from the competitor? What are the trending hashtags in the industry? What are the topics they are posting about now? These are the things that social listening may help you reveal.
Pro tip: Choose the 4-6 brands you want to learn from. (Some ideas: inspirational first-mover brands, direct competitors, brands with similar business resources or models, and more.)
