Social listening allows you to boost posts with a clearer knowledge of what the public wants. Yes, social listening is great for customer care. But it’s also a tool to improve upon the content your business is putting out into the social media world.
It’s time to accept that social listening is more than a trendy phrase marketing professionals throw around. It’s become the gold standard for businesses who are serious about hearing what their customers have to say about them and their competition – and then doing something about it. Read on for how you can use social listening to boost your posts.
Listen Through Tagging
Let’s start from the beginning, and for most, it’s with the proper tool. The B Squared Media community managers are well versed in tagging every single comment that comes through for our clients with SproutSocial’s listening tools. Our ‘why’ is easy – we want to know exactly how the client’s audience feels about certain products and services. Additionally, we want to know the overall sentiment surrounding the brand.
The tags we set up are based on each client’s specific products and services. But here are some general tags as an example:
- Sentiment – Positive, negative, neutral. This can also be expanded upon. Example: Negative-Red Level; Negative-Yellow Level; Neutral-Green Level).
- Product/Service – This is decidedly individual to the client. If the client sells appliances, then tags would be based on the specific models. If there are new models released each year, then you’d add that to the tag.
How do these tags help boost a post? These tags, when pulled into a social listening report, represent what your current customers are saying on your posts. They tell the story of what your customers are positively responding to and also what posts are generating negative feedback. Furthermore, we’re able to calculate which posts garnered the most engagement (and the least).
B Squared Media’s social listening reports work to our client’s advantage in many ways. A jewelry client of ours had an audience asking for the brand to bring in silver jewelry. The sentiment around it was mostly negative because they didn’t feel they were being heard. After the social listening report was presented to the client, it was clear as day to them that they needed to listen to their audience. They did and the results were increase in sales and happy customers.
Listen To Mentions & Hashtags
In addition to tagging incoming comments, it’s important to cast the net wider. In other words, we search mentions, hashtags, and all social chatter around a business. Your business doesn’t need to be directly contacted or tagged for social listening to be implemented.
A great example comes from a case study where our community managers monitored the social media surrounding a national teachers’ convention. Not only were the comments on NCTE’s account monitored, but all mentions and hashtags were as well. The data gathered (see word cloud below) helped the event organizers better plan for the next convention and the social posts surrounding it.
[Source: B Squared Media Case Study]
Listen To Your Competitors
While it’s important to check in on your brand health, it’s equally important to know what your competitors are doing too. By listening to the customer’s reaction to your competitor’s posts, you can learn a lot.
Listening to what’s working (and not working) for your competitors is eye-opening. There’s a wealth of information right there for you. Here are things you will listen for:
- Their tone of voice with social posts and how their customers react.
- Their frequency of posting.
- What posts are providing the largest engagement and are they positive or negative?
These are just a few things you can listen for. You can truly listen for anything, so depending on your business, you can customize it to fit what you’re looking for. And from there, you can determine the best course of action for your own social media posts. For further information, you can read up on this post from Sprout Social.
[Sample Listening Report from Sprout Social]
Review, Revise, & Repeat
Now that you’ve collected the data via tagging and run your listening reports, it’s time to review them with your business or clients. You now possess the solid data needed for proof of what is working and what needs to be revised.
Social media is an ever-evolving entity. Posts that work today may not get the same engagement tomorrow. Additionally, different platforms perform better with different content. Your Facebook audience is definitely made up of a different crowd than your Instagram or Twitter crew. Social listening helps define this in clearer terms and more importantly – with numbers. You’ll be able to see which platform’s posts perform better, which need to be adjusted. Review, revise, and repeat!
Summing Up
How you use social listening to boost posts comes down to tracking and analyzing the data gathered. Of course, you need the skills and tools to be successful at it. If you’d like to learn more about how B Squared Media can implement social listening into your strategy, then visit us here to sign up for a complimentary conversation with our CEO, Brooke Sellas.
What are you doing to boost your posts? Let us know in the comments below!
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