In this post, we will be looking at social listening, how to listen and what tools to use for social listening.
Be reminded that, this is a continuation of the Fundamentals of social media management
Step 1: Pick the right keywords in queries. Depending on the task you want to complete, you will need to pick the right words you want to hone in on.
For example, if your goal is to find influencers through listening, you should start with creating queries related to your campaign topic. Within the query, list relevant keywords, hashtags, and mentions you want to track. Finally, pick the platform you’d like to monitor, along with the default language and region. As a result, you will capture exactly what you are interested in.
Step 2: Listen and analyze. After you select the keywords you want to track, use a social media listening tool to start monitoring them. You can use the data you’ll get in multiple ways, depending on the objective:
Campaign monitoring: see what people are saying about your brand and content and join the conversation to increase engagement.
Competitive intelligence: see how people are responding to your competitor’s content, and look into the volume and tone of their responses to draw actionable conclusions you can leverage in your own strategy.
Top-quality customer care: keep tabs on the incoming questions and comments, so you can respond ASAP to improve customer satisfaction and enhance brand image.
Brand advocates and influencers: understand who’s mentioning your brand to be able to leverage their impactful voices to reach new audiences.
Crisis management: spot complaints and negative comments in no time, so you can prevent conflicts from escalating.
Make sure you look into the sentiment of your keywords or brand mentions. This will help you understand the context of discussions around your brand and provide more informed responses.
How to manage social media influencers
Not that long ago, managing influencer relationships was the job of PR agencies. However, with the increasing popularity of influencer marketing, collaborating with influencers became an inherent part of social media management. Brands are set to spend up to $15 billion on influencer marketing by 2022.
Luckily, with the rise of end-to-end influencer management solutions, this task has become much easier. Let’s take a look at how to build a successful influencer marketing strategy:
Step 1: Define your goals and KPIs. Some of the most popular influencer marketing goals include:
Raising brand awareness: volume of social shares, brand mentions, earned media, reach, direct traffic, brand search
Increasing sales: volume of sales qualified leads (SQLs), sold products or services
Reaching new market segments: reach, the volume of users other than your usual audience personas engaging with your content, visits to your website, purchasing your products or services
Step 2: Find the right influencers for your audience. You shouldn’t work with someone just because this person is hugely popular or has worked with multiple international brands before. Instead, focus on finding someone who is the right match for your audience, even if they’re niche. So, how do you find influencers your audience trusts?
Use an AI influencer search tool: Skip manual research and let AI provide a selection of top social media influencers that are the best fit for each of your audience personas.
Use social media listening: Find out who’s already mentioning your brand or talking about the keywords related to your business or industry. Then, see how well the influencer matches your audience personas to be able to assess if you could strike up a fruitful collaboration.
Step 3: Understand the performance of the influencers. To ensure you’re partnering with someone who’s not only the right match but also effective, review their performance using analytics. Pay attention to metrics such as engagement, follower growth, and promoted post efficiency, which will give you an idea of the influencer’s effectiveness.
Step 4: Get to know the influencer. Talk to them about your goals, expectations, and campaign ideas, and let the influencer do the same. The more campaign details you’ll provide, the better your collaboration with the influencer will be. Find out how to develop successful relationships with social media influencers.
Step 5: Work on content strategy. Many marketers make the mistake of forcing influencers to leverage certain content formats, topics, or publishing frequencies. In reality, though, it’s the influencers who should be deciding on the final shape of the campaign. After all, they know best how to engage their audiences in a meaningful way. Get ideas for your next influencer campaign with our blog discussing seven iconic influencer marketing examples.
Step 6: Measure your performance. To find out how effective your influencer collaboration is, you need to closely monitor your performance throughout the campaign. Don’t forget to compare the ROI of your influencer campaign to the ROI of your other digital marketing activities – it will allow you to estimate how cost-effective your influencer collaboration was.
Check out this guide to learn more about how to start, push forward, and measure your influencer collaboration.
How to manage social media customer care
Excellent customer service on social media is key to acquiring and retaining a loyal, engaged audience.
It also has a direct impact on a company’s revenue. According to Statista, 59% of the global population are active social media users. It’s essential for every business to implement a social media strategy to engage with its customers. That’s why customer care on social media is crucial. Now let’s look at how your team can provide top-notch customer service on social media:
Step 1: List the platforms where your customers are reaching out to you most frequently, so you can focus your time and resources on managing these channels.
