Signs you need help with Social Listening

How many hats can one person wear? A company that doesn’t devote the resources to social listening is missing out on delivering what potential clients want most. That’s where social listening services come in.

Is your company experiencing any of the following five signs? If so, it might be time to hire some help.

#1: You’re Not Creating Content Your Audience Craves

Your company runs a blog and shares posts on social media, and that’s a great start. But if you’re just creating the content you imagine your audience wants to read, you’re missing out. Having a content marketing strategy is no longer enough.

Readers want to connect with your content. They want you to tell a story. More important – they want it to be a story they care about.

How do you find out what your audience cares about, what content they crave? According to Social Media Examiner, 68% of marketers look to social media activities.

In other words, they’re engaging in social media listening.

They’re taking the time to find out what topics are trending among their audience. They’re paying attention to people who post hashtags about those topics. They’re keying in on what their competitors’ audiences are craving.

Almost 30% of people who spend at least 3 hours each day on social media place a high value on engaging with their favorite brands, according to Search Engine Journal.

In order to maximize on your content strategy ROI, your company needs to listen to what your audience wants, and then create content to fill that need, to tell that story. A good rule of thumb is: The more others are interested in your stories, the more value they have.

#2: You Don’t Know Your Overall Brand Health

How often do you go to the doctor for a checkup? Probably once a year so that you can get a picture of your body’s overall health.

Just like you need to know if your cholesterol is too high, your company needs to know your brand’s overall health, and that involves more than just watching the places you post.

Did you know that 96% of people posting about brands don’t follow the brands they’re talking about? This is according to a 2015 study performed by Brandwatch.

Social Monitoring

Brand health is where many social media marketers and analysts confuse social listening with social monitoring. Social media monitors:

Track how many times your brand is mentioned.
Alert you when your brand is mentioned or contacted.
Allow you to respond to mentions on social media.
Comprise one part of a digital reputation management team.

Social monitoring is a great place to start, but that on its own can be time-consuming depending on your brand reach, the number of social profiles you have, other sources you choose to monitor such as forums and blogs, and the size of your audience.

What social monitoring can’t do is provide a bird’s-eye view of your brand’s health.

Social monitoring is like getting a cholesterol test – receiving the numbers, and perhaps going on a restricted diet if they’re too high.

Social Listening

Social listening is like getting a full physical and finding out that you’ll also need medication as part of your treatment strategy. “Strategy” is an important word here.

Social listening can also help you recognize trends so that you can benchmark your brand’s health. After all, how can you see if your health needs a boost when you don’t know what your “normal” is?

A free social listening snapshot can show you how people feel about your brand right now.

#3: You Don’t Analyze Data to Take Strategic Action

This is related to the point above, but it’s important to understand that taking action means a company-wide effort. Social media strategies don’t exist in a bubble; they can impact every department and every stakeholder in your company.

For example, if your PR department has a news release coming out, you’ll want to put that content in front of your audience. Data gathered via social listening services can help you determine when and how to push that content.

When data is analyzed, reports should be tailored to specific stakeholders. The CFO might be interested in different KPIs than the IT department.

Brainstorm with each stakeholder to determine how to fit social media into relevant strategies and take action to implement those strategies. This is where it’s crucial to realize that social listening services are about more than just observing.

It’s about analyzing. Reporting. Brainstorming. Implementing.

If your company doesn’t have the time and expertise to cover this ground, it’s time to hire some help.

#4: You’re Running Out of Ideas for Marketing Campaigns

In August 2017, there were over 3 billion people using social media worldwide, according to We Are Social.

That’s 3 billion people pumping out ideas, hashtagging the topics they care about, following the brands they want to support, and talking about their pain points.

It’s the perfect source for marketing campaign fodder.

You could run a focus group or conduct a survey, and those can both be effective. But the benefit of social listening services is that those conversations happen organically, without prompting. There’s a difference between someone tweeting a question they have about using a product in your industry and someone sitting them down and asking them to come up with a question.

Organic genesis of ideas that feed your marketing campaigns can help you connect with brand heroes, or advocates, as well as consumers and clients.

#5: You Think Social Media Listening Can Be Done in Spare Time

Internet Live Stats reports that there are over 500 million tweets posted to Twitter each day.

That’s just on Twitter, not every social media outlet. It doesn’t include forums and blogs, either. Do you have the spare time to view even one-tenth of that information, analyze it, report on it, strategize, and implement?

Even with social media moderators, that would be too much work to complete in a standard 40-hour work week. A company that expects its social media manager or specialists to handle every aspect of social media posting while acting as social media moderators and listeners will not enjoy the maximum ROI social media has to offer.

Final Thoughts

When you make the most out of your social media strategy, you can see an increase in ROI across multiple departments, for multiple stakeholders. But this powerful avenue requires the time and expertise to realize that benefit. Contact us for more information on social listening services to embark on your journey towards realizing the benefits of social listening to achieve social media success.