Tips & Tricks 10 tips to rock social media listening February 24, 20143 minutes Takin Kroop We had a chat with Geir, our Chief Innovation Officer, today about social media listening. Being aware of what people talk about regarding your brand and industry should be an extremely important part of a brand’s social media strategy. We asked Geir to share 10 tips to make you all rock social media listening. Plan ahead (Have to start off with a boring one. Sorry. Will get better) When listening, you should have some historical data to measure the variations over time. That’s why you need to know which words and phrases to listen to. Plan new campaigns / keywords at least a month in advance. Don’t be too specific in the beginning Make your first search strings pretty wide. In other words, make sure your searches rather generates too many hits than too few. ..then narrow it down Based on the hits you get in your first search, spot the trends and do some testing on how to narrow it down. Use the Exclude feature Most social media listening tools have an Exclude feature. It’s there for a very good reason. Use it to optimize your search strings. Create strategic searches groups When setting up your search, create strategic groups based on what the listening will be used for. I prefer these groups: – All your company names and brands (Like Nike) – What you do or sell. (Shoes, jackets, socks etc) – Actions when talking about your product (Buy shoes, running, working out etc) – Competitors (Puma, Adidas etc) – Potential stories (Fat, Hate my body, Love my body, nice looking instructor, etc) Measure trends, not totals Social media listening is mainly based on key words. If you brand name is words like Chess, Selected, Puma or similar, you may get tons of hits that are not related to you. So…look carefully for trends and don’t compare blindly. Create stories based on related words Looking for inspiration on which stories to create and start spreading? A well-structured social media listening will tell you. Simply look into what other words people currently are talking about when your key words are mentioned. Use for Facebook posts, press releases and even plan campaigns if you spot major trends. Find your key influencers This one should be pretty obvius. Find the ones who have the highest influence on your most important searches. It may not be the ones who talk the most, but the ones who start the most buzz. …and fanboost them! Then…suprise them. Ship them something awesome. Make them go crazy-happy without thinking about neither yourself nor your brand. Just be nice to your key influencers. Keep in mind when taking bigger business decisions (Make your boss understand) Present key metrics to your boss. Keep it stupid-simple and in graphs. Don’t worry about not adding all the details. Just make your boss understand the major trends. The goal is to make the boss add data from social media listening as background for business decisions. But you can’t tell him to do it, you have to make him want to himself. That’s Geir’s 10 tips. If you’ve got any tips please add them in the comments. If you want to learn more about social media listening feel free to contact us.