5 steps to make your social media listening program more ... · 5 steps to make your social media...

5 Steps to Make Your Social MediaListening Program More Effective

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5 Steps to Make Your Social Media Listening Program More Effective

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TABLE OF CONTENTS:

Introduction

Tip 1 - Focus

Tip 2 - Objectives and Goals

Tip 3 - Resource Planning

Tip 4 - Information Workflows

Tip 5 - Results and Learning

The Bottom Line




Social listening is table stakes now; most companies today have some sort

of program in place at least to keep track of what people are saying about

their brand, company or products online.

But even if you’ve been doing social listening for years, it might be time to take another look at your listeningstrategy and see if it could use some fine tuning. Here are five areas to look at, followed by a series of questions you can ask of your programs to see if you’re really optimizing your listening efforts.






Focus

Even a decade after social listening really started to gain traction in the market, many listening programs still lack direction.

Understanding what you expect and want from your listening strategy is important not just for goal setting, but for documenting those things as you scale your teams so learningand absorption across the team and organization is easier and more frictionless.

Plus, listening can be applied beyond just your brand; understanding where you’re focused and where your business can most readily benefit from social listening is key to building a successful program that delivers immediate, tangible results.

A FEW QUESTIONS TO ASK YOURSELF WHEN DECIDING HOW YOU’LL FOCUS

YOUR LISTENING EFFORTS:

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• What are our expectations for what listening/monitoring can help us learn or do?

• What limitations of monitoring do we recognize, especially those specific to our use cases?

• Are we listening only for our brand, or beyond?

• What specific keywords and phrases do we care about?

• Are we going to do competitive monitoring? Track Industry topics? Which?

• What areas of the business can benefit most from social web intelligence?

• Do we have finite or specific initiatives and campaigns that we need to track independently?





Objectives and GoalsTIP

2As important as knowing what you’re listening for is knowing why you’re doing it, and what you’re hoping to accomplish.

Key objectives for you listening efforts should help you illustrate what success and failure look like from the outset, and how much investment of time and resources you’re willing to make in the effort.

SOME KEY READINESS QUESTIONS TO ASK AS YOU GET STARTED:

• What are our expectations for what listening/monitoring can help us learn or do?

• What limitations of monitoring do we recognize, especially those specific to our use cases?

• Are we listening only for our brand, or beyond?

• What specific keywords and phrases do we care about?

• Are we going to do competitive monitoring? Track Industry topics? Which?

• What areas of the business can benefit most from social web intelligence?

• Do we have finite or specific initiatives and campaigns that we need to track independently?





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3Resource Planning

Doing social listening well does require an investment of time and resources just like anything else meaningful in business.

Whether social listening is part of one person’s job or has several full-time heads devoted to its execution and analysis, understanding the investment you’re making is key to keepingreasonable expectations as well as tracking the return on your investment.

THINGS YOU NEED TO BE SURE TO ASK YOURSELF AS YOU BUILD YOUR PROGRAM:

• Who is doing the monitoring on the front lines?

• What kind of training and education will they need? Information access? Tools?

• How are we documenting this knowledge so it’s repeatable and scalable?

• Is this a dedicated role or roles, or integrated into existing positions?

• If it’s integrated, who will be responsible for monitoring what?

• How many hours will you dedicate to listening per week? Per month?

• What level investment of time and resources or other indicators will tell you that you need to adjust?





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4Information Workflows

One of the biggest mistakes companies make when it comes to listening is not sharing the insights and information they glean in order to help inform other business decisions.

Not sharing information, or letting is languish in a one-off report that’s never referenced again, drastically reduces the efficacy of a listening program; after all, the whole point is togather intelligence that can help you make faster and smarter business decisions.

AS YOU’RE BUILDING YOUR REPORTING AND ACCOUNTABILITY PROGRAMS

AROUND SOCIAL AND DESIGNING YOUR LISTENING STRATEGY, ASK YOURSELF:

• Who needs to know what you’re finding through your listening program? In what level of detail? Are there multiple people/profiles you need to consider?

• How will you document your procedures and workflow, and how often will you review and update them?

• How will you deliver the insights to appropriate team members, and in what format? How often?

• What are you expecting people to DO with the information you give them?

• How will you know if they’re doing it? What’s your follow up plan?

• What feedback and refinement mechanisms will you provide?





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5Results and Learning

No matter how simple or complex your listening program, you need ways to be sure that you can take what you learn and put it BACK into the business strategy to refine it based on that intelligence.

Listening is not the end goal in itself; in fact, it should be a starting point for insights and intelligence - even data that you correlate with other information across the organization,like customer or sales data - that you regularly apply to the business in order to improve, optimize, and adjust what you’re doing both tactically and strategically.

AS YOU CONSIDER HOW TO KEEP MOMENTUM FOR YOUR LISTENING PROGRAM,

ASK YOURSELF THESE QUESTIONS:

• Who will review the results of your listening?

• Will that same person or people be responsible for drawing conclusions, delivering insights, and making actionable recommendations?

• What other stakeholders will we need to collaborate with in order to ensure that social data is viewed alongside other important business intelligence?

• How often will you audit your listening programs and review their application in the business?

• How will we share results of our listening efforts across the organization and help them spearhead listening and social analytics programs of their own?





The Bottom Line

Once upon a time, social listening was just something a few specialists in the marketing department did to optimize campaigns or monitor brand health.

But as social data proliferates, so too do its applications: customer care and experience, sales and business development, product innovation, supply chain optimization...the list will continue to grow as businesses innovate.

Having the most strategic approach and the most powerful technology at your fingertips is key.For more information about Sysomos social intelligence and how we help you uncover insights you can actually use, contact us for a free, no-obligation demonstration of our platform.



https://sysomos.com/contact/

5 steps to make your social media listening program more ... · 5 steps to make your social media...

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