Making Sense of Social Media Listening: 3 Strategies

Look just about anywhere these days and you’ll see articles about how to use social media for business, how Twitter is either incredible or wildly overblown, how social media is the number one CMO mission for 2012, and even how social media can make or break a revolution.

According to a recent study from the Pew Research Center, fully 65% of the adult online population use social networks; clearly the opportunity is too big to ignore, but with all of this noise how do you make sense of your company’s place in this new world order?  And more importantly, how do you know what’s worth listening to? Using social media to understand your customers’ needs and goals is far more complex than Googling your company’s name. Companies must learn from the ground up how to effectively learn from and leverage this new playing field of “uncontrolled” communications, learning from and interacting with customers and the influencers of those customers in their own domain and on their own terms.

To move forward you need to fully understand the rules of engagement for your specific target audience and where and why they are engaged – which is likely far beyond just Facebook and Twitter. Based on our experience working with brands trying to optimize the social media space, we have put together three strategies for implementing the most usable social media listening and measurement program.

Look Beyond the Numbers

When you begin to measure social media and what it means to your company, it is easy to rely heavily on technology that lets you “count” what is going on.  This is one key element of understanding the opportunity to listen to your customers, but we’ve found that you can glean much more useful information by integrating that information with other exploratory and quantitative data.

We have found it most effective to take a multi-phase approach – using both qualitative “listening” and quantitative “monitoring” elements – to help you understand and act on the world of social media.

• Relevance to your brand:  How much do YOUR target consumers use social networking to make decisions in your category (regardless of how much people use it in general)?  It’s key to understand the importance of this channel within your category and not make decisions based solely upon mass use of a channel.
• Influence on decisions:  Popularity is not the same thing as importance.  It’s important to understand how much impact social networking has on the brand perceptions and purchase decisions of people you want to reach relative to other places they gather information.
• Most compelling messaging:  People are acclimated to the marketing that is commonly being used on other media platforms (e.g. TV ads, pop-ups on websites, or advertisements in their magazines.)  However, consumers often feel differently about their social networking sites; positioning strategies that work most effectively in other environments may be less effective, or even backfire, in an environment that consumers have built themselves.

Don’t Just Focus on the “Buzz” Sites

The world of social media—especially who influences it and who it influences—is complex to decipher.  While Twitter, Facebook, Google+ and now Pinterest are getting the buzz, they are just a few pieces of the puzzle. There are also a host of other social media that might well have greater impact in particular categories; you need to understand the channels that your target customers are using and why they use them.

Just because a platform isn’t a household name doesn’t mean they aren’t a forum for people talking about their experiences with your brand. On the other hand, there’s little sense in focusing your energies on niche sites that don’t cater to your target audience—due diligence will help you filter out the “noise” and let you focus on your potential and existing customers.

Gather What You Really Need

With so much information available it is very easy to get wrapped up in the interesting tidbits of what people are saying about your brands and products.  While that is certainly beneficial, it needs to be part of a systematic program that will result in your knowing:

• Who to target: Which audiences and vehicles will be most receptive to your social media messages?
• What (and what not) to say: What are the messages, topics, and styles that your audiences are interested in hearing; and those that might backfire?
• How to allocate resources: Which audiences to target through social media versus traditional media and marketing efforts?
• What impact to expect: What are the levels and types of responses you can expect from social media messaging among different audiences?

Social media, and the tools to mine it, can bring you a wealth of  data.  But a ton of data is only better than no data if you can use it to do something. Be as strategic as you would with your brand tracking, segmentation, or any other analyses you perform, and the rewards can be invaluable.