As stated earlier, every business looking to achieve success through social media needs to have a well written Social Media Listening Strategy. A listening strategy specifically designed to reach their customers and get the desired result.
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Generating Leads, Driving Traffic, Build Credibility and Brand Awareness.
Social listening needs to be actionable. The most important part of your overall brand strategy is learning to use social media to really listen to your audience and grow your brand based on their feedback.
Here are some things that you can do to start developing your social listening strategy and build long-term success for your brand.
What is Social media listening? also known as social media monitoring. Social media monitoring is the process of identifying and assessing what is being said about a company, individual, product, brand or industry on the Internet.
Create Social Media Listening Strategy
Create a Baseline – Because social listening requires you to gather and analyze data, it’s a good idea to sit down and map out what exactly you’ll be looking for and monitoring.
Here’s a list of important keywords and topics to monitor right from the start:
- Your brand name and handles
- Your product name(s), including common misspellings
- Competitors’ brand names, product names, and handles
- Industry buzzwords
- Your slogan and those of your competitors
- Names of key people in your company and your competitors’ companies
- Your branded hashtags and those of your competitors
- Unbranded hashtags related to your industry
Having answers to the following questions will give you a solid starting point to begin gathering data.
- Who are the top influencers in my field?
- Do I currently have any followers who are true fans and frequently engage with my product?
- Do I have a product or service that would benefit from a branded hashtag?
Watch and learn from your competitors’ websites or social media accounts. Listening to your competitors may give you insights on angles, topics, and keywords that your audience is connecting with that you haven’t considered.
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Find the Conversations
Set up a focused listening strategy. Listening closely will help you determine what’s happening in social media centered around YOUR industry. It’s important before you launch any kind of social media campaign to find out exactly where your audience is and what they’re talking about.
Don’t limit yourself to one or two social networks. Cast a wide net with your social listening program.
You might find that the conversation about your brand or your industry is very different on LinkedIn or industry blogs than it is on Facebook. Therefor you can also assume their conversations are likely different on Facebook than they are on Twitter or Instagram. Find out where your audience is and what they’re talking about. Use that as a general direction on the kind of content you’ll produce for each network.
You need to know where people are talking about you and your industry, and how those conversations vary across networks. This will allow you to create a clear strategy to join the conversation through both organic engagement and paid advertising.
Engage, Learn, and Adjust
The best way to learn about your audience is to interact with them. Make sure you’re responding to comments, commenting on other posts, and engaging in other activity in the communities that are relevant to you. You’ll get the best results if your interactions are genuine and organic.
Only engage if you have something beneficial to offer, don’t derail a conversation with a sales pitch. Think long-term: you’re establishing your brand as a leader and a good resource in your field. Audiences are less likely to engage with you if they don’t trust you or think you’re only engaging to push them to purchase a product.
Done right, your social listening efforts will provide a wide range of information that will be useful to share throughout your company. Maybe it’s a great idea for a blog post. Or maybe it’s an idea for a new product or new feature for an existing product.
The customer service, content marketing, and product development teams could all benefit from what you learn.
Major changes in engagement or sentiment can mean that the overall perception of your brand has changed. You need to understand why so you can adapt your strategy appropriately.
PRO Tip; Prepare responses to the different kinds of feedback you’ll get. Think ahead of time about how you’ll respond to negative, neutral, or positive feedback on different platforms. Be prepared at least with an outline of a response.
[click_to_tweet tweet=”Create a #SocialMediaListening Strategy – Start with a Baseline, find the conversations then Engage, Learn, and Adjust. SERP Sniper says; Are You Listening?” quote=”Create a Social Media Listening Strategy – Start with a Baseline, find the conversations then Engage, Learn, and Adjust. Are You Listening?”]
Track & Analyse the Data
Social listening is not just about tracking metrics. It’s about gaining real insights into what your customers and potential customers want from you. How you can better address those needs.
Make sure to analyze patterns and trends over time, rather than just individual comments. These overall insights can have the most powerful effects in guiding your future strategy.
If you don’t have the time to setup a social media listening system and do your own social media marketing, please consider outsourcing it to our team. You’ll maintain full oversight so what is being created aligns with your vision and beliefs.
If your ready to discuss your companies Content & Social Marketing strategy contact us for a free phone consult.
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If you are still trying to figure out all this social media and content marketing stuff here is a recommended read. from the SERP Sniper SEO Marketing Blog “How to Create a Winning Social Media Strategy” that will help you better understand Social Media Marketing and our content marketing strategy.
Social Listening Tools & Resources
With so many sources to monitor, you need tools to help you with social listening. Here are a few of our favorites.
From the Nimble Blog Eight Ways to Reach and Engage Industry Influencers
Hootsuite – Use Hootsuite to set up social media streams that monitor conversations and keywords.
ReviewTrackers – allows you to monitor reviews from more than 85 reviews sites, including TripAdvisor and Google Maps, as soon as 15 minutes after they’re posted.
Talkwalker – Advanced social listening capabilities covering blogs, forums, videos, news sites, and review sites, as well as social networks.
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Michael Klasno is SERP Sniper – Building local optimized websites for Attorneys, Law Firms and Business Professionals in Houston and Southeast Texas.
Michael Klasno is a consummate Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Specialist with an impressive 20-year tenure in the digital marketing landscape. Throughout two decades, Michael has been at the forefront of evolving website design & SEO strategies, seamlessly integrating the latest trends with time-tested methodologies.
His SEO expertise encompasses a vast array of skills, including keyword research, technical SEO, (both on-page and off-page) Local SEO, Google Business Profile optimization, SEO auditing, competitive analysis, and content strategy formulation.
“By building a cost effective corporate or business website that looks great and has a high conversion rate you can dominate the organic search results.”
