How do you align your social listening goals with your business objectives and KPIs?

1 Define your social listening goals

The first step is to define what you want to achieve with social listening. Do you want to improve your customer service, increase your brand awareness, generate leads, monitor your reputation, or benchmark your performance against your competitors? Your goals should be SMART: specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound. For example, a SMART goal could be: "Increase positive mentions of our brand by 10% in the next quarter."

3 Set up your social listening queries

The third step is to set up your queries or keywords that will help you find the relevant conversations for your goals. You can use different types of queries, such as: brand names, product names, hashtags, industry terms, competitor names, and sentiment indicators. You can also use modifiers, such as: quotes, asterisks, and Boolean operators, to refine your queries and filter out the noise. For example, if you want to find positive mentions of your brand, you can use a query like: "brand name" AND (love OR awesome OR amazing).

4 Analyze your social listening data

The fourth step is to analyze the data you collected from social listening and extract meaningful insights. You can use different metrics and indicators, such as: volume, sentiment, reach, engagement, share of voice, and influencers, to measure your performance and identify trends, patterns, gaps, and opportunities. You can also use visualizations, such as: charts, graphs, word clouds, and maps, to present your data in a clear and compelling way. For example, you can use a sentiment analysis chart to see how your audience feels about your brand over time.

5 Act on your social listening insights

The fifth step is to act on the insights you gained from social listening and optimize your social strategy accordingly. You can use the insights to: improve your products or services, create or adjust your content, respond to your customers or prospects, engage with your influencers or advocates, or launch or join relevant campaigns or conversations. For example, if you find out that your audience is interested in a certain topic, you can create content that addresses their questions or challenges.

6 Evaluate your social listening results

The sixth and final step is to evaluate the results of your social listening efforts and measure the impact on your business objectives and KPIs. You can use different methods, such as: surveys, feedback forms, testimonials, reviews, conversions, sales, or ROI, to assess the outcomes and value of your social listening activities. You can also use benchmarks, such as: industry standards, best practices, or competitor performance, to compare and contrast your results and identify areas for improvement. For example, you can use a ROI calculator to see how much revenue you generated from your social listening campaigns.