While many companies are now seeing the social light and jumping on
board with Twitter, Facebook et al, there’s still a temptation to set up
your account and start pumping out updates straight away.
While there is a need for some of this as you grow an initial audience, the thing that will really make a social media presence successful is your ability to listen and take on board what people are saying about your brand.
In order to do this properly you’ll need to set aside time for detailed monitoring. Unfortunately one of social media’s biggest bonuses is immediacy, something which can make knowing how and what to monitor confusing.
There’s an awful lot of electronic chatter out there so how do you listen?
In social media your core tasks are building lasting relationships with your customer base and creating positive sentiment around your brand.
In order to accomplish this you need to seek out opportunities for non-intrusive engagement. There are several ways to do this, but the most important is to set up a listening process and note down any mentions of your product or brand.
You’ll also want to take notes about main competitors and some general industry news that you feel you can help with. While this may seem obvious, finding the right conversations can be a challenge, not least because the information you need will be vastly different from business to business.
Each industry and brand has a separate networked community so the most obvious thing is to listen to everything. Unfortunately it’s also hugely impractical. Instead, you need to focus in on core types of conversation.
Check across different social networks, blogs and forums in order to locate your existing and potential customers, and run regular Twitter searches and set up a dedicated column for mentions in Tweetdeck or Hootsuite (if you don’t have either of these go sign up now!).
What should you listen for?
Remember, we’re listening for the opportunity to engage, which means checking negative sentiment as well as positive. If someone has a problem with you or your product, then here’s your chance to help them out, if they like you then take time to thank them.
With this in mind you can divide your listening into two general funnels:
A: Your business and competition.
This funnel should include but not be limited to:
- Questions. Answer them whenever possible.
- Positive comments. Take time to say thank you.
- Problems. Ask them to tell you more, and be publically seen to be working to solve customers' queries.
- Recommendations and retweets. Check your analytics regularly and note which networks are providing a lot of traffic to your site. Make sure you’re active on all of them regularly.
- Related chatter. Regularly search for things like abbreviations, products, as well as key members of staff.
B: Your Industry
Listening to the industry buzz as a whole is a slightly different enterprise, you may actually find it easier to keep up with if you use a combination of formal and informal processes on this one.
Follow industry leaders, major companies and trusted sources of information; the Financial Times or BBC News for example. Their updates are invaluable if you want to keep up to date on industry news so it’s important to run mention searches for these but for immediacy I’d suggest using a service like Twitter organically.
Leave your tweet stream open and dip in periodically throughout the day. This will allow you instant acces to information, and allow you to engage in real time with the industry as a whole.
It’s always worth retweeting an interesting news story you think would interest your customers. Again, set up funnel searches.
For broader industry monitoring you should look out for:
- Open Keywords. All-encompassing industry terms. If you are in business management you might want to look for MBA or HR for example.
- Closed keywords. These should be service/product specific. ‘plumber’ or ‘iPad’.
- Industry leaders. Always useful to know what Steve Jobs or Richard Branson thinks, so follow them and their newsdesks.
- Generic terms. What does the man in the street call your product? If you’re a tool manufacturer search for ‘Screwdriver’ as well as ‘AXC44200 Protwist Phillips’.
If you aren’t listening properly then you’re missing out on the full potential of social media.
When initiating your campaign, set up listening stations and searches first and spend at least a week assimilating all the chatter. When you launch fully you’ll be far better equipped to engage with your customers and provide industry value.
Finally, remember that every conversation has value and the possibility of lead generation, so be proactive and friendly in engagement
Learn more...
Econsultancy's Social Media and Online PR Report examines how companies are using online PR tactics and social media sites such as Twitter for marketing and customer service. Econsultancy has also published Social Media and Online PR Template Files, which you can adapt and use for your own projects. For innovation in this space, download our Innovation Report.