Step 2: Assign roles and responsibilities to your social media customer care team. You can have a designated person for each platform or topic (e.g., technical product-related questions vs. complaints). It’s also a good idea to have one person overlooking all the customer care activities – someone making sure the responses are appropriate and approving the outgoing messages.
Step 3: Create customer service guidelines. Doing so will enable you to keep your responses coherent and aligned with your brand’s tone of voice. Should you appear friendly or professional? Should you reply to questions in the comment section or follow up in a direct message? Should you proactively engage in conversations with your customers, even if they are not directly related to your business? These are some of the issues that a style guide will help clear up.
Step 4: Monitor social channels by listening for brand mentions, comments, and questions. Give answers to a maximum number of customers each day to provide timely help, join conversations while they’re still relevant, and spot conflicts before they develop. If a crisis does escalate, though, keep calm and read our article on how to manage a social media crisis.
Step 5: Report on your performance. Just like with other social media marketing activities, customer service is something that should be frequently reviewed. Reporting on your customer care performance in terms of the types of queries you’re receiving or average response time will allow you to identify gaps and fix any shortcomings.
How to manage social media monitoring and reporting
Any successful social media strategy is founded on data-driven decisions – also ones regarding financial investments. As more and more money is poured into social media marketing, it’s critical to understand the efficiency of this spending and the revenue it generates.
This is exactly where monitoring and reporting come into play. These two activities give you insight into how the budget you put behind social media is contributing to your business’s bottom line. They also enable you to quickly adjust your strategy – the sooner you get your performance data, the faster you’ll be able to improve.
Proper monitoring and reporting are all about the right focus. Knowing the exact scope of data, you need to be able to draw actionable conclusions that will allow you to measure your performance more effectively.
Here are the metrics you should pay attention to when measuring different areas of social media:
Audience analysis: audience size, demographics, interests, behaviors, audience personas (note that personas will change over time)
Content performance: reach, engagement overview, breakdown of engagement types, number of interactions per 1,000 fans, top-performing posts, CTR, referral traffic
Social media listening: volume and frequency of brand mentions, sentiment, influencers mentioning your brand
Influencer marketing: an overview of influencers that match your audience personas, their demographics, interests, audience size, interactions, number of posts, and hashtags they’re using; to track the influencer’s campaign performance, zoom in on their reach, engagement overview, number of interactions per 1,000 fans, CTR, and volume of referral traffic
Ads metrics: CTR, CPC, CPM, reach, frequency, conversions
Social media customer care: volume of customer messages, questions, and complaints, sentiment, average response time
In order to add depth to your monitoring, you should compare yourself to the competition. For example, in terms of follower growth, engagement, or efficiency of social media investments.
This way, you’ll get a more complete picture of where you stand and be able to tweak your strategy when necessary.
When it comes to reporting, it’s important to maintain a narrow focus, be to the point, and make sure your data tells a story.
The right frequency is also significant. The general rule of thumb is that you should report with your team every month, and with top management – every quarter. But to keep close track of your goals, make sure you schedule automated reports to be delivered to your inbox on a weekly basis.
Now, how do you create a comprehensive social media report?
Step 1: Define the variables of your social media report. Before you start creating a report, you need to answer three important questions:
Who is your report for?
What is the timeframe of your social media report?
What is the methodology of your social media report?
Step 2: Choose the right metrics for your social media report. Think about the story you want to tell and metrics that best reflect the impact of your social media activities.
Step 3: Benchmark your results against the competition. This step is important because it adds a broader context to your report.
The additional information about how you stack up against your competitors is a valuable hint when it comes to how you can better manage social media. It is also a signal to your managers that you analyze your metrics in-depth by looking beyond just your own performance.
Step 4: Benchmark your results against the country, region, and industry. This way, you’ll be able to understand if any performance changes affect you alone, or if they’re a result of a broader event, such as a seasonal traffic increase or newsfeed algorithm changes.
The takeaway
Managing social media might seem challenging – but not if you have the right processes and tools in place.
Editor’s Note: This article was originally published on socialbakers.com. Any statistics or statements included in this article were current at the time of original publication.
