How do you use social media listening to identify and engage with your brand advocates and influencers?

Defining goals and metrics is pivotal in leveraging social media listening for engaging with brand advocates and influencers. Start by identifying what success looks like—be it increased brand mentions, higher engagement rates, or a stronger community of supporters. Metrics might include the volume of brand-related conversations, sentiment analysis, or the reach and influence of those talking about your brand. In my experience, setting clear, measurable objectives not only guides your listening efforts but also helps in recognizing and fostering relationships with those who are genuinely boosting your brand.

Sometimes, however, all you are wanting to do is find relevant people to network with, and conversations to join. In this instance, your goal is to increase your own network by adding in relevant and useful people. To make sure the people you spend your time seeking out are going to meet these two criteria, it's important that you spend time working out who you want to reach, what interests they have, and what conversations they are taking part in. You can then set up listening streams that will tap into those, for example through using hashtag searches or joining the same groups your target user is in.

When choosing tools, you also need to consider the social media channels the tools cover. While most of the tools can track mentions on popular channels such as Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, there are some other tools that offer coverage on other channels. You need to align the tools with what kinda of channel you want to monitor as well. For example, discord is the channel used by gaming industry to communicate. If you are working in gaming industry, you would want to monitor discord channels to identify advocates and influencers. Therefore, using the right tools that provide coverage for the channels you need to monitor is important.

One of the best tools for listening on Twitter is Tweetdeck, not least because it's free (at the moment). You may also find that if you use a third party scheduler like SmarterQueue, that you can set up listening streams in there too.

I always find it useful when you’ve used tools to segment a really good influencer target list, drill it down further and ask yourself: How does their content fit with your brand. Is there a way you can work together on partnership content that would work well across both your channels? Would they be open to you using their content as UGC on your page? Are they authentic in the way they talk about other brands? What other brands have they worked with? Brand fit is just as important as reach and their engagement scores.

Think of it as a face to face networking meeting - the etiquette is the same. You would never walk into a new meeting and give a sales pitch at the door! You build trust and rapport first, and then the relationship - whether that's sales or mutual support - comes later.