Posted 20 July 2010 09:08am by Matt Owen with 4 comments
Tags: twitter, Facebook, engagement
Topics: Lead Generation, Online Customer Service, Online PR & Social Media, Social Networks & Online Communities, User Experience & Usability
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Graham Charlton
Strategy & Planning
8:43AM on 21st July 2010
Here's some more tips for using Twitter.
If you have opened a Twitter account, posted a few comments, but not done much else and are now wondering how you can possibly get it to work for you, read on. When you first start out using Twitter, it may feel like you are talking to yourself. You may feel that you have nothing interesting to say. And finding time to tweet may seem like a bit of a chore. As a result, you’re account has probably ended up was a number of random tweets, covering a variety of subjects areas, posted on an adhoc basis. So in order to get your account back on track, here is what you need to do.
1. Clean up the content
The first thing you need to do is clean up your content. Your tweets need to be relevant to your industry and the product/services you provide. Influential followers aren’t interested that John or Ann won employer of the month or what you did at the weekend. They are interested in news/opinions about the industry and product or service news. But don’t go down the route of trying to sell. People will follow you because you tweet information that is useful/interesting to them.
2. Build a following
Once you’ve cleaned up your content, then you need to build a following.
· TwitterGrader http://twitter.grader.com/ - lets you check how influential you are and lets you enter keywords related to your industry and find the most influential Twitter users that match that search term. Then follow them and engage with them by commenting on discussions.
· Use the search function on Twitter & search for your brand and terms associated with your industry/service etc. Again try to engage in conversation.
3. Things to tweet about
· How to articles
· Analysis of current industry trends or challenges – you probably need to subscribe to some trade press, online news sites etc.
· Announcements of upcoming events and comments on events – this is easy if you organise or attend industry events, since you can organise interviews or question industry leaders on particular subject areas. However if you haven’t the time or budget to attend then follow the events on their website. Quite often event organisers will post interviews/speeches by key speakers after the event.
· Feedback on articles we have read in print publications etc.
· Retweets. If you read tweet which someone else has wrote which you thing would be interesting to your followers you can retweet it. Do this in moderation though.
· List of links to 5 or 10 other relevant articles you’ve recently read or videos you’ve watched.
· Build on another bloggers work by adding to the discussion with your own insight or disagree with another blogger – then link to your Twitter account.
· If you have a blog, diversify your blog posts by adding videos – either embed links to your YouTube videos or break out your video camera and record yourself talking about a hot industry topic (2-3 mins max) – then link to your Twitter account.
· Find someone to create cartoons or caricatures of things happening in your industry. This also makes your blog more interesting and again can be linked to your Twitter account.
· Invite local professors/tutors interested in your industry to submit contents to your blog. They may be happy to do this for you as being a Guest Author will raises their profile. If they are too busy, then send interview questions via email, and then paste their responses into your article and link to your Twitter account.
By following these simple steps, you will not only raise your profile but you will also educate yourself on a kind of self-discovery journey.
Good luck!
Robin
Market Development at Socialware SL
9:38AM on 21st July 2010
Another interesting post, Matt, especially your advice to track questions, positive comments, problems etc. If a brand/product/service has considerable online traction, then a constant feed of unfiltered references from Twitter and/or other social media is going to turn the community manager's job in "herding cats". Identifying the labels you mentioned is key to effectively managing and responding to comments. In fact, you can take it a step further and look at alternative uses, misinformation (inaccurate rumours), emerging pressure groups, adverse effects, suggestions, wish lists. In that way, the appropriate people in the organisation can respond to the problems, clarify positions and even assimilate potential improvements. Another key element is to consider who is expressing the opinion in terms of: current, former, potential, competitor customer, opinion leader ("influencer" and/or journalist), employee etc. Again, each of these opinion holders have their particular concerns that need to be addressed. Fundamental to this is setting up the resources, processes and mind sets for engaging with stakeholder voices. In many cases, this unfortunately appears to be a secondary consideration to the shiny tools and dashboards (free or otherwise).
2:54PM on 23rd July 2010
Excellet content and advice... I'll get sharing this with my followers.
4:49AM on 26th July 2010
Good post - it's important to engage and to listen