The world is living online, especially post-pandemic. Even B2B companies, which might have traditionally ignored social media as a meaningful way to build community and advertise their products, have turned to Twitter, LinkedIn, Reddit, YouTube and even Instagram and Facebook to tell their value story. With so much living online, we can cull meaningful and powerful data about your brand health, what your competitors are promoting, what their customers and users think about them, and what your target audience is saying about the industry on the worldwide web.
But how do we harness it? There are several platforms that offer various levels of social listening for a wide range of investment. At my current company, we have 10 “listening topics” via Sprout Social that monitor our competitive landscape, our brand health and various industry and product themes to know what’s trending.
Brand Health
Our brand health topic is set up not to monitor what we say about ourselves, but what others are saying about us. When and where does our name show up in major conversations around our product category? Are there any forums or threads of unhappy customers that are hard to find? This report is built off a Boolean keyword set that searches social media sites and forums such as Reddit or Tumblr and produces mentions of our brand name (or common misspellings) alongside industry terms, product terms, technical integrations and alliances, cross-selling partners, competitors, job-seeking terms, thought leadership and market presence terms, security and negative, “unhappy” customer words (such as sucks). The resulting report includes sentiment, mention volume, impressions, demographics, and even curates a list of related keywords and hashtags to show trending terms that appear frequently with your brand name.
Competitive Landscape
Want to know what your competitors are up to online without having to go to each of their accounts and take painstaking notes on their content production? What about what their customers and the industry are saying about them? Enter social listening. Much like the brand report, this listening topic is built off a Boolean keyword set that searches social media sites and forums such as Reddit or Tumblr and produces mentions of competitor names alongside industry terms, product terms, technical integrations and alliances, cross-selling partners, competitors, job-seeking terms, thought leadership and market presence terms, security and negative, “unhappy” customer words (such as sucks). In contrast to the brand health report, however, the resulting information focuses on share of voice and engagement rates in addition to impressions, sentiment, and related keywords and hashtags. This report is great to see what content topics are trending across your competitor set and even find threads and news that highlight potential takeout opportunities.
Industry Analysis
Content marketing, whether on site or via third parties, should speak to industry trends to ensure you appear as a credible, authoritative thought leader in your product space. The world is changing faster than ever, so an industry listening topic should be built off a Boolean keyword set that crosses core product and industry terms with themes, or buckets of keywords that relate to your industry. Not only will this highlight potential opportunities in your content marketing plan, but these trend reports could even impact the roadmap of your product and marketing plan. Industry sentiment, demographics, volume, and related keywords and hashtags are all useful data points to compare over time to make sure your content is relevant to the conversation.