Social Media Monitoring – Listening, Signals & Tools

The old joke about humans having two ears, two eyes and one mouth and needing to remember why holds very true in the modern world of social media.  Social networks offer interaction, dialogue, two-way or multi-way communication; in other words, it’s the place to listen to your customers as well as to talk to them.

In fact, four parts listening to one part talking is probably a very effective social media strategy, because you not only need to listen to what people are saying to you, but also to what people are saying about you.  Your brand reputation is too important to be left to chance, so it’s important to be a proactive and effective social listener.  Here are some thoughts on making that happen.

Identify who is responsible for listening to what

It’s important to avoid “I thought you knew” syndrome by having a clearly responsible party or parties charged with the responsibility of monitoring conversations about your brand.  Depending on the nature of your business, you may need to involve people from different areas to ensure that all conversations are fully understood, for example a corporate communications team in a computer software company may not understand highly technical discussions.

Ideally there should also be a channel for employees to flag up conversations they’ve noted without getting involved.  Hopefully your monitoring team will already be aware of these, but better safe than sorry.

Define what you are monitoring, why and for what purpose

It might be nice to know everything, everyone, everywhere is saying about your brand, but in reality, the resources involved in this sort of monitoring would be enormous and that is even before you start the process of turning data into information.  This means you need to focus on what matters most to you and select your monitoring tools with this in mind.

There are basically four reasons for monitoring social media

1. To generate traffic: in this case you’re looking for evidence of unique visitors to your website as a result of social media monitoring and engagement, usually social media campaigns.
2. To create brand following: in this case, you’re looking for friends, followers, subscribers and so forth, basically anyone who makes a point of paying attention to what you say and do.
3. To engage with customers: in this case you’re looking for evidence of people connecting with you, Facebook comments, retweets, sharing and so forth.
4. To generate revenue: although this is arguably the end goal of all of the above, if you’re monitoring the link between interaction and profit, you’ll need a tool which helps assign a monetary value to your presence on social media, be it active or passive.

Choose your tracking tools

Google Analytics is a compelling choice since the data it provides is both broad and deep.  In terms of social media monitoring tools are the Data Hub Activity report and the Trackbacks report.

The Data Hub Activity Report shows how your web content is being perceived on social media networks.  It looks at conversations, comments, shares, likes, retweets and so forth.

 

The Trackbacks report shows what sites are linking to you and highlights the context in which they are making the connection.  People are often judged by the company they keep, websites are too.

Another hugely useful (currently) free tool is Tagboard.  This tool can be used to track hashtags across multiple social media platforms.  Alternatively you can filter by site to compare comments on different platforms.

The venerable Hootsuite has built a solid reputation for social media management, which includes listening.  Part of the reason for its success is the fact that in spite of its power, it is fairly simple to learn to use.  Another reason is the breadth of the social media platforms it supports.  As well as the usual suspects, it supports both smaller sites and regional sites such as the Japanese Mixi.

 

Learning how to listen

Once you’ve organized, briefed and supported your listeners, you need to create an effective listening process.  Here is a suggested strategy.

1 – Just listen

You may have hired experienced professionals for your social media marketing campaign, but if your company is new to the area then step one is just to listen to anything and everything that is said about you.  There will be some gems and plenty of white noise but it will start to give you a feel for what the internet is saying about you.

2 – Start tracking the overall performance of the brand

Look for your brand and the key people associated with it and also your competitors.

3 – Start SWOT analysis

By this point, you should have enough experience at social media listening to start using it as part of your overall marketing strategy.  You’re looking for strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats.  This is the point when you need to engage your social media mouth to participate in conversations aimed at building on strengths and opportunities, while taking action on weaknesses and threats.  Remember that even companies with excellent customer service can still find dissatisfied customers making their views known online and engaging with them can go a long way to improving your brand image.

 

4 – Start using social media listening as a real-time tool

By now you should be actively engaging with social media both as a listener and as a participant.  You should now be developing and implementing processes to incorporate social media feedback into your company’s everyday activity.  For example, if there’s clear evidence that users are having issues with one of your products, change it as quickly as you can.

5 – Incorporate social media into customer satisfaction metrics

If you already have a process for measuring customer satisfaction, then now is the time to start incorporating all the free feedback offered on social media sites.  If you don’t, now is the time to start one.

6 – Create a customer communication channel

Social media gives you the opportunity to go to where your customers are, rather than waiting for them to come to you.  While any type of communication between an organization and a customer has the potential to go public (or even viral), some forms of engagement are, by nature, public, so you will need to ensure staff are trained appropriately.

7 – Integrating the experience with customer relationship management

This is the point where you move from engagement to management.  Knowing where your customers like to be, both in terms of platform and in terms of location, what they like to do and who they like to do it with, gives you a head start in encouraging them to buy your products or services.

8 –Anticipate promising trends

This involves combining historical data regarding customer behaviour with current social media monitoring to predict where your company needs to be.  It is the most sophisticated use of social media monitoring and the most rewarding.