Reflection: Social Media Listening

This week we take a look at something that I have personally (always) struggled with: Listening. As we’ll see in this post, listening in social media for marketing purposes is an invaluable resource, and one that could easily give you a major competitive advantage. But where to start? The social media world is large and ever-expanding, and the time drain from sifting through endless amounts of useless data is indeed daunting. Do not fear! I am going to let you in on a couple of great resources for getting started.

First, Martin Waxman’s crash course on Lynda.com, Social Listening for Marketers (2017), is a great way to spend the next half hour of your life. Seriously, if you don’t have any idea of where to start, this is the perfect tutorial. Waxman breaks down his short course into easy-to-consume videos that will leave you with highly actionable information and a desire to know more.

Waxman’s course starts at the very beginning: what is social listening? He defines it as:

Business intelligence that uses research and monitoring of the media, influencers, customers, employees, and competitors.

(Waxman, 2017, Welcome: 0:25)

From there, the course is divided into the following sections:

Develop a Strategic Approach

Here, Waxman (2017) discusses the importance of recognizing your customers as your partners. This is an essential head-space to employ when utilizing social listening. Putting yourself on the same level as your customers can help you avoid defensiveness and open the door to meaningful insights about your business. You don’t want to scare off customers by seeming like a direct marketer. Instead, listen to what the online community is saying about you, and jump into the conversation when you find an opening. He says that you should always listen more than you talk. Social media is also a great place to listen and respond to customer complaints, which can boost your brand image. You can use social listening to learn more about your customers’ demo- and technographics (like we talked about last time!), and discover which channels they are most likely to use so you can effectively market your product to them.

How to Get Started

Did you know that over 90% of what happens online starts with a search (Waxman, 2017)? I just Googled it, it checks out. One of the fastest ways to find out what people are saying about you is to use what Waxman refers to as a ‘long-tail’ search. You can do this by typing your company into the Google search bar, and seeing what results pop up in the autosuggestions. The most important thing I learned from this video is that clearing the cache before searching will give you better insight into what other people will see when they search the same thing. This is because Google (evil geniuses that they are) constantly keeps track of what your past searches were for and translates that information into tailored search results that they believe will be most useful to you. One way around this is to use a site like duckduckgo.com.

Once you know what people are saying about you, you can set up alerts for keywords relating to your company. Sites such as google.com/alerts and talkwalker.com/alerts can help you with this part. Or, you can use hootsuite.com to manage keyword tracking across multiple platforms.

Social Listening in Action

The key thing about social listening is that it’s virtually (pun intended) free research. Waxman (2017) says you can use social listening to find out how your competitors interact with their customers. For instance, if one of your major competitors responds to customers’ questions and complaints quickly, you can create a competitive strategy based on this information. He sites WestJet and Hilton Hotels as good examples of companies who effectively utilize social listening. And of course, social listening enables you to stay on top of potential social media crises, ideally stopping them before they start.

Next up on the social listening learning agenda, let’s take a look at Groundswell (Li & Bernoff, 2011) chapter 5. This chapter provides real life case studies about how companies used social listening to pivot their marketing strategies to better reach consumers. Two strategies the authors propose are building an online community to provide real-world insights, and monitoring your brand (which ties in nicely with Waxman’s course).

Li and Bernoff (2011) say the top six reasons you should be using social listening are:

• Find out what your brand stands for
• Understand how buzz is shifting
• Save research money; increase research responsiveness
• Find the sources of influence in your market
• Manage PR crises
• Generate new product and marketing ideas (Li & Bernoff, 2011)

My favourite takeaway from this chapter is what the authors refer to as “the no-more-being-stupid factor” (Li & Bernoff, 2011, p. 97). The idea behind this is that every company (no matter how well they may think they are doing) engages in stupid ideas, policies, or interactions, and that the online community has undoubtedly already called these out. If your customers (re: partners) have given you endless feedback that something needs to be tweaked, it’s not in your best interest to continue doing what you’re doing for the sake of doing it.

Let’s take a quick look at BlackBerry for an example. When faced with fierce competition from companies such as Apple and Samsung, BlackBerry blindly stuck with their current product offering, because that’s what they knew. If you are not willing to change direction in response to what your customers are repeatedly asking you for, there’s a good chance you’ll soon be obsolete. Why? Because companies like Apple have already figured out that listening and iterating is the only thing that keeps them current, and in turn, profitable. Don’t be like BlackBerry, choose to listen to your social-savvy partners, your customers.

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References:

Waxman, M. (2017). Social listening for marketers. Lynda [tutorial video]. Retrieved from https://www.lynda.com/HootSuite-tutorials/Social-Listening-Marketers/546104-2.html.

Li, C., & Bernoff, J. (2011). Groundswell: Winning in a world transformed by social technologies. Boston, MA: Harvard Business School Publishing.