How To Improve Your Social Listening Process

Monitoring what people are saying about your business, rivals, and products to build a more informed, targeted approach to your marketing is one of the most important, yet frequently overlooked components of social media marketing.

Improving and developing your social media monitoring approach to get the most out of it for your company is the final point that Social Media Today wanted to make based on the findings in their State of Social Listening 2022 report, which they collaborated on with Meltwater. They polled over 650 professionals from a variety of sectors to find out how marketers are benefiting from their social listening programs and how they're incorporating what they've learned into their strategic communications processes.

This last summary is part of their broader State of Social Listening report, which you can download in its entirety here. You can also read the first, second, and third part of their report summaries.

Part IV: Building a Better Social Listening Strategy

Most organizations now recognize the significance of listening in on social media conversations, and those that do reap huge rewards. However, many people find the actual process difficult. Indeed, the responses show that many firms do not believe they are getting the most out of their listening efforts, owing to a lack of knowledge to fully capitalize on their possibilities.

Smarter apps and solutions meant to streamline the process can help with some of this. For example, Twitter is working on additional sophisticated search monitoring capabilities in TweetDeck, its native monitoring dashboard, to make it easier to comprehend the numerous criteria, and various apps have been working on similar features to enable faster setup and better mention filtering. However, none of these methods are ideal, and it's nearly hard for automated systems to fit years of Boolean search string expertise into them to ensure that you're getting the most out of your monitoring work in the most effective way.

Media monitoring services have relied on experts in Boolean strings for years, even before the social media era, to provide only the most relevant alerts to their clients, and with many of them paying per alert, they've essentially had to build the most efficient monitoring systems to ensure customer satisfaction. They are, nevertheless, complicated and necessitate considerable inquiry and questioning.

Did you know, for example, that you may narrow down your Twitter search results by region or city?

You can restrict your results by location by using the 'near' or 'geocode' search operands, which are just two of the more than 30 qualifiers you can add to a Twitter search to narrow down your results.

Here's a real-life example:

pizza near: Washington within:15mi -“Pizza Hut”

This search query would return a list of all references to pizza in the Washington, DC area, excluding Pizza Hut. With Boolean elements accessible on most monitoring platforms, that's nowhere near as detailed as search strings can get. This signals you need to study more, and there are a variety of courses available that teach more in-depth operands, as well as Google's own set of search criteria that can help you filter your results.

You may also need to collaborate with professionals in the sector to establish more precise, qualified mentions of your company. Various third-party apps do provide answers on this front, and many will provide their experts to assist you in setting up your search terms - and the good news is that you usually only need to set up your search strings once, with minor modifications for your core words from there.

There will be breaking events and situations that will have an impact on your key phrases, therefore developing an underlying understanding as much as possible will be beneficial. But, even though most organizations aren't confident that they're getting the most out of their listening chances, they're still seeing tangible results from their own, basic efforts and plans.

More data is always better, and social listening could be one of the most efficient methods to remain on top of industry trends and grow your business based on direct feedback and a deeper understanding of your target market.

Some companies and products will receive more mentions than others, providing greater knowledge, but a refined social media monitoring program may provide useful, actionable strategic insight to all firms. But you won't know unless you look, and you won't be able to take advantage of all the data unless you broaden your thinking about how people are talking about your brand and industry, what they want to know during the buying process, and how to connect the dots between the various data points.

There are chances out there, and they don't always demand a large investment. However, investing the time and energy into learning or collaborating with people who have will pay off in the long run.