How to Use Social Listening and Conversation Analysis Software to Improve Your Marketing and PR

Social media offers great potential for B2B marketers and PR pros. At the same time, however, social media creates enormous challenges. From the conversations that are simultaneously taking place on an expanding number of social channels, news sites and blogs, you need to be able to filter out the terabytes of unwanted chatter to identify the conversations and information that matter to you.

Further complicating things is that in addition to having to analyze the conversations from journalists and analysts—those who traditionally dominated and controlled the B2B conversations—you now have to consider a variety of other social media users who have strong influence, such as B2B decision makers, consultants, speakers and solution providers.

By being aware of and monitoring all the online conversations—from both traditional outlets and emerging social channels—marketers can better target their news, grow their social footprint and online visibility, make better pitches and better business decisions and choose better and more timely topics for their white papers, webcasts and blog posts.

Social media monitoring software has been developed to help track these conversations, measure a brand’s online sentiment and track keyword mentions by listening to the 140 characters in a tweet or to Facebook updates and, in some cases, blog posts.

However, a deeper level of analysis affords numerous opportunities for marketing and PR professionals, from being able to spot trending topics, the people who are most influencing these topics, the most popular or shared content on these topics and getting insights into the topics most discussed by individual influencers or groups of influencers relevant to your product category.

Social Listening and Conversation Analysis software allows you also to analyze the broader and deeper conversations taking place online beyond just social networks, the context of these discussions, the types of people participating in these conversations and their level of engagement for a specific topic.

How does one use Social Listening and Conversation Analysis software and the information it provides to deliver measurable improvements to their marketing and public relations?

You need to listen to the online conversations that matter to your business so you can target and pique the interest of the right online influencers—at the right time—who are most likely to have interest in and/or share your news.

How does one properly identify the right audiences to engage with? There are four basic things you need to do:

1. Find the journalists, analysts and social voices who have recently written or shared content on the topic(s) relevant to your news.

2. Share their content with your social media networks. And share your content and news with them (and give some context as to why you are sharing the information).

3. Comment on their blogs and news stories that relate to your news. Do so in a non-promotional manner while referencing and/or linking to your content.

4. Connect with (LinkedIn) and/or follow (Twitter) them, thus expanding your network and social footprint.