As many move towards a cleaner future and a much more economically friendly lifestyle, it’s no wonder that a new market would develop for energy data. However, it can also be challenging to know what is being said about your field or company. Or even how to monitor and filter the data. So, here are ten social listening strategy tips to help elevate your business.
1. Data Power for Teams Across the Enterprise
Keep in mind which internal divisions will benefit most from an infusion of audience intelligence and align your dashboards to support those teams. Blueprinting social listening initiatives across the organization will help you deliver the right energy data to the right people.
2. Influencers are Lightning In A Bottle
If you’re interested in the impact that energy sector influencers are having on your brand reputation, look to mainstream news outlets first. Influencers in the energy space tend to be journalists or investors whose posts are amplified across social media by end users. Track these professionals to uncover their average reach — and then implement outreach programs to the voices who are broadcasting brand mentions to the widest audiences.
3. Drill Into Customer Satisfaction for Competitive Insights
If you want a more granular view of the competitive landscape, build your social listening strategy around dashboards with subtopic infrastructures. This will allow you to analyze conversations beyond the brand level to the individual properties and products of your competitors. Subtopic dashboards are a great way to measure customer satisfaction across oil, gas, electric, and renewable energy to pinpoint the strengths and weaknesses of the competition.
4. Filter Energy Data To Enrich Audience Intelligence
Filters are the quickest and easiest way to surface social media insights from large datasets. Segmenting by sources allows you to create a social listening strategy in which you talk on channels where your core audience listens, and respond on channels where your audience talks. Use filter combinations, like sentiment and keyword search to surface the language people use when speaking positively or negatively about your brand or the energy sector as a whole.
5. Monitor Your Ecosystem To Mitigate Against Risk
Your social listening strategy doesn’t need to be strictly about your brand mentions. Global energy enterprises can use listening dashboards to monitor their entire supply chain. Analyzing your business ecosystem can help uncover risks or opportunities for business process optimization.
6. Don’t Flood Yourself With Energy Data
Deploy alerts carefully. Creating notifications for every fluctuation in data will create “banner blindness” to data insights and potential indicators of declining KPIs. Instead, create an alerting strategy around crisis keywords — and use automated reporting to set a useful schedule for highlighting critical metrics.
7. Fuel Customer Support with Integrated Technology
If your social listening strategy includes dashboards to track organic mentions associated with customer support issues, consider integrating with a SaaS publishing portal. Open APIs can push all of your earned brand mentions into your response queue so you can react to organic mentions from the same interface you use to manage customer service on your owned social channels.
8. Spot Trends in the Clouds
If you’re looking for trends in the energy sector, consider building a dashboard with wide boolean queries. Avoid using brand keywords — and instead, focus on general terms that are relevant to your sector. Keep in mind that customers typically will use your brand name in a complaint — but when posting something positive about the industry they might just use commonly used industry terms. Word clouds will help differentiate the insights from the noise.
9. Track Hashtags to Gauge Campaign Performance
The best social listening strategy for measuring campaigns is building dashboards around tight boolean queries. Concentrate on your primary campaign keywords and hashtags when building your dashboard, so your quantitative metrics accurately represent the buzz created by your advertising initiatives. Using general brand keywords will make it difficult to differentiate between overall feedback and consumer sentiment expressed solely in relation to your campaigns.
10. Fill Up Your Insight Tank With Forums and Blogs
Valuable conversations don’t always occur on the big social networks — particularly in a sector like energy. Focus considerable attention on blogs, forums, and niche websites dedicated to your vertical. These longer-form sites offer users greater opportunity to share thoughts, feelings, and feedback — often with an anonymized username and profile.
See Synthesio’s solutions for energy data analytics.
