If you pay attention to the world around you, you will be able to create strong bonds. At work, and especially in PR, it should be as natural as breathing to make you stand out from the crowd, or even prevent accidents.
So, how to translate this skill into social media, which is a vibrant landscape that challenges us to keep up with rapidly emerging information? Well, here comes social media listening strategy, that includes:
- Social listening vs. social monitoring: key differences
- Four benefits of social listening for PR
- How do you create a social listening strategy?
- 9 social listening strategies for PR
- What is an example of social listening in Public Relations?
- Social listening FAQ - all you want to know
Ready to start monitoring your client’s social media? Try Media Monitoring right away, or keep reading.
Social listening vs. social monitoring: key differences
Let's start with the very core of the matter. What is social listening and how does it vary from social monitoring? Below you can find the definitions, if you want to dig deeper into this topic, can check out this thorough comparison.
What is social listening?
Social listening is the practice of actively monitoring and analyzing conversations and mentions of a brand/topic/product across various social media platforms.
A social listening strategy usually covers tracking keywords, hashtags, and sentiments to gain insights into audience interests and trends. Social listening data helps to understand your target audience's point of view and plan the next moves accordingly.
What is social monitoring?
Social monitoring is based on tracking and observing online mentions and activities related to a brand or topic on social media platforms.
Following relevant conversations allows the brand to keep up to date with what people say about it across social media platforms.
Four benefits of social listening for PR
Following the social listening definition, this includes analyzing the collected data to understand the audience's intent. But how can your agency benefit from this?
1. Identifying opportunities
Social media listening tools allow you to follow mentions and trends. This may help you recognize opportunities for your client’s brand to actively participate in ongoing social conversations or initiate discussions that align with the brand's objectives.
2. Real-time actions
If you use a social listening tool you have access to all mentions and news in real time. This means you can receive instant alerts about updates and events, which gives you a chance to respond to emerging trends or crises as soon as they arise.
3. Creating meaningful relations
Your social listening efforts should aim at building a relationship with your audience. Make a bond through meaningful conversations. Moreover, with the right social listening tool, you can get actionable insights and data about journalists, outlets, their habits, and their latest publications, keeping your relationships with them even more relevant and tight.
4. Customizing monitoring to your needs
Social listening tools allow you to set up custom alerts, track keywords, and much more. Tailor features according to your needs to make the most of the tool.
How do you create a social listening strategy
First, you may ask: what is a social media listening strategy?
In a nutshell, it is a comprehensive plan that outlines how you will actively monitor, analyze, and respond to what is going on across various platforms. Now, we should address an even more important question.
But how to prepare a social listening strategy?
🎯 Set goals and desired outcomes
While creating a strategy the first step is usually the same – establish your goals. Before you begin, it's important to have a clear understanding of your destination.
Consider the possible outcomes you wish to achieve with your social listening strategy. Here are a few examples:
- Learning about the newest social media trends
- Spotting an emerging PR crisis
- Evaluating your social media marketing campaign outcomes
- Competition research
- Discovering new markets/niches
💰 Do the market research and estimate your budget
One of the most important social listening tips you can get is to set up your budget and evaluate the market before strategy creation.
See the pricing and the number of mentions per month you can get. Compare it with your numbers. These aspects may be very influential while searching across various social listening tools and their plans.
👉 Come back to this step once you set your strategy and take a second look at it. See how many types of mentions you want to track and redo the calculation to verify all the numbers.
✏️ Pencil in a choice of a social listening tool
To pick the best social media listening software, write down your options first. If you want to analyze the possibilities, we've gathered a list of over 15 social listening tools, so you don’t have to do the full research on your own.
Emphasize the features that matter most to you. Is keyword monitoring essential on all platforms, or does it apply only to specific ones? What about sentiment analysis? Should the tool be integrated with any others?
👉 Consider your must-haves, write down your options, and come back to the table after comparing them and knowing your full strategies.
Looking for a social listening tool? Check Prowly's Social Media Listening feature and follow social conversations!
9 social listening strategies for PR
Benchmarks may be very helpful while creating your first (and future) social listening strategy, so don't hesitate to steal these strategies:
1️⃣ Build meaningful relations with clients who don’t tag you
As mentioned before, social listening is pivotal if you want to build a relationship with your target group.
To do so, bond with those who don't tag you on social media.
Every now and then, people might skip mentioning your account on purpose, but it's also pretty common for them to accidentally misspell your name or the names of your products. Nevertheless, let them know you see them.
The solution is to monitor the names of your business, products, and services, along with their common incorrect spellings.
Here's an example of how to do it with ease using Prowly’s Media Monitoring:
Enter your brand's name. If you've selected engagement as one of your metrics, you have the option to filter mentions based on the specific number of comments, reactions, or shares.
Pro Tip: However, please be cautious and do not select the "exact match" option in this case so you can see all the variants and misspellings too.
2️⃣ Understand where to be present in the media
You don't have to be no. 1 everywhere.
Evaluate where your target audience is the most active and which platforms are the most important for them. Focus on these channels and execute your social listening strategy there.
3️⃣ Listen and instantly identify trends
One of the biggest benefits of implementing a social listening strategy is instant trend identification. Making use of them could be good for your PR as well as your popularity, so:
- Analyze social media to identify the buzz.
- Adapt your actions and benefit from trends.
Using social media hype might be one of the most low-cost and low-effort actions that could bring you many profits in both the short and long term.
4️⃣ Keep track of competitors’ activity (and mistakes)
Social listening strategy examples involve not just monitoring trends but also keeping an eye on competitors.
