Social Listening is defined as the monitoring of social networks in order to know what are the topics of interest to our users, what are their concerns or simply what catches their attention.
Social Listening is a key tool when developing a Design Thinking strategy because its implementation has a place in all phases of the project.
In this way, the information extracted from this practice is useful for the previous preliminary investigation process, the monitoring of the popularity of the campaign and, finally, the measurement of its success.
All the content that is collected through Social Listening is directly related to the study of user behavior in the online environment.
However, it is essential to bear in mind that on many occasions the impact that a topic reaches on the network has its replica in the offline panorama.
The online channels in which Social Listening is generally applied are: social networks, blogs, web pages and forums.
Reactive Listening VS Proactive Listening
The first thing that we must be clear about when we face Social Listening is that there is no single objective for which to put this technique into practice. First of all, we need to deal with the difference between Reactive Listening and Proactive Listening.
Reactive listening is aimed at listening to the environment, that is, to society and the events that generally occur in it.
On the other hand, proactive listening is dedicated to the search for very concise information about a specific target and about a specific topic or interest.
Customer Journey: what to avoid
Something that should be strictly prohibited when designing a Customer Journey is not taking into account the different platforms that the user has to go through. Currently, most communication strategies are based on transmedia experiences, in which the user goes from one platform to another performing different actions.
Considering each action in a unitary way for each platform is a mandatory practice to understand the emotional phases that our client will experience. As an example, you have to know if your strategy on Tik Tok should be launched before that of the rest of the networks or not. To do this, you will have to take into account the entire narrative of the action, as well as other factors related to the consumption habits that users make of the networks.
Advantages of Social Listening
1. Meet the user
Through Social Listening we obtain the information we need to develop a clustering process, that is, to create a classification according to the interests and tastes detected in each user.
Through the clustering process, personalized content can be offered, which is one of the best techniques for improving the user experience.
In addition, we cannot forget that not only young people are users of the digital environment today. More and more adults are taking part in social networks, blogs or opinion forums. Increasing the user experience of the elderly is the challenge that Social Listening is helping many brands to overcome today.
2. Prevent problems and identify improvements
The digital ecosystem and the observation capacity within it, can be a primary source to carry out a continuous SWOT analysis of our company or clients. In this way, we can easily identify our weaknesses, threats, strengths and opportunities and those of our competition.
Brands must continuously carry out audits and market studies to develop a strategic response capacity superior to that of their competitors.
As an example, there are many opinions about what time posts should be published on social networks. The only method to find out this mystery is none other than Social Listening. This is one of the great improvements that have been implemented in the digital ecosystem after the implementation of the technique that occupies this post.
3. Find thought leaders
Through the conversational study we can easily discover who the opinion leaders are in each topic and moment. Bearing in mind that this is a variable factor, we can establish specific strategies according to this information.
Thanks to this work, we will be able to identify potential celebrities or influencers with whom our page could collaborate, or how to interact with them on networks.
Social Listening: a strategy to plan
It is clear that Social Listening is a successful strategy for brands! But, it is not something that can be carried out without any prior planning.
Next, we present you step by step the correct way to follow to build a unique Social Listening plan:
1. Definition of strategy: determine what we want to achieve, what are the key business questions, define the categorization and labeling structure based on needs.
2. Tool configuration: choice of tools based on needs and limitations, creation of queries, testing of queries.
3. Classification and treatment: iterative process, reading and classification of conversations, labeling and categorization based on the structure, export of data in custom formats if necessary.
4. Analysis/Insights: iterative process, search for valuable information, follow-up analysis, trends, volumes and others.
5. Presentation and visualization: organization and presentation of information in different sizes and extensions, thinking of different stakeholders.
At PSS we are experts in Social Listening, we help you focus your social media strategy on the needs and preferences of your consumers. If you want more information, contact us!
Employee area