Useful tips for the configuration of your your Social Listening’s solution
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Useful tips for the configuration of your your Social Listening’s solution

Parameterization of a Social Listening tool is not that easy. It will depend on how you want to use the solution and for what purpose the extracted value will be exploited. After having discussed about the importance of social listening and its several uses, then about the selection mode of an appropriate solution to specific and precise goals, we will today speak about the question of configuration of a Social Listening tool.

Once again, everything starts with the need. What do you need to listen to or follow? On the base of this assumption, you will have to define a corpus of key words or specific expressions that are frequently used and associated with researched subjects. To help you, Google trends tool permits to know how often a term has been typed into the search engine. Social platforms such as Twitter, Instagram or Facebook are good sources of inspiration in terms of key words, hashtags or specific expressions asked by Internet users. The more the listening spectrum is open, the more you will have the chance on your side to find added-value elements for your brand or your company.

For being complete and efficient, corpus will have to cover the whole of associated synonyms of a key word or also slang words usually used in the “listened” language. This (tedious) preliminary work is the pre-requisite to the creation of requests, that will be decomposed in function of bolean logic including “And”, “Or”, “Not” terms. Like a spider, you will weave a web that will permit you to minutely scan the web for risen relevant information.

In order to obtain a coherent holistic view of captured mentions, you will have to listen to the integrality of the online ecosystem, social media, trough blogs and other forums. Collected information’s relevance will bring a quantitative and qualitative complementary vision to “traditional” market analyses that your company is used to sponsor or realise. Nowadays, consumers tend to share their thoughts and opinions online in an unbridled manner in relation to the panels realized by polling organizations. This absence of filter permits to get a clear idea of your clients’ opinion on your brand or your products.

Once this configuration basis is done, you will have to refine/set your listening’s cursors in order to only rise relevant mentions and commentaries. We will note that approximately 80% of what an initial research request appears is built with irrelevant elements.

Erase « noises » constitutes the second phase (and not the least) of the parameterization of your solution. How to concretely do for getting rid of it ?

First of all, start with listing all key words to exclude from your requests via the “Not” term.
Play again requests, analyse risen mentions and refine another time words or expressions to be excluded. It is a repetitive process to be pursued as long as needed until the total exclusion of noise. Like a gold digger, sift captured researches for finding nuggets that will permit you to leverage value form your Social Listening tool.

Languages are alive and evaluate, as trends. This is why it is recommended to realise an upgrading work on key words’ corpus as well as exclusions once or twice per year.

After having seen necessary basis to well functionate of your solution, let’s stop ourselves to three typologies of specific configuration.

1. Compare your brand’s e-reputation to your competitors’ one

First step of this type of dashboard’s configuration consists of defining the list of principals competitors to which you wish to compare you reputation. Then, you will have to define a list of key words and specific to your industry expressions.

During the phase of analysis of risen, the principal considered metric will be the Share Of Voice one. This one permits to measure the impact of organic conversations and also the one that are coming from brands’ owned social canals. The feeling of captured mentions (positives or negatives) is a capital element that has to be considered in order to not bias analyses. A high share of voice with an important volume of negative mentions has nothing to positive for the e-reputation of the brand. The impact of Dieselgate on automotive constructors’ image is a good example. Automotive industry has seen an explosion of discussions concerning herself (see the table of evolution of conversations below), but the majority were negative.

Health monitoring of a business segment can help a company to better understand competitive landscape of its industry. In a context of fierce competition, it is important to know what your competitors are doing. The objective of the approach is to leverage from the collected data’s value in order to define differentiation’s axis towards clients and being capable of generating gains of competitivity.

2. Monitor a crisis’ spread and measure its impact

Each day, numerous discussions take place on social networks concerning your brand, your competitors, or also your industry. Sometimes, several conversations are announcers of a crisis to come. Are you capable of identifying these weak signals for keeping control on the situation?

Creation of an automated alert will permit you to not miss out discussions bad for your brand. Classification of commentaries inside themes permits to quickly and easily identify a subject that should be under a particular attention. In order to make operate the supervision system, you will have to define criteria that trigger an alert: they may as well be an increase in the volume of mentions (compared to the average volume daily saved), an explosion of Share Of Voice, a part of negative mentions that is superior to X% compared to the day before…

Follow same keywords for competitors is another guardrail, because due to the snowball effect, the whole of big names from a sector could be impacted by a crisis.

Recent mondial COVID_19 crisis is a good example of evolution of conversations going from discussions focused on information about the virus to interactions more charged of emotions. Online conversations have become more and more politic, reconsidering or supporting the authorities’ measures. Here there is an opportunity to follow what is going on, because it can sometimes have a potential on engaging conversations with the public by showing support or empathy in order to win new subscribers or to detect and resolve problems before they become worse.

3. Identify influencers relevant to your brand

Social influence marketing could help a brand to establish a strong link with its targeted public. The objective is to move from a massive communication to a more targeted one (alongside communities more or less restricted). In this research of authenticity at the service of your communication, two approaches are possible:

  • Making your clients/consumers influencers
  • Identify influencers inside your community

How to identify these ambassadors who will engage for your account their communities and thus deploy a strategy of marketing of influence ?

Firstly you could concentrate yourself on the more engaged internet users identified into your dashboards as “top posters”. Parameterization of your solution will rise persons who quote the most often your brand. You will have then the possibility to refine your list by sorting mentions depending on their scope and their generated engagement rate for ensuring yourself about the influence of these identified persons.

Finally, the analysis of typologies of posted content will permit to define a strategy of approach for engaging with these individuals an exchange in view of the setting up of “winner winner” collaboration that will add value to your brand.

In conclusion, it is clear that solutions of Social Listening are powerful tools provided that you know what you are looking for. An optimal parametrization can give a certain competitive advantage to the one who knows how to analyse collected data. It is however necessary to underline that technologies and social platforms are quickly evolving, and that new trends are permanently appearing, the tool’s configuration can thus not being freeze. You have to constantly upgrade your listening dashboards. Remember that nothing can be taken for granted and stay up-to-date of new digital uses !

Alina NOVIKOVA | Digital Acquisition & Social Media Consultant, Axys Consultants

Published on MyDigitalWeek