The cornerstone of any great B2B social media marketing campaign is great content. But it is equally as important to dedicate resources to social listening, or the practice of listening to what your customers and prospects have to say about you on different social platforms like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and LinkedIn.
STEP 1
A great social listening platform usually starts with a dashboard of some type – either one that your B2B marketing team creates by itself or one that is purchased from a vendor such as Crowdbooster, which enables you to measure and optimize your social media marketing. A dashboard is important is because it enables you to have a big picture view of what is happening on various platforms at once. This enables you to prioritize your resources.
STEP 2
The next step is to figure out what you are actually listening for. Usually, this entails coming up with a set of metrics or key performance indicators (KPIs) that can guide your efforts. For example, you might simply track “mentions of my brand” or “number of likes.” But over time, you can start to develop more sophisticated metrics that actually measure factors like sentiment.
Sentiment is particularly important because it gives you an early warning indicator of people are saying negative things about your product or service. It’s one thing to track the absolute number of mentions of your product – but it’s far more enlightening to track the how those mentions differ in terms of sentiment.
STEP 3
Now that you’ve started tracking how your brand is doing across social media, it’s time to analyze what the data actually means for your overall B2B marketing campaign. For example, what happens if you are getting almost zero traction on Twitter but people are talking about you all the time on Facebook? Obviously, you’d want to allocate more resources to Facebook.
In a best-case scenario, you also want to be able to track how specific messages do on social media. This will help you fine-tune your marketing campaign. If certain selling points of your product aren’t clear, or if people are using your product in ways you didn’t expect, that’s all relevant feedback you can give to the marketing team.
STEP 4
The last step is perhaps the hardest step – and that’s reaching out to the people on social and interacting with them. You’ve been listening (some might say “lurking”) for awhile, now is the time to engage and interact. You already know what they are talking about, how they are talking about it, and why they are talking about it. So you know exactly what to do.
In some cases, it might make sense to appoint a “community manager” who will be the voice and point person for your social media efforts. Over time, this community manager will be able to form relationships with your most passionate advocates and backers, and transform them into true brand ambassadors for your business.
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With this 4-step process, you will be able to transform social listening into a key element of your overall B2B marketing strategy. By learning what your customers have to say on social, you will be better able to craft messages and offers that resonate with them.
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Dane
Dane Cobain is a published author, freelance writer, book blogger, poet and (occasional) musician from High Wycombe, UK. Before going freelance, he worked as a social media marker, now specialising in writing about publishing, technology and marketing.