social media conversations

February 11, 2017

Building Relationships By Active Social Listening

In building relationships, we all know that active listening is key to understanding who your customers are. In social media, using listening technologies allows you to bring together the full picture of not only the who, but where the communities are that they engage in, what conversations they have and why. This full picture facilitates your ability to be more relevant and thus, create a stronger bond with your customers in the short and long term.

Identifying who your customers are, where the communities are that they engage in, what conversations they have and why. All of this provides the strategic approach to defining a social media strategy.

The following criteria below is a sample outline on setting up your social listening strategy for your business so that you can define a sound conversation analysis.

SOCIAL LISTENING INPUTS

Company – The trademarked and branded names of your businesses along with those within your business
Customers – The names of your clients and customers so you can begin to have an understanding of what conversations they are having
Competition – The known competition you have in your industry or sector so you can track those conversations and understand your share of voice
Categories – These are the industry topics that relate to your business

The combination of this intelligence defines the key conversational sections that your business needs to monitor for the following benefits.

OUTPUTS FROM SOCIAL LISTENING

Why – Define the goals of your customers so you can work backwards to support their goals
Who – Understand who your audience really is vs. who you think they are
What – Creating relevancy by creating conversations that support the development of relationships with your customers.
Where – Identifying where the communities are that they have their discussions so that you connect where they are
When – Analyze the best times to have conversations with your customers

Social Conversations Process

Actively listening allows you to solidify your social media strategy to better position yourself for stronger relationships with your customers.

October 3, 2016

Creating Relevancy through Thoughtful Conversations

Engagement in social is defined as interactions between users, typically involving a conversation. These interactions can involve anything from threaded conversations, acknowledgements to sharing thoughts.

Over the years, we’ve seen social devolve where in many cases, we’ve lost sight in the original objectives of social being focused around the conversations to support our objectives to simply publishing content on digital platforms (passive publishing). To ensure we’re focusing on what made social stand out was the conversation, so here are the fundamentals to creating relevant conversations.

Why – Aligning on goals first where you communicate where you are heading and seek to identify others’ goals as a way to connect.
Who – Understanding who your target audience is in terms age, demographic, background, interests, motivations.
What – Once you know more about your target audience, you will begin to piece together what they want to discuss and most importantly, where they don’t want to spend their time.
Where – Defining the conversation allows to understand where these conversations take place and how to bring the conversations to an environment that will best facilitate a conversation to allow the relationship to develop.
When – Timing is everything except when it is not. Always understand the cadence of communication as frequency keeps the conversation moving, but only at the most appropriate times when the other user is able to be in receipt and acknowledge the conversation.

The focus of driving engagement is to continually refine and repeat the fundamentals to ensure conversations can continue to support the development of the relationships.

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