Social Media for Strategic Intelligence: Monitoring and Listening

In keeping your communication strategy up to date, it is important to have a data-driven and evidence-based approach. Below I outline two activities that can help you do that: monitoring and listening.

For each I try to outline their benefits to the different activities of a social media manager or team, as well as their own unique contributions to strategic development overall.

As always - I'm delighted to hear thoughts in the comments below!

1. Monitoring

This activity is all about feeding into your tactics to adjust short term behaviours and create long term gain. There are many levels of monitoring you can engage in, but at its core it's checking out what people are saying about you online.

A simple example of monitoring is keeping track of engagement on your posts and gathering feedback from comments to report back to your team. This can help you determine which comments are more important to respond to, as well as deliver feedback to other colleagues on how content is being received by the audience. More sophisticated monitoring techniques use 3rd party tools to aggregate mentions of your brand all over social media - this is useful for more global organisations who have larger volumes of mentions to deal with.

Content Performance

Monitoring activities include keeping track of content performance in qualitative and quantitative reports. This includes engagement metrics and reach metrics. The feedback provided will allow the other teams to optimise content and deliver to your audience.

Community Management

This type of analysis can also support your community management activities. For example, if you were to look at the time of day your users are most active, you could time your posts to create a greater impact. The patterns in how your users respond to different formats of post can help you cater to different subsections of your audience and the type of engagement you get on different posts can assess the mood of your community.

Monitoring Mentions

At a very basic level this involves keeping track of hashtags and searching keywords on social media, but there are many 3rd party tools that will aggregate mentions on your behalf. The more specific the keywords you use the more accurate your data will be. Mentions are good for getting a sense of how your organisation is being perceived and discussed on social media.

Furthermore, monitoring mentions can create opportunities for engagement. If a particularly important influencer or a high profile post is going around on a topic you are monitoring you can respond directly. This is good public relations and raises your profile outside of your immediate circles.

If you are operating with a small team it is helpful to centralise your monitoring on a single 3rd party tool. This makes it easier to keep track of the platforms for your analyst(s).

It can be difficult and intimidating to jump into the deep end of social media monitoring, so it is advisable to ease into it. Below you will find a table outlining several levels of sophistication, along with their basic activities. As you move through the levels you will learn more about which data are most valuable to your activities and organisation.

One of the most difficult things to prove in social monitoring is return on investment. Social monitoring is one of these things that proves its value incrementally over time and in ways that might not always be apparent. When used right monitoring will improve everything from your content to community management, while feeding into your social listening to create strategic changes.

2. Listening

If monitoring is looking at the trees, listening is looking at the forest. Developing a listening strategy is the point at which you are getting serious about creating long term impacts on your social media accounts with data. While basic monitoring can be carried out ad hoc on platforms and through searches, listening 100% requires a 3rd party tool for analysis. However, this does not need to be difficult - big automated tools can deliver practical insights just as well as customisable ones.

When it comes to social listening and putting the data to good use, it is important to remember that good data analysis is figuring out the right questions to ask the data for you in particular - you can't just ask it anything you like. Below I lay out a few examples of how one could apply these approaches, but there is no one-size-fits-all approach to this.

Content

A long term understanding of the type of content that your community responds to is vital for delivering your messages. It allows you to rely on your own data, specific to your audience, to identify trends. This will allow you to keep track of your content strategy and assess how each of your content pillars is being received. You can see if different formats lend themselves to a particular pillar and write that into the strategy. Longer-term and detailed listening can even allow you adopt the tone of your audience in relation to particular topics.

Community Management

Monitoring mentions over time can give you insights into culture and language for community development and expansion. You learn better who your community are, what they want from you, and how best to give it to them. It can also help you identify influencers and active members of your community. By encouraging them and interacting with them you build a stronger community.

Informing Strategic Changes Overall

Strategic changes can come about as a result of social media listening. An organisation should have a flexible strategy, driven by data.

For example, say you come onto social media with the objective of building a community to support a cause. However through listening you discover that people online were very hostile towards the topics you are advocating for. You would feed back into your strategy - removing the objective of informing people about your topic and adding the objective of reframing the overall discussion to be less negative about your cause.