Social listening 101
Social listening, the process of listening to online conversations to monitor possible or potential trends, is one of the most important tools a digital marketing professional should possess.
It’s applicable to all stages of a marketing campaign and serves to measure both positive and negative effects of online conversations.
“Social listening can help with message amplification (positive) and crisis-effect mitigation efforts (negative),” says Jason Cruz, Social Products Director for MRM/McCann, during the recent lecture on Social Media 102 for the Certified Digital Marketer (CDM) Program.
“If done right, it has the power to detect a potential PR crisis, even before it happens,” adds Cruz.
Cruz says there are three aspects of social listening: mining, monitoring and measuring.
Mining is simply the act of actively searching for specific keywords and phrases online, for instance, iPhone 6.
Monitoring is actively watching online conversations, based on pre-determined keywords and phrases, to spot possible trends. Social monitoring scales up in accordance with the data—for instance, the frequency of a keyword’s appearance in online conversations, dictate certain action points.
Measuring is calculating for conversation statistics to predict the possible impact of the online conversations being monitored.
SocialMediaExaminer.com identifies some of the more popular metrics below.
Reach is the number of fans, followers, blog subscribers and other statistics to gauge the size of your community.
Engagement is measure of retweets, comments, average time on site, bounce rate, clicks, video views, etc.
Competitive data is the share of voice of your competing brand.
Sentiment is the number of mentions of your brand or keywords with positive or negative sentiment.
Sales conversion is the measure of social media referral traffic to the top of the sales funnel.
When you know how to practice social listening, you learn to put the most valuable brand asset first, your customers.
Join the Social Media Marketing Specialist Track of the Certified Digital Marketer Program.
Visit imadigitalmarketer.com or call 927-0096, 0928-506-5382. advt
