Many companies still haven’t quite worked out what social media can really do for them and their marketing strategies. We know everybody wants something measurable to show for their marketing spend – and that isn’t always easy to get.
Social listening, as a specific application of social media monitoring, is one method that allows you to see what your online marketing is doing for your brand. In fact, it can go one step further by actually giving you definitive metrics on your specific key performance indicators (KPIs).
When it comes to marketing, your main KPI is probably brand awareness. But, how can you possibly measure that? Through social listening, you can count the number of mentions your brand is receiving on social media; not only those that come from direct communication with you, but also in posts between other people and organisations.
This goes even deeper, however. Not only can you count the number of mentions online, but you can also measure how deeply your brand is reaching into the social media space. This is not about how many mentions you get but rather about who mentions your brand. A mention from an influencer or someone with a very large following, would obviously mean more to your brand than a large volume of single mentions.
You can also measure your share of mentions on social media relative to your competitors’, which gives you an excellent idea of how your promotional efforts are faring in the online space.
All of this is great for the marketing department and it will look great when you present it to the CEO. But, you know what the next question is going to be after you’ve talked through all the numbers and graphs: “That’s fine, but are we converting all these mentions into real leads?”
Well, with social listening, you can answer that too. You can simply click to the next slide in your presentation, which will give an indication of the level of engagement your brand is getting. This goes one step beyond to see how other social media users are actually responding to the mentions you’ve already counted. If people are engaging with your brand, that will come up as shares, likes, DMs (both to and from you), which hopefully your sales team are jumping on to close some sales! You can also show the boss exactly how many people are clicking through to your website from social media or contacting you by other means.
By delivering solid metrics, social listening helps to eliminate the vagueness and uncertainty that sometimes comes with marketing campaigns. It is a tool that you should definitely have at your disposal. Contact WSI OSM to find out how you can start applying social listening to your marketing strategy right now.