How can I engage in social media listening for my marketing strategy?
Social Media Marketing
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Social media listening, also known as social media monitoring, is the process of identifying, analyzing and responding to online conversations and mentions of your brand or relevant topics. It can help you gain valuable insights, improve customer satisfaction, enhance brand reputation, generate leads and drive innovation. But how can you use social media listening effectively as part of your marketing strategy? Here are some tips and best practices.
Define your goals and metrics
Before you start listening to what people are saying online, you need to have a clear idea of why you are doing it and what you want to achieve. Do you want to increase brand awareness, boost engagement, improve customer service or generate new ideas??
Depending on your goals, you will need to choose the appropriate metrics and tools to measure and evaluate your social media listening efforts. For example, if you want to increase brand awareness, you might want to track the volume of your brand mentions. But if you want to improve customer service, you might want to monitor the resolution rate and satisfaction score of your customer inquiries.
Choose your platforms and keywords
Identify the most relevant and popular social media platforms for your target audience, industry and objectives. You might want to focus on major networks like Facebook or Instagram or discussion-based platforms like Reddit and Quora, depending on where your customers are most active and engaged.?
Make sure you select the keywords and phrases that you want to track and analyze. These might include your brand name, product names, slogans, hashtags, competitor names or specific topics. You can use tools like Google Trends, Keyword Planner or BuzzSumo to find out the most popular and relevant keywords for your niche.
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Use the right tools and techniques
To make your social media listening more effective, make sure you use the right techniques to collect, analyze and visualize the data. There are many social media listening tools available, such as Hootsuite, Sprout Social, Mention or Brandwatch, that can help you automate and streamline the process.?
These tools can help you track and measure your keywords across multiple platforms, segment and categorize the data by topic or audience and generate reports to visualize the results. You can also use techniques like sentiment analysis or topic modeling to extract more meaningful and actionable insights from the data.
Act on the insights and feedback
The final and most important step is to act on the insights and feedback that you gain from your social media listening. Have a designated team to engage with your online audience, whether they are customers, fans or critics. Acknowledge and address their questions, complaints or compliments, and provide them with valuable and relevant information.
Leverage the insights and feedback to improve your products and marketing campaigns. Show your audience that you are listening and that you care about their opinions and needs.
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This article was edited by LinkedIn News Editor Anamaria Silic and was curated leveraging the help of AI technology.
NO cold pitching in DM | TALK your connections into paying clients using content and conversation | 350+ motivated service providers & coaches helped | Social media marketing strategist | Business Coach | Speaker
1 年Not only listening, but hearing, your audience is important for better understanding your target audience on social media Social Media Marketing. You've got to be willing to get into the comments and on their content and read and hear (understand) what your audience is saying. What words and phrases are they using? What are they worried about? What are they responding to? How does all that line up with your goals and intentions for your brand? What can you do to adapt some or all of what they are saying and use it to improve your chances of achieving your goals? You can guess or assume what you think your audience wants. Or you can listen to them and KNOW what they want and need from you.
Global Brand Leader at Andis | Brand builder
1 年Brands can gain so much insight into their target audiences from social listening. First and foremost, equip your social team with the tools and team necessary to build out an impactful listening program. That doesn't mean you need to hire five social managers, but expecting one to do social listening on top of their daily duties will water down the impact social listening can have. After taking the time to properly set up your social listening program through keywords, audiences, and platforms it is imperative that the team checks daily and weekly to gather insights. From there, be sure to engage in these discussions, even if they are difficult. Listening through social is going to deliver critical insights that can help drive decisions that impact the end user. Look at the good, bad, and ugly. Similar to social media, the best time to start is six to twelve months before you actually need it. Social media is about being social with your community. Fail to do this and the brand can come off as being less than authentic. As you have these AUTHENTIC community engagements, gather the data and deliver it back to key stakeholders. Knowledge is power and great amounts of knowledge can be gained through social listening. -J
Director, Global Social Media - Merz Aesthetics
1 年Social listening is a 24/7/365 real-time focus group of your customers, competitors, and employees talking about your company, products, competition, culture, and future opportunities. Companies that are not actively listening on social media are not only missing out, but they are also missing a critical strategy enabler. The brands that have resourced social intelligence roles are always going to be a step ahead of their competition. Some brands are so focused on what other companies are posting vs what people are saying and while both are important, you can learn so much more from what people are saying about a brand vs what a brand wants you to see.
Melih Oztalay Improves Digital Marketing Results | $30M+ generated for clients | Helping businesses increase by 200% their website conversions by optimizing their landing pages & CTAs
1 年Human interaction in the digital world hasn't changed since the days of bulletin board systems (BBS) of the 1980s. Those who listen in real life tend to read and comprehend in the online world. The same is true for those who do not listen in real life, tend to read but not comprehend what they are reading. We have evolved since then. For example, in the real world, we have non-verbal communications that help us express ourselves. Nowadays, we have emojis that help us express non-verbal (e.g. non-text) communications. Those responsible for #brand #communications in #social #communities are best to be people that can listen, read and comprehend in order to keep the brand relevant and trusting within the social communities. #socialmediamarketing #socialmedia #socialmediamarketingtips
All-In-One Business Software Suite | Business Marketing Analysis | Consultant
1 年Excellent article. I agree with all the points. I think social listening can help us define our ideal client by showing us what they respond to, and how they respond. Using split testing, quizzes, and drawing out answers to thought-provoking questions can paint a picture of whom we are reaching. Then we get to ask if we are reaching our ideal client (Avatar).