Modern social media listening

Modern social media listening has improved a lot since I first used the early tools in 2009. AI now does more than tag sentiment. It interprets context, detects emerging themes, and links social media conversations to business impact.

Agentic AI takes it further by running workflows on its own: setting up smart queries, clustering topics, translating languages, spotting anomalies, and drafting insight summaries with suggested actions. This is amazing progress. Instead of combing dashboards for hours, social media experts now get prioritized alerts, competitive comparisons, and audience segments. It goes even further to point in the direction of prompts for content.

The Art of Social Listening

I love doing social listening so much that I often think of it as an art form. I am illustrating using insights to come up with ultimately “business Intelligence”. 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. Contribute 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. You can track major influencers, micro influencers, and also your employee contributions (via tracked employee advocacy tools). 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 more “word of mouth” mentions, 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. The rise of “micro-influencers” is a new opportunity. Read about what they are and how important they will be for your business.

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. Start small and build up your expertise. It is not that important what you use, but key what you do with the insights.

Reports can be scheduled to be sent to business stakeholders in a format they want. In addition, reports can be set up to be viewed via a special URL on desktop, tablet or mobile. Real time “data in your pocket” 24/7 with security to ensure it is not available to others.

Going one stage further is also possible, by connecting your data to large screens and selecting from a wide range of visualizations. Command centres 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..

The takeaway: Listening should generate actions, not just charts. If your selected social media listening tool isn’t using AI to automate discovery, enrich data, and trigger next steps across marketing, CX, and product, you’re lacking speed and maybe missing out on revenue successes.

Audit your queries and check if your tool is using AI in the workflows. See if it is capable of using agentic routines.

• 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?