If you’ve been working with social media for awhile now chances are you’ve come across the term social listening. You might have ever been asked by a client or boss to compile a social listening report or set up some conversation monitoring.
Social listening differs from standard social media monitoring in that it goes beyond “owned” conversation (such as on your Facebook business page) to learning from the “earned” conversation (across the full spectrum of public social media).
Why brands use social listening
A teacher once smugly told me we have two ears and one mouth, and they should be used in that ratio. He wasn’t wrong, but he was smug.
You can learn a lot from listening in on the conversations happening around your brand. Social Listening is just as important for your social media strategy as posting relevant and interesting content. Learning what makes your audience tick, how they talk about you, and even discovering great user generated content.
Think of social media like one giant focus group. In fact, it’s better than a focus group because the people talking are already actively engaged with your brand, and their opinions and observations are offered unsolicited.
Social listening keeps you on the pulse of your audience and helps you find new audiences you might not have tapped into yet. It can also be used to see what people are saying about your competitors, giving you a sneaky insight into their customer’s conversations across the social sphere.
Social listening tips to get you started
Social listening can be done manually or automated with platforms that allow you to set up hashtags, handles, and keywords to monitor. Doing it manually on social platforms like Facebook and Twitter is very time consuming and can be challenging with standard search features, but might be necessary in some cases like monitoring specialized forums and niche Facebook Groups where a particular conversation is emerging.
Due to its open platform, and short-form style posts, Twitter is the biggest and best social pool where listening should occur. Agorapulse offers the flexibility to monitor your own brand, as well as others, in a bespoke feed from Twitter. The relevant posts it brings back can then be tagged and assigned to the relevant team member to handle. That goes for Instagram geo-monitoring too.
What should you be listening for?
- Brand mentions of both your handle and hashtag
- This is fairly straightforward! Any @Twitter handles you have for your brand, and also your brand name in #hashtag format, like @BMW and #BMW counts.
- Branded and unbranded hashtags relevant to your brand
- Branded hashtags are what you’ve pushed out and encouraged people to share as part of your social strategy, or as part of a campaign — think Coca Cola’s #ShareACoke.
- Unbranded relevant hashtags are generally user generated, or “organic,” hashtags that have attached…
