Social listening strategy
Today’s social savvy brands aren’t just posting on social media. They’re gathering insights from social channels—real-time insights that can be used to support and grow their business. They use social listening tools to measure brand health, inform their marketing campaigns, monitor their competitors, and better understand the needs of their customers. When combined with an effective social listening strategy, social listening platforms enable you to zero in on the most important conversations and people, helping you discover and explore the social media metrics, consumer trends, viral topics, communities, and influencers that matter most to your business.
Why firms need a social listening strategy
For firms new to social listening, a good first step will be to develop a social listening strategy. By allowing you to concentrate your efforts on what’s most important, a social media listening strategy can help you carry out more effective social listening and ensure that you get the most value from your social media listening initiative.
A smart social listening strategy provides you with a guide for working towards your objectives, helping you choose the right people to manage your social listening project, evaluate your progress, and ensure success. Having a strategy in mind will also help you when carrying out a social listening tools comparison, allowing you to focus on the features and use cases that are most important to your company.
How to develop a foolproof social listening strategy
1) Define Your Goals
Building a successful social listening strategy starts with defining one’s goals or objectives. What is it that you are trying to accomplish with your social listening initiative? Are you trying to measure ad campaign performance? Manage your brand’s online reputation? Or find a target audience? Knowing your objectives will help you choose the right keywords, metrics, and channels to focus on. Once you’ve established your goals, you will want to find a social listening tool or platform that supports your intended use case(s).
2) Choose Keywords to Monitor
After you’ve found an appropriate tool, which will be essential for executing your social listening strategy, you will then need to choose a list of keywords to monitor. You will want to monitor your brand name, the names of your products and/or services, and the names of your competitors and their products. You may also want to include industry-related keywords and the names of your chief executives as well as important events and opinion leaders in your market. Once you’ve selected your search terms, your social listening tool will help you gather the necessary metrics and mentions from the platforms and sites, it supports and, you choose.
3) Put the Insights Into Action
You will want to then share the information gathered with the relevant teams in your organization. This may include your customer care, sales, product development, marketing, public relations, and other teams that can use social listening insights to inform and improve their efforts. The most critical part of an effective social listening strategy is ensuring that all of your internal stakeholders can leverage the intelligence gained and integrate social listening streams into their decision making.
How these firms use Synthesio for their social listening strategy
In developing your social listening strategy, you may want to consider how other firms are using social listening tools to support their business. Here are a few social listening case study examples from Synthesio:
- Celcom, a leading tele-communications brand in Malaysia, uses Synthesio’s Social Listening Platform to find key influencers in their target markets, evaluate their influencer marketing programs, and measure brand health.
- CMI/Compas, a U.S.-based healthcare marketing agency, uses Synthesio to identify key conversation themes and trends among consumers for their clients, providing them with actionable content and product positioning recommendations.
- Imagination, a global experience company, uses Synthesio to measure consumer engagement with and sentiment around experiential marketing campaigns and help their clients understand the social amplification effect of connected experiences.
How Synthesio can help your firm achieve social listening success
Synthesio supports and works with users of its Social Listening Platform to define, execute, and continually refine their social listening strategies. Providing clients with comprehensive social listening capabilities and sophisticated social analytics tools, Synthesio’s Media Intelligence Suite enables global brands to distill actionable insights from the most extensive collection of social data on the market. With broad platform, geographic, and language coverage, Synthesio lets you monitor your brand’s presence and performance on social channels, and that of your competitors, across the world.
Leverage Synthesio’s Social Listening Dashboards to keep an eye on the conversations, metrics, and influencers your teams need to be aware of. Measure brand health and campaign performance in real time while filtering and viewing your brand’s social mentions by keyword, topic, media type, language, location, sentiment, and more. With Synthesio Rank, a proprietary metric, you can identify the sources and authors with the most influence, letting you drill down quickly to the conversations and people with the most impact in your market. Synthesio filters out the noise, so you can focus on your strategy.