Depending on your tool, it should provide key engagement data, such as the number of interactions and views (for example, Prowly gives you these and more). You can also discover opinions and conversations about your content.
Knowing these, you can focus on:
- identifying the issues and concerns that connect with your audience (and taking care of them)
- generating valuable content such as articles, studies, and infographics
- engaging with users who have expressed dissatisfaction with your competitors
Start tracking your competition with Prowly. Follow their actions and learn from their mistakes (instead of yours).
5️⃣ Understand your position in the media
Once you get to know your environment, it's time to understand where your place in it is. Analyzing social media through a proper and adequate social listening strategy should give you an overview of your position.
One PR metric that may give you a hint is Domain rank:
This widget illustrates the ranking distribution across all domains where mentions were located. It assesses the organic visibility of each mention by considering their estimated monthly traffic.
The closer the number is to 1, the more significant the domain, indicating a broader audience.
To put it simply, the more mentions you have on high-ranking domains, the more visibility you'll gain.
6️⃣ Show the value of your work when reporting
Your social listening strategy may be a way to highlight your efforts and show your results. How to do it?
👉 Use Tiers to classify mentions based on importance
For example, with Prowly you can categorize domains by importance for publishing articles.
You can assign multiple domains to each of the 6 tiers, ranging from the most (Tier 1) to the least important (Tier 6). Tiers are set individually for each search query, allowing flexibility based on your PR goals.
👉 Use Mention backlinks
Highlight the traffic source and your SEO input.
👉 Use Share of Voice (SOV)
Who is and how often are they speaking about your brand – this is what SOV reflects. Use this metric as one of your social listening strategy's crucial pillars.
👉 Use Domain Authority score
Yet another key SEO indicator – DA shows how likely a website is to rank in SERPs. The closer the score is to 100, the better.
7️⃣ Measure the result of a PR campaign
Apart from just keeping an eye on how things are going, data obtained while social listening may come in handy for:
- Planning goals for your future campaigns
- Figuring out which groups in your target audience were the most active – helping you create ads and content that really connect with them!
What is a social listening strategy for companies? A great basis for future (and very successful) PR campaigns.
You can read more about specific ways to measure PR campaign results in these articles:
- PR Reporting: How to Measure Media Coverage
- How to Use Sentiment Analysis in PR
- How to Measure Brand Sentiment in PR
- Advertising Value Equivalency and its Alternatives in PR
- Media Mentions Guide
- UVPM Metric Alternatives
8️⃣ Discover new audience spaces
Social listening strategy is a great way to explore new places where your target audience gathers. Dive into discussions about trends, competitors, and your business on various forums, communities, and social platforms.
Don't be afraid to try new channels, you should be where your audience is.
Trust Prowly with this research and spot the places where your target audience is talking about you.
9️⃣ Spot and mitigate potential crises
Where actions are, there crises may arise.
Let's say you're running a restaurant. One day, you come across a customer's post on social media complaining about a mix-up with their food order.
Your immediate steps should be:
- If you can identify the issue: Quickly rectify it. Then, reach out to the customer, assuring them that the matter is being addressed.
- If you can't identify the issue: Express genuine concern. Respond to the customer's post, asking for more details about their experience.
Why the urgency?
In the era of social media, customers anticipate rapid problem resolution. Here, at their full strength, come social listening and dedicated tools such as Prowly. Detect crises immediately and take care of them before the harm goes too far.
What may become even more handy are email notifications.
Set them on key topics and mentions and do not fall behind ever again.
Get to know all about social media listening and monitoring from The Complete Social Media Listening Guide for Public Relations.
What is an example of social listening in Public Relations?
It's high time to discuss some social listening examples and show the tactics in action. Let's witness firsthand how useful it might be:
Example 1: tracking viral topics and events
Some hot topics cool off very fast, some stay hot for longer.
In both scenarios, you should keep your finger on the pulse and make the most of them.
One such hot topic that lasted longer was the Depp vs. Heard defamation case.
If you want to refresh your memory, here's a case study where we tracked conversations across various digital channels to analyze the media coverage around this event. It resulted, among other things, in the data you can see in the charts below. And it was even before we introduced social media listening!
Now with Prowly's new social media monitoring feature, the analysis would be even more insightful.
Example 2: tracking brand-related mentions
You may want to track not only your brand mentions but your product or key services as well. You can do it in a flash with social listening tools.
For example, one can track OpenAI (the brand) and ChatGPT (the keyword).
But you can do better.
You can also include competitors, like Google's Bard.
Social listening FAQ - all you want to know
What is the purpose of a social listening strategy?
The main goal of social listening is to monitor, analyze, and leverage conversations happening on social media. By doing so, one can improve the brand's actions, making stronger connections with their audience, and always keep one step ahead of the competition.
How do brands use social listening?
Generally speaking, brands may use social listening for:
- Influencer marketing
- Brand monitoring
- Crisis management
- Campaign effectiveness
- Content strategy
- Portfolio improvements
Thanks to following the news about the brand, they can create a comprehensive plan as well as react in real time to any surprising events.
Wrapping up your social listening efforts
In business, keeping your fingers on the pulse plays a vital role in your company's development and image. And that's why social listening should become a part of your PR strategy.
It allows you to deeply understand your target audience and thus forge a better relationship with them, and do more.
The stronger the bond, the higher the chances they come back to you and bring new potential customers. Moreover, your brand may become known from your upfront social media activities or your superior communication with your audience.
There is no better way to make good PR.
