Could you remember the pre-social media marketing landscape? We sometimes forget how Facebook, Twitter and such made our job easier, enabling our brand communication to easily reach millions (if not billions!) of people in a single click.
Still, many marketers are so amazed by the reach potential of social media channels, that they forget where most of the value is. Yes, because posting an update and getting instant notifications is a lot of fun, but if you stress the “talking” too much, here’s the risk you’re running into:
- Becoming an unpleasant “host” (nobody likes 35 product updates a day)
- Not knowing who you’re talking to
- Not knowing if other people might be interested in the ongoing conversation
Thankfully, there’s a practice that keeps you safe from these mistakes. I’m talking about Social Media Listening.
Social media listening, also known as social media monitoring, is the process of identifying and assessing what is being said about a company, individual, product or brand on the Internet.
(definition by techtarget)
But social media listening goes beyond checking notifications, and allows you to find people who aren’t tagging you in their conversations. A social media listening tool can make unstructured data (social conversations) easily readable, so you can start transforming it into actionable insights with traditional data mining techniques.
The paradigm shift is huge if you think about the difference between a radio broadcast compared to an online conversation. The first one is monodirectional: as interesting as the content may be, there’s no way to capture feedback. While the latter is interactive, real-time and bidirectional. In fact, by actively listening you can avoid missing out countless opportunities to delight your customers, or to gather precious product feedback.
Not bad if you consider that 70% of buying decisions are based on how the same customers feel they’re being treated by your brand.
Actively listening to what people are saying about you can become a driver for your business growth. Social Media Listening can be helpful especially when you’re dealing with:
- Generating leads from social media
- Better campaign kpi tracking
- Finding the right influencers for your influencer marketing campaigns
- Improve the customer service
- Real-time Marketing
- Measuring your brand reputation
Smartinsights provides a clear explanation of the Social Media Listening process with a simple infographic.
- It all starts with keywords. As any data gathering activity, you need to have a starting hypothesis. This will be the baseline filter that the social media listening tool will follow to gather relevant conversations for you.
- It still is about keywords. 99% of the cases, something unexpected will come up from the first keyword query. Maybe you missed some crucial keywords. Maybe some of them are useless. Maybe there’s a brilliant opportunity to take on a niche. Keyword refinement will let you adjust the trajectory concerning your way to see the data.
- The first thing you’ll notice are the trends. Keyword volumes, n° of mentions, spikes over time. These are the most easily readable signals of “what’s buzzing” into this segment of the social sphere you’re analyzing right now. Each time you’re dealing with such trends, ask yourself “why” and try to get to the reason why this is happening. Toyoda, founder of the Toyota Industries, used to say you should ask yourself “why” at least five times to get to the real root of the problem.
- Now it’s time to switch from the “what” to the “who”. Who are the authors of those messages? Where are those messages being posted? How big is that market? Who are the opinion leaders in that market? Match engagement metrics and media, and you’ll find influencers of that niche.
- Another step for social media monitoring as a customer intelligence process, is when you use it to enrich your buyer personas profiles. Here you have real online conversations where customers are expressing pain, needs and itches. This is a goldmine for your R&D, product and marketing department.
- Now that you have a laser focus target on your online buyer persona, it’s time to measure how their messages and sentiment correlates to actual actions. They say they want this and that, but are they actually clicking on the ads with that same angle? And how much is their average cart on your e-commerce? Do people classified with higher needs truly spend more?
- Always keep an eye open for signals that can prove or disprove your insights. Also try to integrate different data sources and check if the diversty of data supports your findings. If that’s so, you probably had an “AHA” moment and now you just need an action plan to improve your strategy based on the social media listening.
No matter how big is your company: when done right, Social Media Monitoring is an activity that pays for itself by letting you calculate clear ROI for each action, bringing immediate results. Here’s a FREE set of success stories that will inspire your next strategies.
You’ll find a brief selection of case studies, and for each, a list of takeaways. Each takeaway is an actionable tip that you can apply, starting today, to the way you do marketing on social media.
Enjoy it!
