The importance of social listening for your social media strategy

Social listening can be the enhancement to your social media strategy that you didn’t know you needed. If you need a brief overview, or even a refresher, on social listening I’d refer you to this blog that explains social listening.

Where this blog will differ however, is guiding you on how to enhance your social media strategy through leveraging the power of a tool such as Brandwatch. Whether it’s validating your social media strategy, or using conversation to guide your content, there are several key benefits to incorporating social listening into your strategy evaluation:

Validating your strategy

Search any blog that details measuring social media success and the usual suspects (metrics) will prop up the list; awareness, engagement, follower growth, website traffic, conversions etc.

This handy Sprout blog analyses all of the above before we get to the metrics that social listening would deliver (brand mentions, share of voice, sentiment) and personal bias would argue they’ve got it wrong – brand mentions & share of voice should just as prominently feature alongside awareness metrics, while sentiment would sit just as importantly within the engagement metrics as comments. 

My personal favourite means of incorporating data from social listening into regular reporting is tracking month on month brand conversation. At an awareness level – shameless plug of a blog I wrote back in 2019 that examines social listening through each stage of the sales funnel – we have the typical metrics you’d associate from social; impressions and reach. While I won’t dispute these at all, smaller brands or brands looking to enter new markets should also be utilising social listening to see if anyone within their target demographics is actually talking about them, and thus, aware of them.

Month on month tracking of your brand conversation, whether as a whole or from targeted demographics, is a great way to prove at a high level people are aware of you. However, the fun with social listening only begins with checking the volume of conversation each month.

Diving beyond the numbers

I could write a series of blogs on all the different data sources available from social listening that could inform a social media strategy. As with anything, the real detail comes from scratching well beyond the surface (and with tools like Brandwatch you can go way, way beyond the surface) and looking into what every mention of your brand means (we’ll get to other external conversations shortly).

Give a quick search of blogs looking for how you can use social listening to inform content and you’ll find plenty of examples of how this could look – Hubspot use a great analogy of a gym coming up with solutions to complaints about classes being filled up quickly. Even in reality, we have seen brands influence their marketing & social content based on social conversation.

Ask my colleague Ishbel the best part of Autumn and she’ll tell you it’s PSL season. For anyone unaware, that’s when Starbucks start selling their Pumpkin Spiced Latte range. While perhaps not something I’d personally mark on my own calendar, it’s clear Starbucks have been keeping an eye on their conversation and decided to appease their audience by bringing the range back each Autumn but also creating an annual content campaign around the launch to build on the audience anticipation and drive social engagement.

The above graph shows year-round conversation around Starbucks’ “PSL” release

While reporting on your own content is important in evaluating your social strategy, reporting on what exactly is being said about your brand is equally important in then being able to learn from and adapt your strategy and content to ensure you’re capturing exactly what resonates with your audiences. The next level to this is applying the same measurements to competitors.

One step ahead of competitors

In their complete social listening guide, Brandwatch frequently reference tying in competitor conversation to your social listening. Applicable in so many instances beyond social listening, keeping an eye on your competitors is generally a way to keep yourself ahead of the game as well.

As part of a regular reporting evaluation of your brand’s social media strategy, where the previous two section’s process would feature heavily, I’d recommend the final piece of the jigsaw: applying the same to competitors.

With regular reporting on competitor conversation, you can take a nosey into where their conversation is coming from and what is driving it. Falling back on the Starbucks example, has a competitor started offering PSL all year round but hasn’t advertised this? Social listening of the competitor could spot this being discussed on a Reddit Thread and all of a sudden Starbucks is doing the same but with orange branded content being promoted all year round.

One step further and you can see shifts in positive & negative conversation (sentiment) each month. What was the reason for an increase in negative conversation for your main competitor this month? Perhaps, on further inspection, the conversation around Starbucks’ competitor doing PSL all year round wasn’t being discussed positively. Discovering the negative sentiment towards the competitor around this, Starbucks decides this isn’t worth pursuing after all.

In the most simplistic summary, competitors seeing increases in positivity would provide something to emulate, while a competitor seeing an increase in negativity would provide something to avoid.

Changing Perceptions

Constant negative conversation is never fun. In some sectors, this is harder to escape, but it doesn’t mean you can’t try and rewrite this narrative.

Across the 2010’s, ScotRail used to be known prominently for constantly apologising for a train service that was viewed in the eyes of many as unreliable. The Courier ran an article that showed nearly 40% of their Tweets carried some sort of apology for a disrupted service.

What changed? A dedicated social media strategy of content aimed to drive positive engagement and a transparent customer service team tasked with increasing positivity towards the brand, particularly on Twitter (as it was then).

The change in sentiment towards Scotrail

From the above pie charts, we can see the vindication towards ScotRail’s social media approach with an increase in positive sentiment conversation (8% positive in 2022 v 10% positive in 2023) and decrease in negative conversation (27% in 2022 v 22% in 2023).

Summary

I hope this brief blog has at least opened the idea of your regular social media strategy reporting including social listening. This can range from proving high level awareness, through to keeping an eye on what is driving positivity for your competitors and applying this to your own content.