Social media listening is one of the best ways of monitoring the effectiveness of your business strategies. It enables you to know what matters most to your customers by systematically keeping a check on what real online people on social media are saying your business company, your employees, your brand and your industry. Social listening is more than checking intermittently for google alerts or some few tweets. Both Observing and listening are essential in coming up with an effective strategy.
This is because you want to gain perception from what you see and hear. Observing can be done by less skilled people, but listening requires knowledge and experience of your industry. As digital marketing competition goes up in Singapore, you need to know what your customers want for you to stay ahead of other businesses in your industry. This article goes through how to do social listening in Singapore.
The significance of Social Listening
Social media listening gives you an overview of the matters that people are talking about your business. You cannot be able to stop them from speaking, and neither will be ignoring them make them stop. It is hence worthy for you to listen and work on what you here towards rectification and perfection.
Some of the advantages of social listening include gathering insights about your customers, refining your knowledge about the buyer personas, hostages, increasing your social media engagement by joining the conversation and getting content marketing ideas to use in your blogs, offers, and website pages. The beauty and richness of social media platforms are talking and is always happening.
Ensure that you include the knowledgeable team members in social listening strategy as well as willing and curious people in monitoring happening social media conversations.
How to Develop Social Listening Strategy?
Creating a social media listening strategy is easy. All you need is to set up social media accounts. You should at least have a twitter account. You will then follow these eight steps.
- Establish Your Online Social Listening Objective
Establishing your goal is critical in any business approach. It helps determine how the resources are spent, analyze the progress and decide on where to make changes for improvement. If your primary objective is the improvement of your customer service, you need first to understand the customer service resolution currently. Take a look at the team members who will have a quick response when needed.
In the past, the lack of synchronization between online and offline conversations resulted in unreliable practices that profited outspoken social media customers. If your purpose id thought-leadership, you will want to appoint a member of your business with a deep understanding of the industry to oversee the outreach.
Furthermore, if you want to interact with a specific target audience, you will need to identify a member of your team with enough knowledge about the audience to engage them actively and give advice.
- Look for Relevant Online Conversations
Finding relevant online conversations constituents two important factors. These include the place where the conversing audience spends time online and terms that create relevant online conversations.
- Where Does Your Audience Hand Out Online?
Figuring out where your constituents hang out online is crucial in a move to know where to find relevant conversations about your business and industry. The constituents do not necessarily mean your customers. You need to consider all groups in the market that are of significance to your business including suppliers, influencers and basic fans.
According to your business industry, each group may have varying hangouts and social habits. You have had insights of where your audience hangs out when creating personas. If not, use social listening to research the social platforms conversations in your business niche.
- What Are the Relevant Conversations to Use in Your Social Listening Strategy?
Depending on your business or industry, it is often difficult to determine the right conversations. Some of the sectors including marketing and real estate tend to be too noisy. You need to be able to separate meaningful information from that of no use to your business. You first need to start by searching for your business category and industry. Check for hashtags, twitter chats, professional organizations, and trade shows. Research on the terms used by your competitors and the available influencers.
It is keynote to know that there are specific and broad search terms depending on the range of your choice. Search engine specific search terms means that there is an increased likelihood that the people conversing about you know you. Broader terms mean the conversation is more about the greater business industry and lesser specific about you. It is advisable that you develop social search streams for both particular and broader terms.
- What Next After You Get Relevant Online Conversations?
After finding relevant social media conversations, the next appropriate move in your strategy is identifying and following the profiles of interesting social voices on the platform. They participate actively in most of your concerned conversations, and it is an excellent move for you to favorite their updates and even interact with them by asking questions or saying thank you.
Other than engaging with your fans and followers, you will get fresh ideas and content for your marketing strategies. You want to use social listening as an interactive and valuable source of your customers perspective and insights in improving your online marketing. This involvement is hence vital.
- Keep Ready for The Unexpected Online
Scenario planning is an essential part of creating your social media listening strategy. This will help you to be aware of what to do when the unexpected online occurs. Similar to PR101, you will be able to respond effectively despite the situation. One of the things to decide on is the level of interaction you will have on a daily basis. It is more suitable for you to put more effort rather than just passive monitoring.
Use a strategy that will enable you to take the necessary steps when needed. Though there are many internets, feel good and success stories, you also need to be ready for the worst if it happens unexpectedly such as unreasonable tweets and internet trolls. In line with being prepared for the unexpected, it is crucial for you to include your customer service associates in your social listening strategy in case customer service queries arise on the social platforms.
- Involve All Members of Your Organization in Your Social Listening
Every person in your business organization is an ambassador of your brand. They frequently engage with people through their social media accounts online and offline. Why should you not then involve them in your business social listening strategy? By including them in social listening, it provides more customer insights and makes your business more social and sprightlier to everyone.
You are now thinking of how you can make everyone to get involved and represent your business. The most appropriate way is including it in your company’s social media guidelines code of conduct. Reviewing them to include how to deal with customers and permissions needed is an excellent step in strengthening your social listening.
- Create A Listening Process
You now have the basic social listening tips in place. You now need t put a process of conducting your social listening in place. Firstly, you have to choose the search terms that will get you started. This is simply deciding between a strong words combination or use of single words. After you have settled on your search terms, the next step is to identify valuable hashtags and influencers to follow.
Develop search streams to keep an eye on th0se hashtags and influencers as well as private or public Twitter lists. According to the social listening and monitoring tool you are using, you will even be able to analyze your customers and prospects quickly. For best results, your listening process should have a regular schedule of interacting, monitoring, sharing content and recognizing new social media visitors.
- Find Online Social Conversations Listening and Monitoring Tools
You are now already started with your social listening strategy. You want to get a feel for each of the different social media platforms and understand how each one of them varies from each other. This will also give you insights of particular platform dynamics, ways in which the users engage with each other and if there are unique ways of communication.
Monitor all social media platforms including Facebook and LinkedIn groups, Instagram, google+, Pinterest, YouTube and other question-based networks such as Quora. A good example is visiting a foreign country. You want to feel the land before you submerge yourself completely. This is a similar case in exploring the different social media networks.
Examples of Social Search Tools
For you to efficiently identify your target audience, hashtags, and terms that you are more likely to be interested in, you can use some social search tools. One of the best examples is FollowerWonk, Twazzup and Social Mention in searching Twitter bios. Moreover, Tagboard is more specific when searching for hashtags and is effective across several social platforms including Facebook, Twitter, Google+ and Flickr.
In case your followers participate actively in forums, Board Reader may be a good option for you. Twitter Chats offer a valuable opportunity for you to get relevant insights about your business or the industry as a whole and also connects you with industry influencers who engage in topics of your interest passionately. Use the Twitter Chat Schedule to check for conversations and chats that are relevant to your business.
Tools to Enhance Social Media Listening
To understand the strong and weak bits of each search tools, you need to standardize the results from one search tool to another. This way, you will get to compare and know the best tools according to different tasks and social platforms.
As you gain more knowledge about these search tools, you will want to try out paid tools that make social monitoring and listening more comfortable and more effective. Some of these recommendable paid tools include Nimble, Hootsuite and HubSpot. Even as you put your efforts in social listening, below are some important bonus tips for you;
- Use Google Analytics to Check Your Social Referrals Regularly
You don’t want to put much effort into a strategy that is not yielding results. Checking your social referrals through google analytics is essential in confirming and validating that your social media actions are giving results and traffic to your business website.
See that you know the networks are generating traffic and that the traffic is qualified. You can also incorporate these insights to improve your social listening strategy.
- Use Google Search to Benchmark Your Business
What are the listings that are got when you search your business name on google? If there directly listings that you are yet to claim, add relevant business information.
You also need to check on your business reviews. Get over the bad reviews and encourage your happy customers to leave reviews.
- Come Up with A Routine and Schedule for Your Social Media Listening Strategy
The social listening strategy requires consistency and frequency to be successful. You want to gain continuous insights from your online audience and use it to improve your business. You hence need to be dedicated enough for the best results.
That’s why the last and crucial step is developing a daily schedule and routine to observe, monitor, participate and listen regularly. Similar to interaction and networking in real life, your strategy needs to be consistent and regular. Make sure that you create a routine plan for your social listening strategy.
Conclusion
Have you come up with a social listening strategy? Which are some of its importance? Which are the most valuable monitoring tools? The stated steps are adequate for you to establish your strategy. Social listening is an essential component of your online marketing strategy.
It enables you to monitor, analyze and give a response to your business and industry conversations. What you’re your Singapore customers talking about your business competitors? What do they think about you? These are some of the insights you are missing if you are yet to adopt a social listening strategy.
You can make use of keyword and conversation monitoring tools to make your work easier and concentrate on improvement actions on the available insights. Take a step today and start your social listening strategy in Singapore for improved success. This will ensure the listening team knows how to give perfect response to the customers and direct them to the experts for more inquiry.
