What is Social Listening and how to dabble into Social Media Measurement
People are talking about your product on social media. Here is how to listen (and why you should care).
What many small businesses and medium-sized companies have in common
When I started working with early-stage entrepreneurs seven years ago, I would ask a lot of questions:
“How do you think your product is different from the competition?”. “Why do you choose to do this one thing over the other?”. “How are you planning to delight your users?”.
I could tell many of them thought this was none of my business. I was –just– the Graphic Designer, after all. But to me, internalizing the nuances of their product was essential to convey their message through their logo, packaging, or catalog.
However, their answers never were: “Because we did an exhaustive research and this is what our customers are craving for.”
Now that I’ve worked as a Product Manager for a few years –and especially after doing allWomen’s Product Management course –, I know the importance of user discovery to solve real-life problems and reduce business risk.
But the truth is many businesses frequently make strategic decisions based solely on thin air and expect to succeed. But more often than not –oh, surprise– their products fail.
As Product Managers, our goal is to understand customers’ needs and discover opportunities to build meaningful and valuable products. And it’s all about gathering the right data, having your eyes and ears open to what is happening out there.
You might say: “Sure, but we don’t have a Data Scientist in our team. My hands are tied”. Well, I also thought I could only conduct user research at a high level on my own. So when I attended allWomen’s workshop about Social Listening with Dovidena del Campo, a new world unraveled in front of me.
What is Social Listening and what is it for?
Dovidena is Head of Digital & Social Media at Weber Shandwick, where she consults on Social Media Strategy, Influencer Marketing, Online Advertising, SEO, Digital Content, and, of course, Social Listening. She explained that:
Social Listening, in a nutshell, is to monitor the millions of conversations happening online and narrow them down to the messages that are relevant to our brand, to find trends, gauge the impact of a campaign, or identify potential crises.
The goal is to discover what people are saying about a given topic on social media to spot opportunities and adjust to new situations quickly and successfully.
Why monitoring?
- To identify and follow up communication crises.
- To find trends and hot topics.
- To gauge the impact of a campaign.
- To pinpoint key users and influencers.
- To join the conversation.
What to monitor?
- Your brand. What people are saying about it, and how they are naming it. Example: Porsche, Porshe, or Porche...
- Your products. How are your customers using them? What‘s their opinion?
- Your competition. What are they doing and how is it working for them?
- Your current and past campaigns.
- Relevant directors (e.g.: Ana Botin from Grupo Santander).
- Issues and potential crises (e.g.: strikes, boycotts…).
How to monitor?
Here comes the tricky part. With such a high volume of interactions happening in so many channels, it’s easy to miss out. So here is Dovidena’s guide for Social Listening, to get rid of the noise and focus on the conversations that really matter to our brand.
- Establish keywords: What do you want to look for, and how are these keywords linked to your objectives? Remember to take misspellings and other forms into account.
Example: Burger King, Burguer King, BK. - Narrow down the results: This is key to not missing out on anything.
Example: To find conversations about Douglas, the perfumery chain, we must remove the results about Kirk and Michael. - Turn keywords into Queries: Queries are specific searches formatted in a way that search engines understand. When you mix Queries and Search Operators together, you create unique recipes that show precise results.
Search Operators: the formula to clear-cut results.
I’ve been hearing about queries and search operators ever since I started in Product Management, always in the context of MySQL and naively thinking this was way too much for me to bear. But thanks to Dovidena, I learned I had been using them since college.
- Quotation marks (“xxxx”): Show results of two or more keywords together in a specific order.
Example: “Palm oil” - OR (xxxx OR xxxx): Shows results containing one keyword or the other.
Example: Porsche OR Porshe - AND (xxxx AND xxxx): Shows results containing all the keywords, with no specific order.
Example: “Douglas AND perfumery”. - Minus sign (xxxx -xxxx): Shows results containing one keyword whilst excluding the results that contain the keyword with the minus sign.
Example: Douglas -Kirk -Michael
To make more specific searches, you will have to use parenthesis in your queries. According to Dovidena: “Parentheses work the same as in math, to create groups of keywords and other operators within.”
Here’s an example:
To find conversations about the union strikes at Coca Cola plants, this is a possible query:
(“Coca Cola” OR Cocacola) AND (boycott OR strike OR strikes OR union OR unions) AND (plant OR factory)
Tools that make Social Listening easier
The good news is many free or freemium tools offer advanced search options or visualization dashboards.
The first one is Twitter, where you can select different search criteria, and the tool creates the proper query automatically.
Google alerts
The second one is Google Alerts, which creates email alerts for the queries you save and makes it easier to stay in the loop.
Talkwalker
Talkwalker is a freemium tool that allows you to create and save queries to visualize results in dashboards in real-time. You can also filter by keyword performance, trends, demographics, or sentiment and export reports to spreadsheets or PDF.
These kinds of tools make it possible to keep posted about what customers are saying about our brand, our industry, or our campaign. That way, we can be deliberate about the strategic decisions we make in terms of Product, Community, or Marketing.
Stay in the know to deliver outcomes, not just outputs
Social Listening is a method to dabble into data, user research, and social media measurement when you have little knowledge and zero budget.
When you dig deep into your target market and understand what success looks like, you begin to create user-centric products, and your needles move in the right direction… and outcomes are way more persuasive than outputs.
Craving for more?
If you want to get more insights from Dovidena del Campo’s talk with allWomen about Social Listening, watch the whole conversation here (in Spanish).
