Have you ever thought about the number of conversations taking place on social networks at any given moment? It can only be enormous. Their rhythms and tones fluctuate depending on current events and trends, covering all subjects.
The social listening, or social listening, involves grouping a category of conversations that are particularly interesting to you and extracting relevant insights and data from them.
In this article, we dissect all aspects of social listening and how it could benefit your company.
What is social listening?
It is the process of monitoring online conversations and collecting data from social platforms and forums on a chosen topic. This could be a brand, an industry, a social phenomenon, a hashtag, or other.
The collected data is then analyzed to identify trends and useful information to help brands understand consumer sentiment, evaluate their online presence and reputation, and further clarify their market positioning. This information is then integrated into product development, business operations, marketing, advertising, and many other areas of the business.
This is not an entirely new approach. Brands have always tried to assess public opinion and gather customer feedback through surveys. Unlike these traditional research methods, with the right technology, spontaneous discovery and analysis, unsolicited consumer opinions prove much more meaningful and profitable.
The analytical part involves extracting insights – what are people saying about your brand online, who are the pioneering influencers in these conversations, how is the industry evolving, and where are the majority of these conversations taking place? This involves tools and features such as author analysis, page type analysis, topic analysis, and sentiment analysis, also known as opinion mining. This last process involves determining the emotional tone behind a series of words, used to understand the attitudes, opinions, and emotions expressed in an online mention.
How to proceed with social listening?
Generally, you will need a dedicated tool or platform to perform social listening. As part of a basic approach, you can start by monitoring mentions of certain terms, for example through Google Alerts, but this will always be quite superficial.
What are you trying to measure?
The first step is to write down your goals. There are a variety of things you could do with social listening, so it’s easy to get lost in the data. Whether it’s simply seeing who’s talking about your brand or setting up a crisis alert system, you need to know exactly what you want to achieve from the outset.
Our needs are far from identical. For some people, social listening is part of an ongoing strategy. Others might be looking for the answer to a single question. Take the time to discuss this with your team to make an informed decision.
Here are a few examples of what you could do:
- Crisis management
- Customer service
- Brand awareness and reputation
- Content creation
- Campaign performance tracking
- Trends and demographic data
What data do you need?
Once you have clear objectives, you can determine the necessary data. It is very important to discuss this directly with teams specializing in each area.
Your customer service knows the common discussion topics among customers. Additionally, your campaign managers know which metrics are important. The sales department is better equipped to determine what potential customers like to hear, etc.
Work with them to create a checklist of data they would find useful to achieve the stated objective. You then use this to define the parameters of your data collection. This could range from searching for all mentions of your brand to conversations about a specific topic in a particular geographical area.
How much data do you need?
You also need to decide how much data you will need or, in other words, the duration for which you will be practicing social listening.
For some projects, like customer service, it makes sense to keep this continuous. But in other cases, you will need to be more specific. Do you need a year’s worth of data? Should it come from one country or worldwide? Will you collect data from all social platforms and forums, or just a few specific ones?
What you are trying to uncover will determine all the answers to the above questions. But stay vigilant – covering a reasonable period is a crucial criterion. You can’t identify trends in just one week. So, make sure to capture enough data to obtain appropriate insights that you can practically exploit.
How to leverage the collected data?
As mentioned earlier, there are a whole host of reasons for conducting social listening. This means we can’t cover everything, but here are some general tips for handling the data.
Clean up the data
The data collected can often be excessive, noisy, and messy. You will always need to discard data that is not relevant and in line with your search criteria. Sometimes this will be negligible, but often it can give you ideas.
The first thing to do is manually check what you have collected. You don’t need to look at every piece of data, but if something is wrong, you will be able to spot it. Following this process, your data will be much more targeted.
The main lesson is not to take your first set of results for granted. You will never get things right the first time, and it will always be a process of constant refinement. Check and re-check your results before assuming your data is useful and drawing conclusions.
Data analysis
It can be difficult to know where to start, especially with a large dataset. Always remember the goal of your analysis to guide you through the process and ensure there is enough data.
Advising on how to analyze the data should be the subject of another article altogether, but here are some common elements to watch out for to get a first glimpse:
- Sudden peaks and dips in mention volume
- Seasonal trends
- Sentiment changes
- Differences between demographic data
- Related topics
- Specific differences in product conversations
- Conclusions that contradict assumed knowledge
Continuous monitoring
If you plan to collect data indefinitely, it is important to get it right as early as possible. If, after six months, you realize that you have collected the wrong data or missed important areas, a lot of hard work, time, and resources will be wasted.
Above all, involve all relevant teams. Request continuous feedback to quickly identify any issues. Online conversations evolve rapidly. New words, products, and even memes could unexpectedly skew your data. Always verify your results.
You will also want to update your goal for the same reason. If a new competitor appears or if you launch a new product, you need to ensure that you are collecting data to cover these events.
Finally, social listening is extremely powerful – if done well and followed up on.