Tip: 8 Ways That Social Media Listening Can Help

After 8 years working across consumer, corporate and employer branding communications for some of the largest brands in the world, it makes sense to share some of my professional experiences via the LinkedIn Publishing Platform. I've always wanted a blog, but work/life commitments have always been a three meter high, steel wall in my way.

Regardless, whatever you might think about the value of social media, and there are a wild variety of opinions out there, there is no denying the value of social media listening and analysis. From the basic to the advanced, there are numerous ways of making the most of a social media listening tool for a product or service.

I've found that the most important part of social media listening will be your choice of keywords. You can, of course, simply choose the name of your brand, product or service. However that will only give you the answers to one side of the dice. Consider listening to conversations happening around your competitor's brands, products and services, as well as market or industry keywords.

For example, pretend that you work for Nestlé's KitKat brand. By listening to Mars' Twix, Maltesers or Mars Bar, you'll have better benchmark on your competition. Then consider keywords around packaging, recycling, product availability or, more generally, chocolate. By the end of the search you will have a hollistic view of your brand, your competitors and the industry within your chosen location.

But what should you be looking for - let's explore your options...

How many conversations?

• Not only understanding how many conversations are happening across social networks, forums or blogs, but also when, why, where. Is there a particular day/time period when conversations picked up? This could be related to an online sale, a media story and/or a post on your owned social media channel. By knowing the answers, you'll be able to learn what your customers like and don't like.

How does the sentiment appear?

• Now that you know how many conversations are happening, it's important to think about whether those online mentions are positive, negative or neutral. Again, we can learn about the positive things that our audience have chosen to post about, the negative also, and that will help massively when refining a strategy. After all, your audience are the people that you're selling to, building content for and attempting to appeal to.

What are the conversations about?

• What are people talking about when they mention your brand, product or service, and is this something that is actionable (e.g. possible to change within your business)? Sometimes you might want to consider the influence of the individual's opinion, but that's a whole different post. In an ideal world, you would want everyone to be happy, regardless of their follower numbers. So, it's important to make time to consider what's possible or not.

What are the major trends?

• Aside from individual conversations, as mentioned above, there will also be topics (often spotted in a word cloud) that will be popular within the conversational data. These are often mass shares of a news story, but all the same good to know about. Other times, you may find that a group of customers will have similar issues, e.g. website access "I can't use X's website. It's terrible", or mass retweeting of a negative comment. Social media listening is useful in this instance for identifying a problem and reacting quickly.

Where online do the conversations occur?

• Social media listening tools will show you where conversations are taking place. For example, if 90% of complaints occur on Twitter but your brand doesn't have a presence to answer these or customer queries, then how can you be involved and help? Simply, you can't. Knowing where your audience talk about your brand can be a key source for building a social channel/presence strategy.

Who are the commentators?

• Knowing who is talking about brand, product or service can help you to map your advocates, detractors and commentators. Is there a person that mentions your brand most often? Are they saying good things or bad? Would you like to encourage their content or correct their factually untrue rants? Or would you simply like to build a list of positive commentators for a future marketing campaign? Identifying individuals and commentators is a great way to understand more about the personas of your customers too.

Where are the conversations happening?

• Literally, where are people saying things about your brand, product or service across the Globe? Imagine if there was a large community based in Berlin who are obsessed with your brand, or in Buenos Aires people were very negative about you. Wouldn't you want to know this? And wouldn't you want to know why they felt the way they did? By analysing this type of data, we can build a map of sales vs. online conversation and spot gaps in our most prominent markets, or build outdoor campaigns when thinking about perception change, for example.

What are your competitors doing?

• As mentioned previously, let's think about all of the above for our close and aspirational competitors. We can benchmark a brand, product or service against these named competitors and learn from their successes and failures at the same time.

While there are a variety of social media listening tools available, free and paid-for options, I'd recommend trialing with something like Social Mention. Once you're confident that there is enough data for you to listen to analyse on an on-going basis then move onto one of the paid-for alternatives such as Brandwatch, Sysomos or Radian 6, for example.