Social Media Listening: Essential Tool for Both PR & Marketing (and Competitive Intelligence Too)

Social media listening has become an indispensable research tool for marketing and competitive intelligence. Increasingly, it had also become essential for public relations.

With the growth of consumer conversations and expert opinion on the wide range of social media channels, most companies now listen to social media to get feedback and insights from consumers for marketing purposes. Social media listening can readily reveal issues with products and customer service.

Carefully monitoring social media enables businesses to identify and correct problems quickly. (By monitoring social media, a software company identified a bug in a newly-issued product within hours and issued a software fix within days.) Monitoring competitors on social media can produce valuable competitive intelligence – and provide opportunities to take market share.

Monitoring Social Media for PR Purposes

PR departments, too, must monitor social media just as they monitor news outlets. Social media (especially blogs) are every bit as much “earned media” as traditional news. Social media now affects brand reputation as much as mainstream news. PR must carefully monitor and measure social media to gain insights into consumers’ perception of the company and its brands – and to guard against potential PR crises.

Feedback offered unsolicited by consumers on social media provides companies and brands with real insight into how the marketplace views the company, its products and its positions on issues. Social media can also provide insights into the sentiment of investors on the company and its prospects.

Sometimes just one piece of social media intelligence can prompt a company to change a product or customer service process. However, gaining real insights from raw social media comments requires a thoughtfully-designed monitoring and measurement program over the long term.

Don’t Guarantee Disaster

PR measurement expert Katie Paine, CEO of Paine Publishing LLC, says failing to include social media in PR measurement programs will guarantee disaster.

Paine recommends tracking influencers, monitoring what they are saying in traditional news outlets and social media, including video-based networks. PR can also monitor less influential social media users; however, it’s not necessary to complete an in-depth analysis since chances they’ll most likely only be repeating what the influencers say.

Social media monitoring, also known as social media listening, also provides other benefits, such obtaining more followers, personalizing communications, and networking with journalists. Listening to your audience enables PR to understand it better and learn want kind of content different audience segments prefer. The right content will increase social media shares and click-throughs to your website. It will also enable PR staff to personalize communications with journalists and other influencers.

Steps to Implementation

Experts recommend following these steps to implement a social media monitoring and measurement program.

• Establish business goals first. What do you want to accomplish with social media monitoring and measurement?  Do you want to focus on building brand awareness, increasing website visits, accumulating sales leads, watching corporate reputation, improving customer service, assess product performance, or other objectives?

• Set objectives that are measureable, time driven and connected to goals. For example, the PR team should achieve at least two of five benchmarks each reporting period.

• Monitor widely on social media. Monitoring blogs is mandatory. These days, monitoring Twitter is also essential. The monitoring plan can also include other social media important to the company, including message boards and forums, Facebook, LinkedIn, YouTube (and other video sharing sites), Instagram , Pinterest and Google+. The social media channels you select to monitor depend on which social media channels your customers use.

• Develop key performance metrics tied to objectives, such as click-through rates, engagement rates, sales leads or conversions. Basing measurement on objectives is the key to successful measurement.

• Create regular monitoring/measurement reports that deliver actionable insights. Share the reports with all affected decision-makers.

More Accurate Research

Social media monitoring can help PR learn about:

Their companies and clients. Many people probably assume that corporate executives, of all people, would understand their own companies. However, like most people, executives sometimes don’t view themselves and their organizations as others do. Corporate insiders may not view their company and its products as their customers or the public view them. An analysis of social media and media mentions can provide a more accurate picture of the company’s strengths and weaknesses, including how visible your brand is in comparison to competitors.

Customers. Customers are often reluctant to provide businesses with accurate feedback. How many times have you falsely answered “good” or “fine” when a waitress asked “How is everything?” Marketing researchers have noted that people participating in surveys or forums may not provide honest answers. They may tell researchers what they want to hear, especially when speaking face to face.

Customers are more honest when commenting on social media. Thoughtfully-designed measurement of social media comments can gauge the overall sentiment of the target audience, or how it feels toward the company and its products. Social media listening has the added advantage of being less expensive than traditional market research.

Issues. Often, companies can be tone-deaf to issues affecting their business and may not understand how customers feel about the issues. Monitoring social media can help companies identify issues that may affect their business.

Social media listening can answer questions such as:

• What do consumers want that isn’t being delivered by your company or your competitors?
• What do your customers like and dislike about your brand/products.
• What do certain demographics think about specific topics, brands and products?

Competition. Social media listening can reveal information about competitors, such as their PR and marketing strategies, their strengths and weaknesses, their customers, and their share of voice.

PR campaign success. Social media monitoring tools are essential for evaluating PR campaigns. Monitoring tools can show which social media channels saw the most engagement, identify topics that increased conversations, and find influencers that helped boost campaigns. In addition, measuring changes in sentiment reveals the overall effectiveness and trends of the organization’s PR and marketing efforts.

Outsourcing Media Monitoring & Measurement Services

Most companies outsource social media monitoring and measurement to specialized services such as Glean.info. In most all instances, an outsourced service can deliver comprehensive monitoring and measurement more effectively and cost-efficiently than clients can do it in-house. In outsourcing, it’s usually best to obtain proposals and quotes from multiple services. Developing a formal RFP for media monitoring and measurement can help assure proposals that meet your company’s specific needs for both marketing and PR. Integrated services that cover news, social media and Website analytics usually provide more valuable data and more significant insights.

In assessing proposals, it’s important to weigh price against value. Low-priced services may not provide your required breadth of monitoring or depth of measurement and analysis. They may not include the key performance indicators you specified. Therefore, it’s important to find and select a service that can customize its standard measurement services to meet your company’s particular monitoring and measurement needs.

Bottom Line: Social media monitoring and measurement is an invaluable tool that provides in-depth analysis about a company, its products, its marketing and its competitors. In addition, because social media like blog placements account for much of today’s earned media, social media listening is essential to accurately measure the effectiveness and ROI of PR campaigns.