Native Social Listening on Instagram, Facebook, and LinkedIn : Social Media Examiner

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by Samuel Pordengerg May 29, 2023 News
Native Social Listening on Instagram, Facebook, and LinkedIn : Social Media Examiner

Do you want to engage with a larger audience? Is it possible to set up a complete social listening and response workflows without spending a fortune?

You'll learn how to set up social listening without third-party tools.

Native Social Listening on Instagram, Facebook, and LinkedIn by Social Media Examiner

When it's relevant, you can join the discussion on social media channels that matter to your business. You can listen to conversations that aren't related to your comments or messages.

You can use social listening to analyze public posts and public comments that are related to a certain topic. A lot of important trends and discussions can be missed if you don't actively seek out posts and engagement. There are a few benefits of social listening.

  • Find mentions of your brand: Are potential or existing customers talking about your brand on social media? Does the conversation volume seem to be increasing or decreasing? With social listening, you can quantify mentions over time and look for patterns.
  • Gauge customer sentiment: What are people saying about your brand on social media? Is it positive or negative, and are those sentiments consistent or spiky? Social listening can help you see how people feel about your brand and qualify the engagement you discover.
  • Prevent potential crises: In some cases, you might uncover serious issues that could become major concerns for your business. With social media listening, you can find and address customer complaints before they evolve into major crises.
  • Learn about your customers: How well do you really know your customers? The more conversations you listen in on, the more you can learn about the problems customers have with your brand, the things they love, and the products they want you to make next. In other words, social listening helps with market research.
  • Improve your messaging: As you get to know customers through social listening, you can use their discussions to improve your messaging. You can draw on the challenges, goals, and pain points they mention to make your messaging resonate better.
  • Connect with brand ambassadors: As you tune into more social conversations, you're likely to find true fans of your brand. In some cases, you might consider inviting them to join your brand ambassador program, where their loyalty and enthusiasm can help your business grow.
  • Uncover competitor issues: Although your social listening strategy may focus mostly on your brand, it can also include your competitors. With listening tactics, you can learn just as much about your competitors as you can about your own brand, including customer sentiment and market research.
  • Spot industry trends: Social listening can also complement the industry news sources you use. By listening for certain keywords and phrases, you can keep an eye on trends, tune into thought leaders, and get a wider range of insights.

It's important to note that social listening and social monitoring are different. Social media monitoring doesn't involve responding to mentions so it's only part of a listening process.

We're going to design a strategy for social listening. Goal setting will be the first thing we do.

What do you want to do with social listening? You can use the benefits above to guide your thought process, and you can have more than one goal. Your team's goals could include this.

  • Measuring customer sentiment
  • Refining brand or product messaging
  • Finding and acting on industry trends

It is important to clarify why you are doing social listening in the first place. Make sure you talk to your team about your reasoning. Your team might have a reason.

  • Sales have declined over the last quarter and you haven't been able to pinpoint the cause. By listening to customer sentiment, you can assess whether opinions of your brand or products have changed.
  • Your brand or product messaging is due for an update. You're planning to use both social listening and customer surveys to collect the social listening data you need to refine it.
  • Your team follows a lot of industry news sources but struggles to analyze trends. With social listening, you'll be able to gain more insight into trends so you can decide how and when to act on the information.

Identifying the social media platforms where you want to listen for brand conversations is the next step. They will be the same channels you use. All or most of the channels that your customers use are included in your social media marketing strategy.

It is helpful to think outside of the social channels that you already use. Social listening can help you find conversations that aren't on your channels. It is possible to gauge whether or not to include new channels into your social media content strategy.

It's important to remember that each social platform has its own listening function. Facebook has relatively limited native search parameters and doesn't give much data to third party listening apps. Next-level search parameters and extensive data to third-party tools are provided by the micro-blogging site.

The tools you can use for analysis are affected by these built-in capabilities. Before committing to using a channel for a certain goal, it's a good idea to run some tests or explore other options.

Regardless of which channels you include in your strategy, the listening process is driven by the keyphrases and words you use. The next step is to use your goals to build a list of terms to monitor. Here are a few types of words you can monitor.

  • Brand and product names, including common misspellings
  • Brand and campaign hashtags
  • Product categories or solutions your customers often talk about and seek out
  • Company domains and landing page URLs
  • Industry terms and hashtags, including trending keywords
  • Competitor names, products, and branded hashtags

You can change your lists whenever you please. Changes to your list can change the results of your listening strategy. You won't be able to attribute these trends if you don't account for the fluctuations.

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Some important factors to consider when building your social listening toolset are: If you manage social media for a small business, you might be able to do it manually. If you work with national or global brands that have a lot of active conversations, you'll want to build a social listening tool into your budget.

Many brands choose to use social media listening tools. Tools like Meltwater are better for enterprise listening needs. This article shows how to use native social media tools to listen and monitor.

