5 steps to identify keywords for Social Listening

Keywords are a crucial foundation in Social Listening applications. Through keyword tools, Social Listening tools collect and analyze discussions about your brand, market trends, and industry. Social Listening can only be effective with the right and comprehensive set of keywords.

So, how do you identify the right and comprehensive set of keywords? Here are five basic steps to help you create a list of keywords for your Social Listening application:

Define Social Listening goals:

The first step before implementing Social Listening is to define your goals. Social Listening goals depend on your brand’s objectives and business needs.

Common Social Listening goals include:

Measuring brand awareness on social media platforms.

To carry out Social Listening effectively, a Brand needs to generate a substantial volume of discussions about itself on social media platforms to have a data source for analysis and measurement.

Understanding customer personas and identifying discussion sources.

Social listening helps identify the profile of the target audience and the sources that attract discussions. Determining the customer profile and conversation sources is significant in building focused communication content and effective communication channels.

Measure the effectiveness of communication campaigns:

Social Listening provides real-time feedback on the effectiveness of your social media campaigns. This allows businesses to assess how campaigns are performing and make adjustments to future strategies.

Capture industry trends and competitors:

Social Listening helps you monitor industry trends, competitor actions, and how users perceive and react to your products or services. This provides an overview of the market on social media platforms, enabling you to plan appropriate strategies and directions.

Capture customer feedback on social media:

Monitoring social media conversations allows businesses to identify issues or challenges that customers may be facing with their products or services. This enables them to react quickly and resolve issues before they escalate and harm the brand.

Create an initial list of keywords:

After identifying your Social Listening goals, the next step is to create an initial list of keywords. There are six types of keywords that are important to monitor in your Social Listening strategy:

Brand keywords:

Monitor and analyze keywords related to your brand to understand customer perceptions, manage brand reputation, and gain insights into customer needs and desires.

Competitors

Capturing information about competitors helps understand their activities, marketing strategies, and customer feedback.

Representatives/Leaders

Representatives can be CEOs, high-level employees, or famous figures associated with the brand. By monitoring the activities and opinions of representatives on social media and media platforms, you can gain a better understanding of the messages they convey, their interactions with customers, and their image. This helps you build a positive and trustworthy brand image.

Campaigns

Whenever a brand launches an advertising campaign, special event, or media activity, monitoring related keywords provides valuable information about how people respond and interact with that campaign on social media.

Industry Sectors

By tracking keywords related to your industry sectors, you can gather information about trends, changes, customer opinions, and competition within the industry.

Trends and Events

Capturing ongoing trends and events helps shape marketing strategies and product/service development.

Building an Extended Keyword List

In addition to the initial keyword list, an extended keyword list contains variations of the initial keyword group based on user search behavior or unexpected occurrences. This list should be continuously updated to ensure comprehensive data coverage. For example, if the initial keyword is “Kompa,” extended keywords could include “kompa” or “kom pa.”

Selecting Key Keywords

From the two lists of keywords, you need to filter and select the keywords that align with your social listening objectives.

Check the effectiveness of these keywords and adjust them to match your initial goals. 

Continuously monitor the keyword list to ensure effective social listening.

Determining goals and selecting the right keywords is crucial not only for capturing important information but also for building a positive brand image in the eyes of customers.

In summary, determining the set of keywords for social listening is an important and necessary step for brands to harness the power of social listening. It helps shape and reinforce their position in a competitive market, leveraging advanced technology in an era where interactions and feedback from consumers on social media increasingly impact a business’s success and development.

Kompa is a company that applies data technology (AI, machine learning) on a big data platform, providing data analysis solutions and equipping customers with valuable insights to optimize their business operations in various aspects such as marketing, finance, operations, and other fields. Kompa has been a strong partner for numerous businesses, both small and large, in Vietnam for over 20 years, including companies like Vingroup, Masterise Homes, Vinamilk, SSI, MB Bank, Tan Hiep Phat, Shopee, VietJet Air, among others. With the ability to collect, analyze, and process information quickly and completely automatically, Kompa has become a powerful ally for businesses and an excellent companion for many marketing and communication professionals.

Currently, Kompa provides several solutions to help businesses maximize market data exploitation and drive business growth:

• Social listening
• Reputation management
• Campaign effectiveness measurement
• Strengthening brand engagement within the community
• Integrated market research
• Digital data center