The Art of Social Listening for Business Intelligence. What can you do with social media if you are a B2B business? Does it differ if you are a B2C business? My response is that it really depends on what your most important goal or objective is right now. Contributing to your top business objectives is my advice rather than following a general reference book approach.
Influencers can multiply the reach of your content, making it easier to achieve your objective. There might also be detractors talking against you, or a new industry change that could be a hindrance or a blessing. How do you find answers to all these questions? My suggestion is to use social listening. Once you are good at it, and use it every week, you will progress to painting insightful views of information in close to real time that will provide valuable and actionable business intelligence for your brand.
Translate Your Business Strategy Into Social Media Objectives
This is the start of aligning your social media objectives, so that your social media tactics, deployment and evaluation have significance to the organization. Aligning with your business strategy will make it blindingly obvious what the metrics should be. Avoid always using easy to measure metrics that have nothing to do with your business strategy.
Thought leadership can measure the influence a brand has on it’s industry. Share of voice is a great way to chart that progress, which leads to word of mouth mentions more often, and at the right time, and at the right place. Content marketing is my suggestion for a foundation to establish thought leadership using social media. Social listening will chart your progress.
Aligning with your business strategy will make it blindingly obvious what the metrics should be.
Understand Your Target Audience
Social listening can help to map out many key characteristics of your target audience. Mix existing data, offline and online, with social listening insights to fuel your customer decision journey maps.
Analysis of the social listening sentiment curves can lead to greater understanding of the customer needs, aspirations, delights and concerns.
Key for creating relevant content is an understanding of the trending topics for your target audience.
In this example I am looking at the trending topics around waste food. I decided to deep dive into the “food scraps” topic and now I can see the conversations in that area like landfill and compost etc. Each word or phrase can be investigated further for insights into what content will resonate with influencers or key parties around food waste.
Discover Industry Influencers
Influencers are present and active on any and all topics. They thrive on content. The very best influencers can multiply your normal post reach by a factor 5-10 at no extra cost to you. Imagine the equivalent advertising cost to obtain the same reach? As a result, I have learnt that not all influencers are a good fit for a given brand, even when they active in the same verticals as you.
Don’t get confused with prolific users. In other words they post frequently but are not necessarily influential. Influencers are the catalyst to make other users engage, share, comment, and even create more. Therefore knowing the latest key issues for your influencers is a prerequisite to creating content that they will love to share and amplify on. Social listening can solve this task.
Visual Storytelling using Social Media Data
Why should you seek to acquire the art of social listening and then not use it to prepare imagery. Consider using visuals of trends and insights displayed on large HD canvasses in front of your key internal audience or stakeholders.
Within the social listening management tools is where all the data resides. I use Sprinklr and have used many others in the past. Start small and build up your expertise. It is not that important what you use, but key what you do with the insights. Connect your data to large screens and select from a wide range of visualizations. Command Centers can be very effective. Learn how to get started here and how to take them to the next level here.
Now everyone can see the alignment to your business strategy, and track in near real time, how social media marketing is contributing to the success of your brand.
Moving Forward..
- What is the role of social media in your digital transformation?
- What data will you combine with social media in your visualizations? CRM, web analytics, and eCommerce data are just a few to mention.
- Lastly, what are you going to do now in your organization with the Art of Social Listening for Business Intelligence?
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