Mentions and tags can be found in the Content dashboard. The platform compiles all mentions and tags for you. It's easier to review mentions in the mobile app because it doesn't offer sorting or filters.

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You can tag conversations in the business suite inbox. If you want to measure factors like sentiment or topic, you need to create a labeling system that matches your listening goals.

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Business Suite's competitive research tools can be used to monitor changes on competitor pages. You can see if competitors are losing followers with the benchmarking tool.

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You can find mentions in the app by opening your notifications and tapping the Filter option. You can apply by selecting tags and mentioning it. You can review new engagement after scrolling through. It's helpful to save tagged content to an account on social media. There are different folders for different things.

Tools Resource Guide

You can discover the tools we recommend to drive engagement, save you time, and boost sales.

Whether you need help planning content, organizing social posts, or developing your strategy, you’ll find something for every situation.

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If you want to monitor brand, competitor, or industry, your best bet is to use social media. If your brand is important to you, you should follow it so you can see highlights in your feed.

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You can easily find conversations about your business with the robust search tools of LinkedIn. Sort by date if you want to search for a specific word or phrase. You can make the content more relevant by looking at it from a different perspective. Click your profile icon and select your company page instead to engage with the content.

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Similar to Business Suite, LinkedIn offers competitive analysis that can help you keep an eye on competitors engagement levels. The charts can be used to find competitors that are generating more engagement. You can see what your competitors are talking about by looking at the section.

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A lot of control is given by the search tools of the social network. You can save your searches and add them to the decks that automatically stay up to date. Creating a separate deck for listening would be a good idea. It's easy to keep an eye on the hashtags that's important to your business.

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If you want to monitor competitors or industry trends, you might want to create dedicated lists of keyTwitter accounts. Even if it doesn't show up in your searches, you will have a higher chance of seeing it.

It's important to find and listen to online conversations in this process. Creating a plan to respond to discussions is equally important.

You can cross it off of your to-do list by creating a list of engagement that doesn't require a response. The goals you have set will affect your list. Say you're monitoring mentions of competitors. You don't need to respond to every single one of your competitors' posts on social media. You don't have to engage with all of the industry hashtags.

You can focus on what really deserves a response once you have that out of the way. Engagements like this usually warrant a reply.

  • Positive reviews and statements about your brand
  • Negative reviews or complaints about your brand
  • User-generated content from brand advocates
  • Word-of-mouth mentions of your brand or products
  • Campaign and brand hashtags

Saved replies can be set up to be used again and again. You can add saved replies in Business Suite by clicking on them. You can either add personalization automatically or set a goal to add a few custom details manually.

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Saved replies can be added directly in the social network's app, which can cut response time in half. Saved replies are not supported by many social platforms. You will want to store your default responses in a location that your team can access.

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Adding retweets or story shares to your workflows is a good way to do that. If you decide on a standard course of action, you won't have to change your approach every time.

The steps you take may be affected by the type of engagement. You might want to respond to positive engagement in a public way. Negative engagement can be taken private to prevent it from being amplified.

If you use a dedicated social listening tool, you can easily access the data on your dashboard. Share of voice, customer sentiment, and mention volume can be measured using these tools. These tools can help you spot changes and identify problems.

You will need to set up the tools by configuring them. The rest of the process will be handled by them. Review the reports and give them to your team.

You will have to manually process the data if you use native tools. A manual social listening analysis could look like this.

  • Label all comments and messages with sentiment and/or topic
  • Keep a running list of mentions and hashtags in an external database (i.e., Google Sheets)
  • Add sentiment and/or topic tags to mentions and hashtags
  • Export inbox items to the database and review for missing labels
  • Generate charts and graphs to visualize the data (i.e., sentiment scales or topic trends)
  • Share insights with your team and stakeholders and create an action plan

The final step of the social listening process is the same regardless of whether you use automated or manual analysis. You need to act on your results. You can use the goals to guide your social media strategy.

Customer sentiment can be measured after you notice that sales have dropped. If you discover that customer sentiment has fallen by a certain percentage, you can work with your team to figure out the next steps. The topics you identified in customer conversations can be used as guides. Making your shipping process more efficient is a next step.

Identifying key phrases in customer conversations is the next step if you want to update your brand or product messaging. You will want to work with your team to turn these quotes into benefits that can be incorporated into your marketing.

The social media data needs to be turned into an actionable plan. It is possible to get value from your social listening efforts if you take this final step.

It's important to monitor your brand, customers, industry, and competitors online with social listening. You can find topics that are relevant to you, join conversations that are important to you, and get insights that can help you form better relationships with your audience.

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Anna Sonnenberg specializes in paid and organic Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook marketing. For 6+ years she has run Sonnenberg Media, a micro agency that provides social media and email support to brands and businesses.Other posts by Anna Sonnenberg »

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