fbpx
Flat Preloader Icon
Social listening

3 Steps for a Perfect Social Listening Strategy

What really moves your customers? If you want to understand your customers and social media, you have to listen. Numerous conversations about your brand take place not only in social networks, but also on forums and blogs. Analyze these conversations with social listening and derive better business decisions. We show how to do it.

Listening is all about your audience and customer!

Listening gives us an insight into what our customers do every day, what their motivations and challenges are. Social listening opens up completely new possibilities and lets us influence their everyday lives. Social listening is about checking where and how your brand, products, competitors, and all other terms and topics relevant to your business are mentioned. 

With the right listening strategy, you can position your company as a competitive, holistic and data-driven company. Imagine the valuable business insights you can draw from this – not only for the marketing team but also for sales.

That is how it goes: 

Step 1: Identify Company-Wide Goals

It’s time to look beyond the marketing edge and work with other departments. Ask around in other areas. Conduct interviews with the company’s sales and customer success directors and product managers. They all have different focuses. If you consult with the individual departments and concentrate on their challenges, you can formulate specific goals. Here are some examples: 

  • Sales : competitive analysis, lead generation, building ideal customer personnel, getting to know sales funnels
  • Product research and development : market research, getting feedback on products, finding inspiration for new products
  • Customer service and support : improve customer service, personalize customer service, identify issues quickly to mitigate impact
  • PR and Marketing : Find influencers to work with, uncover looming crises, reputation management
  • Recruiting and HR : learn how people look for jobs, find top talent, improve employee experience

“Social listening has developed into an established branch of research, particularly in the field of market research and competitive analysis. For many companies this is still an undiscovered area, but we can really recommend it ”

Social listening in market research and competitive analysis

Instead of elaborately organized opinion polls with subsequent analyzes, social listening enables a more cost-effective alternative that can be easily implemented online. In addition, the numerous networks, forums and blogs can be used to find precisely the social media data that lead to better business decisions. 

The crucial point is to sort and evaluate the mass of unstructured data and generate meaningful insights from it. With the help of the social listening tools, certain keywords, authors or hashtags can be filtered. They show how much data there is on this. Next, the data must be structured in dashboards. Find out more about where people post most, which authors are most active on the topic, or the time of day when your company is mentioned most often. By determining the dates and time periods, patterns can be derived – for example whether the mentions are positive or neutral, how your products are received by the target group or what they think about your brand. With this know-how you can derive further measures for your future campaigns. 

Also look left and right, what are other companies doing in your industry? With the right tools, you can get insights into the activities, strategies and future issues of your competitors. The areas of market research and marketing are growing closer together overall. With a better understanding of what to look for, the social media team can also improve their responsiveness and act more strategically and agile in everyday life.

Step 2: Identify the Listening tool and Topics

Once you understand why you are listening, focus on how you are going to listen and what specific insights will help you achieve your goals. It is almost impossible to collect and aggregate all the data manually. It is therefore important to choose a listening tool that reaches the deepest corners of the social environment, produces actionable data, measures sentiment and can be easily integrated into your business strategy. 

Creating strong topics depends on the platforms, hashtags, keywords, and phrases you include or exclude. Note: not all social platforms are created equal. Choose the priority networks based on your different business goals and the most active target audience. Be specific with your keywords to get focused results.

Most tools provide insight into performance, conversations, and demographics. They display news statistics and more traditional KPIs like volume, potential impressions, and total exposures. Conversations, keywords and hashtags that are often mentioned with your topic can also be found in it. With the help of demographic data, you will gain a better understanding of who is participating in conversations about your topic. Profile names, user devices, geographic location and more are collected here.

Step 3: Create Reporting and Adjust Goals

In order to make optimal use of current trends and data, the social team should regularly review the topics. Reporting also helps other departments. This is where the art of social strategy and the art of data analysis come together. It is not enough to just throw numbers. Value the knowledge. For presentations, for example, the data can be packaged as visually appealing graphics. 

Once the listening strategy is activated, you may need to reevaluate the original goals, investigate additional social networks, or add more keywords to the topics. Stay flexible, continue to work with the larger “listening team” and refine the approach for optimal social listening success.


How do consumers talk about my brand? Does the campaign that was run on Facebook work? With Hitcaliber Social Media Services, we make customer opinions transparent and evaluate opinions and trending topics. Contact us . 

Leave a Comment

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *