Goal: Setting up a social listening campaign that will identify, categorize, and operationalize the way your company deals with social mentions most effectively.
Ideal Outcome: You will be able to know what people are saying about your brand on social media and act accordingly.
Why this is important: Setting up a social listening campaign will help you offer better customer support, as well as make more informed business decisions, based on what clients, potential clients, and people in your industry are saying about your company.
Where this is done: In Google Alerts or Hootsuite, depending on the financial resources you are ready to invest in this.
When this is done: The sooner, the better.Who does this: You, your Social Media Manager or your Virtual Assistant.
Environment setup
Get access to your company’s social media accounts. You will use these to connect your monitoring tools and to reply to social mentions.
Decide which tool you want to use. For this SOP, we will exemplify the social listening campaign set up using two tools: a free one (Google Alerts), and a paid one (Hootsuite). Here are some of the pros and cons for each of these tools:
Google Alerts:
Pros:
- It’s free;
- Easy to set up;
- Great for smaller businesses that are just starting out in digital marketing.
Cons:
- It won’t send you alerts for all social channels, just those that whose messages are indexed in Google (e.g. Twitter.)
Hootsuite:
Pros:
- Easy to set up;
- Can help you gain access to social mentions on a wide range of social media networks;
- Allows you to reply to these mentions directly from the app (no need to separately log into each of the social networks your brand is present on);
- Allows you to assign specific issues to specific members of your team (e.g. assigning complaints to your Customer Service Specialist);
- Allows you to schedule social media posts and get metrics.
Cons:
- It’s a paid tool (although it does offer a free plan with limited functionality)
- Might be limiting for large businesses and enterprises
Set up Google Alerts
Put simply, Google Alerts uses the same crawlers as Google Search does to find the search queries you set it up for. If you decide to set up a social listening campaign using Google Alerts, follow these steps:
Go to Google Alerts and enter a query into the search box. You can set up as many alerts as you want—we recommend you get started with each of the following for your business:
- Brand Name + Industry/Category
- Brand Name + Common complaint
- Brand Name + Review
- Brand Name
- Founder/CEO name
- Product Name
- Competitor Names
For each of the terms above, follow these next steps.
Once you have entered a search term, click on “Show options” .
Adjust the options according to your preferences.
Note: If this is your first time setting up an alert for your business, we recommend you don’t narrow your results too much. Instead, allow a few broad alerts to come in and narrow based on the results to filter out irrelevant results.
How often: as it happens, at most once a day, or at most once a week. If you have a small team, you can choose a daily frequency. However, if someone on your team is in charge of social listening, you can go with the most frequent option.
Sources: automatic, news, blogs, video, and so on—we recommend you go with automatic.
Language: this will narrow results to a specific language.
Region: a relevant region for your business.
How many (results): only the best results, all results.
Deliver to: the email address you want to use for these alerts.
Click on “Create Alert”. Repeat with all the selected types of queries described in step 1.
Below the alert setup form, you will see the type of results you are likely to receive in your inbox according to the entered criteria. If they are not suitable for what you are looking for, use the special operators:
Quotations (“search term”) Use quotations around your phrases when you want Google Alerts to send you emails regarding mentions that contain a very exact term. For example, “Tommy Griffith” will only reveal mentions that contain this exact term (and not just part of it or with other terms in the middle).
Minus operator (“search term” -“topic to be ignored”) This type of operator will ignore certain topics from your alerts to make them more relevant for you. For example, I used “Tommy Griffith” -“baseball” (to avoid alerts about Tommy Griffith, the baseball player.)
OR operator (“search term” OR “search term” OR “search term”) If you want to create an alert for terms that are more or less synonymous or very close in nature, use the OR operator. For example, “Clickminded” OR “Tommy Griffith” will reveal mentions that contain either of these terms.
Plus operator (“search term” + “search term”) If you want to create an alert for results that must contain several specific terms, use the plus operator. For example, “Clickminded” +“best” will reveal positive reactions/mentions to ClickMinded courses.
Set up Hootsuite
While Google Alerts is a free tool you can use both for personal purposes and for business purposes, for free, Hootsuite is a much more powerful social media management platform.
It will allow you not only to listen to what people are saying online about your brand, but also assign conversations, respond directly from a single platform, as well as publish and get social media analytics.
In Hootsuite, you will create a dashboard of “streams”—these are updated in real time with your social mentions.
To set up your Hootsuite, follow these steps:
Go to Hootsuite and sign up for an account. You can start with a free plan, or pick a free trial of one of their paid plans.
Once you have your account set up, log in and go to “Dashboard” (green button in the upper right hand side of the screen).
Click “Add Social Network”.
Connect the social network of your choice, following the steps on screen. You will likely be directed to a login page for each social network, where you will need to log in with your company’s credentials.
Repeat this with all the social networks you want to monitor.
Next, we’ll start creating “streams” to monitor. Select the social network you want to add a stream for (in our example, Twitter)
Click on “Search” to Search for a custom term you want to add in your stream.
We recommend you get started with one stream for each of the following terms:
- Brand Name + Industry/Category
- Brand Name + Common complaint
- Brand Name + Review
- Brand Name
- Founder/CEO name
- Product Name
- Competitor Names
Once you have entered your search term, click on “Add Stream”. Repeat the process with all the search queries listed above.
Like with Google Alerts, you can use search operators to narrow your results and exclude irrelevant mentions:
Quotations (“search term”) Use quotations around your phrases when you want Google Alerts to send you emails regarding mentions that contain a very exact term. For example, “Tommy Griffith” will only reveal mentions that contain this exact term (and not just part of it or with other terms in the middle).
Minus operator (“search term” -“topic to be ignored”) This type of operator will ignore certain topics from your alerts to make them more relevant for you. For example, I used “Tommy Griffith” -“baseball” (to avoid alerts about Tommy Griffith, the baseball player.)
OR operator (“search term” OR “search term” OR “search term”) If you want to create an alert for terms that are more or less synonymous or very close in nature, use the OR operator. For example, “Clickminded” OR “Tommy Griffith” will reveal mentions that contain either of these terms.
Plus operator (“search term” + “search term”) If you want to create an alert for results that must contain several specific terms, use the plus operator. For example, “Clickminded” +“best” will reveal positive reactions/mentions to ClickMinded courses.
Manage your social mentions
A social listening strategy should also include the actual management of the mentions.
We recommend grouping them in different “buckets”, according to their nature. This will allow you to easily assign every mention to the person most competent to resolve it.
Categorize your social mentions. The social mentions buckets you could use are:
- Complaints or customer service requests: current users might go to social media if they are having issues with your product / service.
- Praise: you will probably get some positive feedback via social channels.
- General questions and sales enquiries: these typically come from people who are doing research want to learn more about your product or service.
- Content opportunities: if you run a type of business that causes users to create user-generated content (for example: travel, restaurants, remodeling, etc), you might want to get permission from your customers to use this content in your marketing campaigns.
Once you have created your social mentions buckets, establish a clear procedure for each of them (modify the guidelines below to fit your business / team):
Complaints:
- Recommended response time: <30 min. The sooner you reply, the better—fast responses are perceived positively in 99% of the cases.
- Procedure: take the conversation to a private channel (email, phone, direct messages, etc.) and out of the public eye as soon as possible, and quickly address the issue there. For example, direct users to a support email.
- Who is responsible for this: These requests can be managed by your social media team if they are trained in providing support to customers. If they aren’t or if the problem’s complexity is high, direct to a customer support specialist.
Managing praise:
- Recommended response time: <12h. You can allow yourself a bit more time here, since it’s not a stringent issue.
- Procedure: Give thanks and amplify (retweet, quote, share) to build social proof with your audience.
- Who is responsible for this: Typically, your social media/community manager can manage this.
Managing general questions/sales queries:
- Recommended response time: <2h. You want to set a response time that’s reasonable enough to allow you to give proper, accurate answers, but you don’t want to take too much time—this is or could become a sales opportunity.
- Procedure: create internal documentation / FAQ, so that social media specialists can quickly and accurately reply to general questions. If the question and answer is not listed there, direct it to the sales department.
- Who is responsible for this: Social media specialist or sales representative.
Managing content opportunities:
- Recommended response time: <12 hours. You want to set a response time that allows you to check if this is a viable content opportunity.
- Procedure: Analyze the content opportunity, then reach out to ask for permission to use the content. Once approved, post it on your social media channel / website / marketing materials and credit the user who initiated it.
- Who is responsible for this: Marketing team.
Build your internal documentation:
- Gather a catalog of the most common questions for each bucket.
- Write your best answers to each of the questions.
- If necessary, build resources on your website/support documentation to send to users as a link.
- Keep adding common questions you encounter in your social media mentions to the internal FAQ file.
Assign different actions to team members.
Hootsuite will allow you to assign different tasks to team members. For example, you could assign all negative tweets and customer complaints to your Customer Service Specialist.
To do this, click on the “+” sign under the social mention you want to assign and select the team member to task with this.
You and your team members can also reply right from the Hootsuite platform. To do this, simply click “Reply” under the social mention you want to handle.
