Back in the day when I was working with the Fox Cities PAC—before we had the digital tools we have now (even social media)—I would stand in the lobby and just talk to people about their experiences.

I'd always have a couple core questions I’d ask to get as much feedback as I could, and I loved it. It was like having a focus group for every show.

And then when social media came about, I could start to see conversations online unfolding—it was amazing. I spent more time scrolling on my brand pages learning what people said about different shows, what they liked or they didn't like, and I was fascinated with people's conversations. 

For news stories, I would dive into the comment section, which was also great branding information just waiting to be consumed.

And of course today, before I start working on any kind of creative campaign, I always want to understand what my audience is saying about a brand. Toward that effort, social listening is indispensable.

How else can you know where your audience’s headspace is? How would you know how to communicate with them more effectively—or what content they’ll respond to? 

You have to start by listening—not talking. Tough for us extroverts, right? But this is something I've always found incredibly valuable throughout my marketing career.

Some particular things I’m listening for include:

• What are people talking about?
• What are my audience’s misunderstandings and misconceptions?
• Where are the gaps in communication?
• What topics are trending?

All brands need to start with that kind of listening—it can help them to truly understand their audience and their needs.‍

How you can listen

So where do you do your social listening? There are so many great sources for finding out where people are talking about your brand, and you don’t need fancy software to do it. You can simply ensure you’re proactive by tracking topics across platforms.

You can start with a simple spreadsheet and develop a simple coding system for sentiment. You can include Google alerts, social platforms, and forums like Reddit. You can use free tools like ChatGPT to seek data.

You certainly can always work with somebody like me who has great tools to gather the information about your brand and give you that starting spot. 

And then there are benefits to continuing to monitor that brand once we have it set up. 

Tools can help scrape data and monitor all channels on the internet by looking for certain keywords or hashtags, and it can monitor trends over the long term so you can see the number of conversations, how they ebb and flow, and what the sentiment is. You can see the peaks and valleys and know what conversations were happening at a given point. You can even build word clouds to see common keywords. All of this can help you to be thoughtful with your content development.

We can monitor the brand health weekly, and get alerts if there’s a bad mention or things start to escalate. We can stay on top of that. We can even monitor industry insights, which goes beyond your brand and into your industry as a whole, which also can be important for responding or offer an opportunity to be a subject matter expert to share your unique point of view. 

When social listening works

When I worked on the Smart Streets campaign for the city of Appleton—a reconfiguration project for the busy College Avenue corridor that was unpopular with the public at first—I needed to audit the conversation before I began the creative side of the campaign. 

I pulled all the media stories on the project, reviewed the comments, and pulled them into a spreadsheet, then categorized the comments by sentiment. I showed the top trends in comments, questions, and misconceptions. I outlined these for each venue in which they appeared—media stories, social channels, and a simple Google search on the topic. We also conducted more traditional listening at town hall forums, which also helped.

While it takes a bit of time to gather and organize that information, it gave me a really strong understanding of what the conversations were—and some trends appeared pretty quickly. 

I was surprised how much we could get just from online research. From there, that informed our messaging for the first phase of the Smart Streets campaign. After a few months, we had deployed campaign messaging in the community through various communication tactics to help people understand the thinking behind the program and help resolve some of the misconceptions.

Later, I went back and did the same manual sort of look at the campaign analysis— did I see a change? Were there more positive comments? Did sentiment move at all? Did people have the same questions or have a better understanding of the project and its goals? 

We did see a shift, which was really rewarding. But we were very strategic going into it, understanding what the core issues were. I think without doing that work—the social listening—we might not have been as effective with our initial messaging.

Using feedback to your advantage

Understanding those common questions, misconceptions, and trends is so vital for proactive crisis management, and monitoring social media and other forums can serve as an early warning system. If negative feedback starts to pop up, you can gain a competitive advantage by responding early. 

Plus, not only can you monitor your brand, you can monitor your competitors—which allows you to create a benchmark system. 

Another good use of social listening is finding partnerships and influencers. Who's talking about your brand authentically? Are there opportunities for deeper relationships? Find those people who are natural advocates for you or your brand. You can send them a thank you note, coupon, or product to help build that relationship and see if there are opportunities to take it further.

All of this should inform your marketing and content strategy. If you get in the habit of doing it regularly, you should be able to not only start to see a greater impact on all of your activities, but on your brand as a whole. 

The bottom line: Social listening is a great tool that can really make your strategies, content campaigns, and brand reputation so much stronger.

‍