7 steps to building a Social Listening strategy

In today's digital era, social media platforms continue to grow and attract ever-wider audiences. This means the role of Social listening solutions has become more important and is now widely applied by businesses from B2C to B2B. The goal in every case is the same: to understand customers, assess opportunities and challenges, and identify future market trends. Below are 7 essential steps for building an effective Social listening strategy that delivers real advantages for your business.

Why does your business need a Social listening strategy?

Social listening gives businesses a valuable source of data for uncovering customer insights by tracking conversations on social media, how often users mention a brand, and the business potential of a given sector. Social listening also reveals which factors are shaping the industry's overall growth, who your competitors are, and which brands are leading the digital market.

In particular, with social networks proliferating densely across every media channel, building a Social listening strategy helps you save research time, obtain real market data quickly, and optimize your human-resource costs. A Social listening strategy may be simple, but it delivers considerable value to a business: stronger brand awareness, products and services improved in line with user preferences, and greater loyalty from your existing customer base.

>See more: Effective Social listening tools your business should be using

Steps to build a Social listening strategy

As one of the market research methods most widely used by businesses, Social listening provides in-depth perspectives drawn from user feedback on brands and on the value of products and services. From there, you will know how to reinforce and add value, create experiences that satisfy your target customers, and help build their trust in your brand.

Define your objectives

If this is the first time your business has invested in a Social listening strategy, start with simple objectives and focus on understanding customers based on their interactions with and comments about your brand. You can then break these down into smaller, more specific objectives to gain deeper insight from the feedback you already have.

Here are some objectives you can consider applying to your business strategy on social media platforms:

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  Identify which product or service content attracts the most comments.
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  Understand customer concerns related to your products.
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  Collect information on potential customers.
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  Identify your competitors.
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  Strengthen your brand voice by listening and responding to customer opinions.
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  Raise brand awareness through customer interaction on social media.

The objectives your business sets will determine the media channels and research tools you choose next. Businesses therefore need to invest in setting objectives that are feasible and aligned with their needs and growth strategy.

Choose your research channels

Wherever your customers spend their time and whichever social platforms they actively participate in, that is where your business needs to invest. This is the step where you narrow down the media channels that have the greatest influence on your customers.

Thoroughly researching social media platforms will help you identify the channels that matter most to your Brand and deliver high engagement. The key here is to pinpoint the platforms your customers use most, so you can raise your Brand's visibility where they are already spending time.

Choose two or three channels where your target customers engage most with content. At the same time, businesses are encouraged to select a few suitable Social Listening tools so they don't miss any valuable conversations taking place on other media platforms.

Choosing a Social Listening research tool

How do you choose an effective Social Listening tool? Start by revisiting the original objective behind building this strategy, along with a few questions that clarify what the chosen tools need to do. Businesses can refer to the following criteria when selecting a research tool:

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  What factors does your business need to analyze? For example, do you need to know how users respond to your Brand? Do you want to collect more demographic and behavioral data about your customers? Do you want to study in detail how they discover and approach your products and services?
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  Which sources and channels does your business want to prioritize? Some social listening tools focus on specific platforms, so if you need to track TikTok, for instance, that requirement will narrow your options.
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  What is your budget? Most Social Listening tools require a subscription fee to use, so you need to plan your spending around the budget you have available.

For example, if you want to collect cross-platform data to gain multiple perspectives on customer Insight, as well as measure the density of interactions and comments from a large volume of users, your business might choose a widely used tool such as HubSpot. Alternatively, if your business needs an overview of its Digital Marketing strategies and guidance on developing campaigns across multiple channels and platforms (omni-channel experience), Hootsuite is a suitable choice.

Setting up Social Listening tracking metrics

This requires monitoring multiple social media channels for mentions of your Brand name, topics, competitors, keywords, and products in social conversations. A business can track user responses and interactions with its Brand by establishing a list of metrics to review regularly, or by relying on the research tools it has selected to automate the process.

In particular, to make sure Social Listening delivers the greatest possible impact, businesses need to focus on searching for keywords on social media. Here are some keywords you should track:

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  Brand name
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  Hashtags related to the Brand
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  Hashtags related to the industry
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  The business's product names
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  Brand keywords
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  Campaign names, Brand terms, or topics
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  Competitors' products, mentions, hashtags, names, etc.
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  People associated with your Brand. These may include the CEO, Brand partners, or any influencers or celebrities connected to your Brand

For most market and consumer research, Social Listening focuses primarily on three elements: the brand, the customer, and communications. Of these, the customer is always the hardest problem to solve, and businesses must look everywhere for consumer Insight before planning their marketing and communications activities. This is why Social Listening is such a valuable solution for businesses — it cuts marketing costs while still delivering strong results.

Monitoring and collecting information from social media

After setting up your tracking metrics, the next step is to actively monitor social media channels and capture conversations mentioning your brand, competitors, and products based on the metrics you have defined. This is the core of the work, and every Social Listening strategy must invest real effort in it.

Businesses need to filter and regularly review comments across their social channels — whether Facebook, their website, Zalo, Instagram, or even e-commerce platforms such as Shopee, Tiki, and Lazada, as well as product review sites. Doing so gives you a comprehensive view of customer feedback and opinions about your brand. Be prepared mentally, because you will inevitably read both praise and criticism, the good and the bad, from the online community — but this is all valuable information that helps businesses improve their products and raise their service quality.

At this step, pay close attention to three elements that deserve careful observation:

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  Customer information
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  Competitor information
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  Industry information

Analyzing and evaluating the data

Once all the necessary data has been collected, businesses will have a comprehensive view and initial assessments of the data at hand. Analyzing and evaluating this data is a crucial stage that helps businesses propose smart, effective strategies to increase brand awareness and sustain a pipeline of potential customers.

Based on comments from the online community, you can learn a great deal about customers' consumption habits, the competitive landscape, and current market demand. Beyond that, businesses need to understand how satisfied customers are after experiencing their products and services. If this data has not yet been recorded in structured tables, businesses should consolidate it using common software such as Excel, SPSS, or Minitab to build tables, graphs, and charts, break the results down into appropriate segments such as age and gender, and identify the main trends in the data.

One point to note is that you should separate opinions into three streams: positive, negative, and neutral. Then compare them to see the gap between positive and negative feedback. The data you analyze at this step forms the essential foundation for carrying out the final step smoothly and effectively.

Measuring results and proposing actions

Measuring your research results helps you see the real value of your brand and how satisfied customers are with your business. Specifically, the metrics you have analyzed may include engagement levels, conversation volume, mentions, and response time — all of which help you measure brand awareness and account for every user conversation that could affect your brand health.

Now is the time to synthesize the most useful information, staying close to the objectives the business has set, in order to complete a Social Listening research report along with recommendations for next steps in the most concise and easy-to-understand way. Businesses can start with the objectives and business problems identified in the first step, followed by the questions that unpack those objectives and the proposed channels and research tools. Finally, present the results of the collected data analysis and propose activities to improve or steer public opinion in order to meet the stated objectives.

When presenting the results, businesses need to connect the data and present their own understanding and conclusions alongside the charts and tables. For example, if you place a chart in a market research report, ask yourself: "What does this mean and what impact does it have?" Businesses need to sharpen their critical thinking and reasoning skills so that the research report becomes more practical and meaningful.

Conclusion

Implementing a Social Listening strategy helps businesses uncover customer insight deeply and thoroughly, while also assessing their growth, credibility and brand value in today's challenging competitive market. In addition, businesses can turn to Kompa's Social Listening solution to understand customer insight effectively and elevate their brand's influence on the world around them.