Social media listening strategy
Businesses realize the value of social media now, not just as a channel for communicating with customers but as a resource for data—real-time data that can be mined to uncover valuable information about their brand, their customers, and their competitors. Guided by an effective social media listening strategy, firms can leverage social media listening tools to track and analyze the relevant conversations on social channels and distill actionable insights from social media data. These insights can then be used to inform and optimize marketing, crisis management, customer service, product development, and other efforts critical for growing their business, protecting their brand reputation, satisfying their customers, and staying competitive.
Maximizing your social listening ROI with an effective social media listening strategy
For firms that are just now considering adding social listening to their toolkit, a social media listening strategy can help them envision a plan of action before investing in a tool, find the right tool for their unique business goals, and reap the most benefits from the service or solution in which they choose to invest. By providing you with a general framework to follow, a social listening strategy helps you focus your efforts on the channels, KPIs, and use cases that matter most, thereby saving you time and ensuring that you take full advantage of the capabilities of your social media listening software. A successful social listening initiative starts with a smart social media listening strategy.
Creating and fine-tuning your social media listening strategy
The first step in building a social media listening strategy is to determine your objectives:
- What are you listening for, or what is that you want to achieve using social listening?
- Are you trying to assess the performance of your marketing campaigns? Develop more engaging content?
- Or, better understand your target audience?
Once you’ve defined your goals, you’ll be in a better position to carry out step two, selecting the keywords and platforms you want to monitor and defining your KPIs, and step three, choosing the best social media listening tool for your organization.
Once you have a tool in place, you’ll want to make sure that you share its capabilities across your organization, letting your customer care, research and development, communications, and other teams take advantage of this powerful technology. Whether it’s through use-case based dashboards, insights reports, or a real-time social media command center, you’ll want to find ways to distribute social listening insights to all your internal stakeholders. And finally, to maximize your social listening ROI, you’ll want to make sure not to keep your social media data in silos. Combine your social listening streams with other data in your CRM, BI, and other enterprise systems to get a holistic understanding of your customer base and the customer journey.
Learning from brands leveraging their own social media listening strategy
As you create your social media listening strategy, it may be helpful to know how other brands are using social listening to support their own unique initiatives. Here are just a few examples of how organizations are using Synthesio’s Social Listening Platform:
- Imagination, a creative agency that creates experiences for brands, uses social listening to show their clients how to track, measure the effectiveness of, and rank product launches, conferences, exhibitions, and live brand experiences.
- Moving Image & Content, an award-winning digital marketing agency, uses Synthesio to investigate why people feel close to a certain brand and uncover insights that they can use to develop more appealing messaging for their clients.
- Paprika, a creative agency, uses Synthesio’s audience insights tool Profiler to help their clients identify and understand the characteristics of their target audience in order to create content that resonates and more effective campaigns.
Partnering with Synthesio to support your social media listening strategy
Once you’ve reached the third step in creating your social media listening strategy, you may want to consider Synthesio, a robust social media intelligence solution from the leaders in social listening. Synthesio combines comprehensive social listening capabilities with a sophisticated analytics toolset and offers you access to the broadest range of social data sources.
Using Synthesio’s Social Listening Dashboards, your teams can track and analyze real-time conversations about your brand, your products, and your competitors in over 80 languages. Keep an eye on your social media KPIs while scanning mentions enriched with useful metadata about content, author, and tone. Leveraging Synthesio Rank and Automated Sentiment Analysis, you can filter out the noise and focus on the conversations and people with the most influence and those expressing negative sentiment. To get even deeper insights, use Synthesio’s APIs to export and combine your social listening data with data in your CRM system and other enterprise applications.
