Listen Up! 5 Dont's of Social Media Listening

Listening is hard. Social Listening is even harder! Social media marketing managers, avoid these basic social listening fails to take your social media marketing outcomes from ‘I hear you’ to ‘eureka!’

If you are like me and a fan of people watching, then you know that listening is the people watching equivalent of the internet and can be really fascinating. If you listen - really listen- then social listening offers the wily brand marketer some real gems of insight and action that they would otherwise never have the chance to know. Of course, you could drop a few G’s on market research and focus group discussions by expert agencies, but that course of action is missing what I love most about people watching: serendipity! The stumbling upon of an insight that could come from literally any quarter, and the ability to seize it and turn it into something that will have your competitors kicking themselves and asking, ‘why didn’t I think of that!?’ (at which point you could gently -and smugly- point out ‘well, you weren’t listening’!)

THE NEW RULES OF (MULTI-CHANNEL) CUSTOMER ENGAGEMENT: HANDBOOK FOR GROWTH MARKETERS

Winning CX will come from Brands who can balance relevance, consistency and convenience to drive engagement. The kind of engagement that drives optimal customer lifetime value and real business impact.

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So, we’ve established that social listening is the best, most flexible and cheapest form of customer immersion possible. But what takes your social listening from good to awesome are some tricks of the trade that we’ve curated just for you. Read on, social media managers, if you want to take social listening efforts to the next level.

1. Don’t listen just to your customers or competitors. This sounds counter-intuitive but listen. It’s not just about YOUR customers. It is about YOUR CUSTOMERS WORLD. Listen to everyone in it for the real insights . Including your competitors, their followers, their partners, their critics, and product reviews platforms. Listen also, to what’s happening with these prospects on non-competing forums. For example, if you sell bar-be-ques and your target demographic is male, 35-40, then you could listen to them on your and competitor sites – and all they had to say about bar-be-ques. But you would do well to listen to them also on fitness and diet and health pages, on travel pages and car pages and all other pages that are of interest to them (a practical way to do this is to track the right hashtags). Because the secret is -  knowing you prospect better than anyone else. And hey - you never know- a conversation on Twitter could give you your next breakthrough product development brainwave. In short – once you zone in on your prospect, go wide in to their world, and listen!

2. Don’t be superficial: Of course, you are trying your best to maintain an authentic voice in your social handles. But I’m specifically referring to going beyond skin deep with your metrics and insights. Sure - it’s important to know the WHATs - how many followers, how many shares and forwards and comments etc.- but it’s also important to know the WHYs and the patterns. If something has gone viral, you don’t need to create something similar to what’s gone viral- you need to understand why it went viral- what were the sentiments behind it - and try to recreate that sentiment in whatever format is authentic to your brand.  Track the patterns – is there a pattern to when people share certain kinds of posts, is there a pattern to the kind of posts that don’t elicit any engagement at all, etc. Go beyond number of clicks to who is clicking and why. Patterns and Reasons (cause) are sometimes more valuable than Numbers (symptoms). And with the proliferation of bots on social media, numbers can sometimes be downright misleading. So validate them with qualitative insights as well to see if it checks out .

3. Don’t confuse social media listening with social media monitoring –  monitoring is a more objective tracking of the metrics and facts. Listening can involve gauging the mood, the vibe or the sentiment (often a feature called sentiment analysis in social analytics tools) behind the general discussions and aggregate it into an actionable insight. Monitoring is important but listening gives you the leeway of contextual interpretation and that can be the difference between spotting and missing an awesome campaign idea . Just ensure that the person in charge of reading the social media listen tools understands the business well enough to spot them.

4. Don’t miss sales opportunities: We all know that social media can be used for more effective marketing, research and customer care. But what about sales? Put a process in place to link social listening to social selling: social media can prove to be a valuable source of leads – if you listen! It’s not however about just spotting a lead and sharing that with the salesperson who then follows the lead on LinkedIn and tries to start a conversation. It is about having a system in place to nurture the lead by leveraging social listening to understand their stakeholders, their organizational structure and buying influencers, its about knowing what competitors they already follow and communicate with etc.; seeking intent signals from their conversations and leveraging the right pitch and content based on those insights. In short, most of what you need to know for ABM, an approach proven to deliver higher quality and value deals.  

5. Don’t try to DIY. Remember the days before Uber? You and that cab you need could be one meter away from each other, but you would have no way of knowing, without the app. You would be stuck with the entirely wasteful option of calling a cab company who would send a cab from perhaps miles away, to fetch you. In the social media context, there are now several added layers of complexity – over and above the millions of tracking points including your brand mentions, competitor mentions, keyword mentions etc. First, there is more than text. You need to track and monitor and analyze visual media - gifs, memes, photos. Then, there are multiple languages to communicate in, on the same platform. You could be typing in English and the response could come in Spanish or Arabic or Hindi. Social media listening tools and platforms not just track the numbers, they also track the sentiments, the nuances and the attributes that matter, aggregate it and turn it into actionable insights. With machine learning in the mix, you could even have predictive insights that help preempt (social) disasters in the making. Unless you enjoy being wasteful with your time, energy and sanity, get a tool.