Knowing your objectives around the use of social listening is fundamentally critical to the scope of your project. As you are gathering consumer conversations online, you are meant to then funnel the insights back strategically for proper decision making. While social listening data can be as broad as you want it to be, you may still want to focus on a few key topics to make the most out of your investments. Understanding the environment on social will help you to hone in on the right discussions pertaining to your brand; on which interactions matter the most to your overall brand experience and perception.
Social listening could you used for a myriad number of solutions, from competitive intelligence, market research, to smoothing out the customer experience. The common goal in most social listening strategies is to formulate insights, whether it may be for:
- Product strategy
- Content marketing
- Customer service
- Event and stakeholder monitoring
- Crisis and brand reputation
- Sales enablement
- Lead generation
- Competitive intelligence
- Audience research
After you have outlined your strategy, the next step is likely to define the social media channels and web sources to monitor, ideally where the majority of your audience is.