Ten Do’s & Don’ts for Social Media Listening

Do people love your brand as much as you think they do? If you are not afraid of the answer and have thick skin, then social listening is for you. Social listening uses specialized software to scrape and search social media content for specific conversations, sentiments, and trends. Social media listening will show the true gap between your brand equity and image.

I’ve been doing some form or another of social listening for eight years, and I have used Social Bakers, NetBase, Meltwater, Union Metrics, Sprinklr, Hootsuite, and most recently, Talkwalker. They all share similar ways of pulling conversations from social media platforms. The Twitter and Instagram of the world decide how much they are willing to share with social listening tools. They regulate this exchange via application programming interfaces (APIs). Without further ado, here’s the list:

Don’ts

1. Expect that catch everything: APIs can limit how much you see. You will not catch every single brand mention. More than likely, you will catch most of it, but there will 
2. Go on Rabbit Holes: The richness, availability, and depth of the data are alluring to marketers but don’t lose sight of your core metrics and conversation. 
3. Expect loving consumers: As I prefaced this article, you need thick skin to handle this work. Consumers (especially on Twitter) are hyper-vocal and will prefer cursing you. I often come across conversations and content that I prefer not to have seen in the first place, and on one occasion while working for a reality show, I had to request police to investigate threats against a cast member. 
4. Expect lots of activity: Some brands can often come out underwhelmed by what they find in social media listening. I wish I could tell some of them, “hey, you’re just not that interesting.” 
5. Ignore the Analytics: Most listening tools include analytics reporting capabilities. Talkwalker has the Channel Analytics tool, which takes a deep dive into social media metrics as long as you provide them with your login. Once you establish that connection (via API as well), you will be able to gather richer data from your platforms.

Do’s

1. Learn Boolean Operators: This is a technique for writing specific and purposeful search queries. Many social listening platforms use this type of query and depending on how its configured can mean a world of difference in the quality of the results.
2. Know Your Conversation Influencers: Social listening platforms will reveal who is your brand’s biggest allies and detractors. Know them, study them, and learn why they love/hate your brand.
3. Dedicate Resources: At Florida International University, we have on dedicated social media analyst. Her task is to monitor and listen to social media and other sources. Even though many of these social listening tools can automate alerts, nothing beats a pair of eyes on the data. Our leadership team receives twice-daily reports on important conversations in which the university is involved.
4. Monitor Competitors: Social listening makes it easy to track competitors and know how their audiences are engaging (or not). If your competitor is similar, you may consider their audience’s engagements as early qualitative research.
5. Except For More Tweets: Twitter is the most open API of all the social media channels. For this reason, you will find more tweets than anything else. You might want to reconsider how you listen to social media if you know your audience is not active on Twitter,
6. BONUS – Read about my Favorite Talkwalker Tools For Brands.

Strategize Listening For Success

Over time, shrewd social media listeners develop a deep knowledge of their social media community. This person will be able to anticipate brand messaging reactions and audience expectations and know when best to post content. Know what your goal in social media listening is and strategize around it. Monitor competitors, detractors, news outlets, whatever your goal is, make a strategy around it and avoid rabbit holes. Good luck!