Digital Playbook

5 Tips for Social Listening

Social listening is when you track your social media platforms for mentions and conversations related to your brand. Then you analyze them for insights to discover opportunities to act. It’s a two-step process:

Step 1: Monitor social media channels for mentions of your brand, competitors, products, and keywords related to your business. Step 2: Analyze the information for ways to put what you learn into action. That can be something as small as responding to a happy customer or something as big as shifting your entire brand positioning.

5 SOCIAL LISTENING TIPS:

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Listen everywhere

Find out where your audience is talking about you—not just what they say. That means casting a wide net. Conversations around your brand on LinkedIn are very different than on Instagram. And you might fi nd that people talk about you all the time on Twitter, but not on Facebook. Knowing where they talk about you is as important as how they talk about you.

Learn from your competition

You can always learn something from

your competitors. You can especially 2learn something from what people say about them. See what they do right and what people love about them. But most importantly, see where they misstep and get it wrong. It’s a lot less painful to learn a hard lesson by watching your competitors make mistakes than by making it yourself. 3 Collaborate with other teams Social listening provides a wide range of information that is useful for your whole company. Maybe it’s a customer post that needs a response right away. Or maybe it’s an idea for a new product or a new feature for an existing product. You can benefi t from what you learn when you’re listening on social media.

Roll with the changes

As you start to collect social information, you’ll develop a sense of the regular conversation and sentiment around your brand. Once you know how people feel about you on a regular basis, you’ll know when it changes. 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. 5 Take action Remember: if you don’t act, you’re only engaged in social media monitoring, not social listening. Social listening is not just about tracking metrics. It’s about gaining insights into what your customers and potential customers want from you and how you can give them that. To learn more about how you can use Social Listening to form an impactful digital strategy, schedule a digital consultation today! digital@topsmarketing.com

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