We already covered the basics of social listening, how it benefits your business and some of the free tools you can use in a previous post. Today, let’s look at implementing a social listening strategy.
Don’t let all the tools, metrics and insights overwhelm you during your social listening journey. Implementing this strategy can be complex. But, it’s rewarding for gaining valuable insights about your customers, competitors, and industry.
There are a few steps you can rely on when implementing social listening to make this complex process a lot easier. Using this guide and staying focused on your goals and objectives will help anyone, even an amateur, put in place a social listening strategy that helps a business thrive.
It’s important to plan whatever process you’re part of. A well-thought-out plan helps you understand the entire process better, plan for challenges and stay prepared for any outcomes.
Creating a successful social listening plan should include the following steps:
- Define your goals: The first step is to define your goals for social listening. Think of what you want to achieve through social listening. This can be an increase in brand awareness, better customer engagement, or improved SEO and write them down.
- Choose the right tools: Many free and paid tools are available today to make social listening more effective. Explore as many as possible and select social listening tools best suited to your needs and budget. Factors to consider as you make your choice include coverage, accuracy, and ease of use.
- Identify your target audience: This isn’t the time to cast a broad net with your audience. You will only get good results when you listen to a few demographics. Fine-tune who your target audience is and what social media platforms they’re most active on. Having this information will help you focus your listening efforts and ensure you are tracking the right metrics.
- Define your keywords and topics: Another important part of social listening is listening for the right keywords. Conduct extensive research and learn what keywords and topics are relevant to your business and goals. Then, set up monitoring for them in your social listening tools.
- Establish a process for reporting and analysis: Learning what your audience is talking about and what language they use is one aspect of the grand process of social listening. You must also decide how to collect, analyze, and report your social listening data. There are automated reports available or you can create manual reports according to your needs and resources.
- Engage with influencers and customers: Prepare to take part in the conversation. Listening is great for learning and an excellent opportunity to connect with your people. Develop a plan for engaging with relevant influencers and customers on social media. Your plan should include how you will respond to customer inquiries, address concerns, and offer helpful information.
- Refine and adjust your plan as needed: The exciting thing about Digital marketing strategies is that they’re evolving. The same thing goes for your audience. What they find interesting this week may be completely different from what you discovered last week. So keep checking the effectiveness of your social listening plan and make adjustments as needed to achieve the best results.
Influencers have become a big part of many digital campaigns. They can also contribute meaningfully and be helpful with social listening. Working with influencers takes your social listening efforts to the next level and improves its success by a large margin. They have direct contact with your target audience most of the time and can give deeper insights into what they like and respond to.
Below are a few steps you can take to help identify and engage with the right influencers for your brand.
Identify key influencers in your industry.
Look for more than creators with a large following. It’s also vital for whoever you work with to be active in your industry or niche and have followers who engage with them and trust their opinions. Also, explore partnering with various influencers across different platforms. This can include bloggers, journalists, experts, or social media personalities.
Track their activity
Some of the tools you’ve set up can also offer insights into influencers. Refrain from relying on their follower count or the metrics they give you. These tools can track their activity and track mentions, engagement, and reach. Knowing exactly how far their reach and engagement are can help you decide whether to work with them.
Engage with them on social media
Some influencers will only work with brands they recognize or have had some interactions with. It can help to start a conversation, comment on their posts often, and share their content to build a relationship with them. When you’ve established contact, you can also reach out to them and introduce yourself or offer valuable insights or resources.
Provide them with value
Before jumping in with an offer to partner up, show them how you can be valuable to their brand. You can offer insights, advice, or resources that help in their work. Then make a move to engage with them. For example, you can share relevant articles or offer to collaborate on a project to increase their credibility.
Measure the results of your partnership
Partnering with the right influencers should yield positive results. Ensure you keep measuring the success of your influencer list by examining key metrics. Metrics to look at include increased brand awareness, website traffic, or engagement. This’ll help to test the impact of your influencer engagement efforts and refine your strategy as needed.
Optimizing for search engines is a big part of any digital campaign. So, it’s vital to consider how any strategy you’re implementing affects it.
You can use the insights you gain from social listening to inform your content creation strategy. Look at the keywords and topics with the most interactions and interests. You can form topics for relevant and engaging topics around these keywords which is great for driving organic traffic to your web pages.
Use the keywords and topics you are tracking to drive more organic traffic to your website. Do this by updating your website’s meta tags, creating keyword-rich content, and building backlinks to your site.
Another way to use social listening to improve SEO is by engaging with customers on social media. You’ll build stronger relationships with them and their networks, who will be more inclined to search for and work with your business in the future.
Armed with these steps, there’s no limit to the information you’ll gain from listening to what your audience says about your business. They’ll help you create a comprehensive social listening plan to understand your customers, competitors, and industry better. This valuable information you gather is often the secret to driving business results.
