Social listening is the process of monitoring online digital conversations to understand what consumers are saying about your brand, product or industry.
There are several important things to keep in mind while social listening:
Identify the purpose
Social listening can have various purposes like customer service, customer retention or for gaining traction. It is very important to know ’why’ and for ‘whom’ you’ll be listening. Therefore, proper clarity of your purpose and target audience will give you direction and help you to achieve desired results.
Choose the appropriate software
Applications play a vital role in social listening. Hence, explore all available options and choose what is feasible and budget friendly. Importantly, many applications have a free trial, which helps you to get a bird’s eye view of the tool and also helps you to make an informed choice. A few examples of popular software are Meltwater, Radian6, Hootsuite etc.
Relevant keywords
Keyword search is an extremely important activity with a good payoff in social media marketing. Keywords can make or break your website. They reflect how well you know your company. You could identify the important pillars of your company and weave them into the keyword search list. Relevant keywords will help yield perfect search results for your company. Therefore, meticulous front end research is very necessary to churn out the appropriate keywords for social listening.
Ex:Company name, Competitors, Target Audience, etc.
Select timelines carefully
Every social listening tool allows you to fix timelines for the required period. By selecting a proper timeline you can narrow down your search window and focus on the main happenings within that time period.
Timelines are further divided into slots:
-
- Days
-
- Weeks
-
- Months
- Quarterly/ Half-yearly/ Yearly
Exclude irrelevant keywords
Delete all unwanted keywords to avoid unnecessary information.
Evaluate your results
After the above steps, it is time to evaluate how productive your process of social listening has been. Social listening tools give you various parameters like graphs, bar graphs, pie charts etc. which help you to evaluate the performance of your company/ product.
Keep exploring:
Many social listening tools provide add-on features which do many more things apart from just social listening. Explore the tool as much as you can. The more you explore the tool you are using, the more you will learn from it.
Leave a reply