Our tips and tricks for launching a social listening project 

Social listening is often defined as an activity of listening. The idea is to monitor all social media platforms to identify publications mentioning your brand, your products, your company’s keywords, but also those related to your competitors. Unlike social media monitoring, where quantitative data is important to measure engagement rate and number of mentions, social listening delves deeper into the public’s sentiment regarding your brand. This activity should no longer be underestimated by companies because it allows them to know what is being said about them and adjust their actions in real-time. 

So what are our tips and tricks for launching a social listening project? 

| Define your objectives 

The objectives of implementing a social listening strategy can be multiple: trend analysis, measuring brand awareness and e-reputation, competitive intelligence, or finding insights that the company can leverage. We can categorize social listening into 6 major uses: 

• Crisis management: preventing and/or managing a crisis 
• Brand image monitoring: evaluating how the public perceives your brand or products 
• Sectoral monitoring: analyzing discussions or hashtags in a specific industry 
• Competitive analysis: analyzing a competitor’s brand or product 
• Campaign analysis: reporting on the impact of a campaign 
• Event tracking: monitoring the public’s reaction to an event (trade show, competition, conference, etc.) 

| Identify the channels where you are being discussed 

It is important to analyze and identify all social media platforms where your brand is being discussed. The way your users express themselves about your company can vary from one social media to another, just as you adapt your messaging according to the platforms. It is not relevant to limit yourself to only Facebook or Twitter, for example, but each platform will provide specific information related to its unique audience. 

A social listening tool allows you to monitor all your social media channels where your brand is being discussed (Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube, etc.) in a single solution, which can give you a 360-degree view of the public’s perception in real-time. 

| Learn from your competitors’ strategies 

In terms of communication and digital marketing, it is not enough to copy-paste the winning strategies of your competitors to increase your online visibility and reputation. However, with social listening, it is possible to obtain valuable information about what works or doesn’t work by listening carefully to the public’s sentiment regarding your competitors. 

In fact, it is always more pleasant to discover the mistakes not to reproduce when they are made by your competitors. It is then important to stay alert to your competitors’ successes, but especially to their failures. 

| Share your information with your teams 

All collected data and information is profitable not only to you but also to all your teams, so don’t hesitate to share this information. All these insights can be used by marketing departments, customer service teams, and content management teams, which can benefit from everything you have learned. Thus, social listening can help you quickly respond to a customer post, suggest new product ideas, or even help you find the topic for your next blog article. 

| Implement actions 

Social listening differs from social media monitoring by implementing relevant actions to respond to the demands of potential and current customers. By obtaining valuable information about what they expect from your brand or company, you are better able to meet those demands. 

It is now time for you to choose which social listening tool can provide all the solutions to your inquiries, knowing that each tool has its own specificities. 

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At Netino by Webhelp, social listening is our specialty! Thanks to our team of expert analysts, we estimate that we have avoided more than 470 crises (bad buzz) on social media for our clients in 2020!