When companies first started using social media, few had defined strategies. We were all figuring out how to make the most of it all. Not everyone was using it, there were no algorithms, we were actually interested in the content that was being shared.
Fast forward to 2021 and it’s a different experience. By next year it is predicted there will be 3.3 billion social media users globally.
When companies create content for social media, they’re not just competing with other brands, they’re competing with trending content, friends, celebrities and photos of coffee.
A social media strategy helps with getting your content in front of eyes, but how can you be sure that your social media strategy is actually going to deliver?
The answer is social media listening.
Social media listening is simply the practice of using some kind of software (We quite like Pulsar at the moment) to listen around keywords/brand names across a variety of social channels.
Why is it so useful? We’ve broken it down into 3 sections below.
Understanding who your social media audience is
Every company has a fairly strong idea of who they want to reach on social media platforms. This is oftentimes either anecdotal or based on real life/traditional research methods. But the internet isn’t like real life. It’s like the internet. We’ve worked on so many projects where the client has had a very clear idea of who their social audience is, and social listening has revealed something very different.
Competitor research
Most people will do a social media audit of their own brand, and look at what competitor brands are doing themselves on social media. In our experience it’s uncommon for people to dedicate the time to doing social listening around key competitors, oftentimes the company in question won’t even be doing this themselves.
This is important as it’s far easier to get a realistic idea of the general feeling about a brand by listening to what people are saying when they aren’t addressing the brand directly. (Pulsar leverages IBM Watson to actually understand the key mood of the conversation alongside the sentiment)
This can help your company by identifying current issues with competitor products, pain points, and even understand what consumers are actually looking for.
You can use this data for creating a content strategy for any part of the “funnel”, or even for product development.
Identifying influencers, micro-influencers, and detractors
Everyday companies get influencer marketing wrong, just going for the biggest name with the broadest appeal. Although this is usually fantastic for reach, we often favour a more micro-influencer based approach. Social listening is brilliant for finding the people in your communities of interest who talk about your keywords all of the time.
The other side of this, is it’s also very easy to identify those who are negative in the space too. We look at the people who are talking the most around the keywords, switch the sentiment to filter to negative and then we have all the biggest detractors in any community listed out for us - ready for our community managers to keep an eye on.
If you have any questions about social media listening or interested in joining one of our reputation management consulting packages– get in touch!
