How to Approach Social Media Listening for Your Brand

Social Media Marketer comes across enormous articles that give expert tips on how to make your target audience talk about you. Moreover, tremendous efforts are put behind gaining a new member for the community and then enabling them to create buzz for the brand. In all this process some brands forget the essential part of the social media engagement and that is systematic listening.

Listening is an imperative part of social media activity and can garner ample benefits for a brand. Systematic listening generates actionable insights and, if played smartly, this can win you opportunities to be ahead of your competitors.

Approaches to Listening activity

•  First, think of a small world in which conversations take place around your brand and competitors.
•  Second, a part of the universe that is talking about the attributes of your brand, subject matters around your campaigns in pipeline, opinions on the news that is relevant to your target audience and ongoing trends in digital conversations.

Key Parameters that can be tracked are:

Volume :

This can be used to measure the scope of your listening activity. It tells you of the total audience talking about the subject you want to get insights on. A mix of relevant keywords and tools helps in getting this number, but separating the relevant and irrelevant conversations makes the task easier.

Conversation Subjects :

This is a feature for any given topic which allows you to map down the key conversations themes that occur frequently in relation to the set of keywords. This gives a clear picture of what needs to be focused on to either leverage the opportunities available or to fix the gap, if any.

Media Usage:

Be there where your audience is in order to reach them, avoid wastage of efforts, to build connect and finally strike conversations. Platforms used for voicing opinion can be helpful in structuring targeting strategies.

Sentiments:

Volume for a given subject gives half a picture but true sentiments that can be achieved using tools and manual intervention helps in achieving a crystal clear scenario. The sentiments help in showing the brands the direction that they should explore and also the areas to stay away from.

Influence :

A sentiment disseminated by any influential user further amplifies the negative or positive impact. A constant watch on the influencers helps in avoiding crisis in a negative scenario. At the same time these influencers can be strategically involved in brand communication strategy.

Insights gained from social media listening are valuable and increases the chance of achieving the most desirable outcome of engaging with the audience. Inputs from a robust listening activity would always offer new methods to engage effectively with the audience.