Social Media Insights can be a great way to understand and engage with your users and customers. Before you can start gathering insights, you need to have a listening strategy in place. Once you have that, you can move on to the tactics of running the program. The steps to running a successful listening program are configure, deliver, validate and adjust.
Based on your listening goals, you can select one or more listening tools. There are many available. While many claim to be able to do it all, in reality they tend to be good at certain tasks. Some will be a great tool for social support listening and engagement. Others will be better for PR & brand monitoring. There are some tools that are specific to influencer identification. Based on your needs, find the right tool or tools.
With a tool in place, you can start to do some initial listening. Social listening is all about the keywords. Getting the right listening profile in place will take time and a lot of tuning. You can start with a broad net, trying to get a sense of the overall conversation. Use the name of your company and its products and look across a wide variety of social media locations. Much of what you find will not be relevant and you can mark it as noise.
A good way to develop better keywords is to brainstorm with others. Based on your strategy, you have focused your initial listening program to just a few main goals. Work with your partner teams. If you can find writers or SEO experts within those teams, they will be the best place to start.
You should also review your web site for keywords. Look for the products, services, white papers, blogs and other content. What keywords would you use to search for it? Try searching and look for the related searches. For example, in Google, when you start to type in a topic, it recommends related items.
But, people won’t be discussing your company the way you do. So, you need to build on that list and tune it. After reviewing the initial broad searches, you should be getting a sense of conversation themes. How would you classify them? Are they rants, raves, customer service issues, or something else. Many tools have built in classification systems. You need to determine if you should customize the tool to better fit your needs.
Tuning will take the most time. Using boolean AND OR and NOT instructions, you can improve your listening accuracy. Look for words that produce the most noise and add those using NOT. Read samples of the posts and look for words that are related to your search terms and might bring in mentions you missed. Add those to your keywords list. Look for phrases. You might be able to identify customer questions using ‘does anyone know’ as a key phrase. Try using proximity. For example ‘Brand Name AND Frustrated within 10 words’. Take samples and adjust frequently until you are satisfied. You may still have a lot of noise – but you should be able to reduce it by at least half.
If you will be having more than one person classifying mentions and identifying insights, you will need to get synchronized. Using sample mentions, independently classify. Then, review how you classified them and why. As you start to become more consistent, document your process. That will make it easier to onboard the next analyst.
Once you have a social insights system in place, you can start to deliver reporting. You worked with partner groups on the strategy and metrics plan. Go back to your partner groups to validate that what you are delivering is adding business value. Are they getting a good sense of the voice of the customer? Are product improvement suggestions being identified? If you goal was support or sales, are they getting the insights and connections they need?
If needed, adjust the program. You will want to keep in close touch with these partners and adjust the approach as needed. Don’t be surprised if you need to make changes to your listening and reporting every six months.
I hope that was helpful. I would love to learn your tips and tricks for social listening. Please leave a comment or reach out to me on Twitter @XDstrategy.
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