A social media listening strategy sounds straight forward enough: Identify and analyze what’s being said about you on the internet. But what makes social listening so crucial is how it can impact every other part of your marketing plan. When you use real data and sentiments from customers on social, you can ground your entire marketing strategy in deep consumer and market insights. Listening first and engaging second should be key to your social media approach. 

10 ideas to start building a better social media listening and analytics plan.

1. Research where people are talking about you.

The first step in the social listening game plan is tuning your antenna to the right channels. You probably already know that Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn are smart places to start listening. But depending on your industry and customers, you may find that forums, Snapchat, Instagram, TripAdvisor, Yelp, or other sites are just as important.

2. Identify industry influencers.

When you first start listening, you may feel that no one’s talking about your brand and there’s not much to listen for. This can ring especially true for B2B brands. That means it’s time to identify the primary influencers in your space. You can bet that trusted influencers are out there creating great content for just about every topic under the sun. So find the influencers first and see what they’re talking about.

3. Listen for social selling opportunities.

Social selling doesn’t always mean conversion directly as a result of social. Usually, it’s about social media managers getting the assist from their sales teams. For example, someone might tweet that she’s thinking about buying a new BMW, and the local BMW dealership chimes in with a useful video. Look for these kinds of opportunities — and also times when someone may not be so happy with your #1 competitor. Social selling opportunities are everywhere once you start looking.

4. Keep an eye out for nondirect brand mentions.

People don’t always mention you by your correct brand name when talking about you. They may spell your name wrong, use an abbreviation, or simply talk about your industry without specifically calling you out. Put together a list of words people may use to describe you, your industry, and your competitors, and track conversation around those keywords across the social web.

5. Connect social to the broader business.

The highest-performing marketers integrate social media activity into other business functions. For example, 88% of high-performing marketers collaborate with their service department to respond to social inquiries and concerns — versus just 37% of underperformers. Social also helps your sales teams discover new leads and your community managers identify brand advocates.

6. Create categories to organize mentions.

Hopefully, as your social listening plan matures, you’ll start tracking many topics and keywords. You’ll likely find this information flows into your stream in one large, unstructured mass. By assigning categories and moving content (either manually or automatically) into categories, you’ll have a far easier time understanding and taking action on what people say about you. Keep your categories flexible to account for any changes that arise in your audience’s opinions.

7. Draft analytics reports to help shape future marketing endeavors.

Social media listening puts you in an enviable position: You’ll start sitting on a mountain of data. But more data doesn’t always create more action — you have to be intentional. So create consistent reports that cover:

• Sentiment analysis
• Total mentions
• Most active networks
• Pain points

To put it all into context for your fellow marketers, answer questions like “Are mentions going up or down over time?” and “Is positive sentiment increasing?” Doing this on a weekly, biweekly, or monthly basis will help shape current and future campaigns and the way you talk to your customers.

8. Be customer-focused, not channel-focused.

As all social media marketers know, channels change over time, but the importance of knowing individual customers stays the same. As you listen for questions and comments, focus on individual customers and how you can provide a consistent experience across social, web, email, and more. Instead of filing their thoughts away under keyword lists, get to know people as customers, not handles, connecting the dots on their relationship and history with the company.

9. Automate what you can, but keep the human element.

The social listening process may be overwhelming, depending on the size of your company. Social listening tools help by automatically tagging keywords and assigning mentions to employees. These automation steps improve efficiency and allow you to spend more time engaging with people. But you can’t leave it all to computers. Figure out what automation techniques work for you and allocate human resources where it makes the most sense. You’ll be more productive and your employees will be happier doing work that can’t be done by a robot.

10. Draw meaningful conclusions about your customers from sentiment analysis.

Sentiment analysis refers to how you measure consumers’ attitudes toward your brand. Sentiment analysis technology today is highly sophisticated, but some posts — which use sarcasm, for example — may occasionally trip up the system. You should always take a sample of your analyzed content and make sure it looks properly tagged. The holy grail of social listening is the ability to draw meaningful conclusions about your customers from listening to what they say, and that’s where sentiment analysis plays a big role.