Plus, one word of caution.
Seeing what people are talking about on social media is a great way to learn about their hopes, fears and struggles. For brands, social listening can provide valuable insights that a consumer survey or focus group might miss.
“It’s a technique to spot trends, identify emerging topics and explore audience interests,” said Brandon Boatwright, an assistant professor at Clemson University. “It’s a tool for detecting potential issues and monitoring competitors.”
As helpful as social listening tools may be, it’s also easy for PR pros to get bogged down in the amount of data they can generate.
In a learning module hosted on Ragan Training, Boatwright outlines the main metrics a PR pro should focus on, with one important caveat.
- Conversation volume: How many consumers are talking about the topic? How frequently are they talking about it?
- Reach and impressions: How many consumers are seeing the conversation?
- Engagements: How many consumers are actively interacting with the conversation through likes, shares or comments?
- Share of voice: How big is the conversation volume about your brand compared to your competitors?
- Influencers: Who is shaping the conversation?
- Location insights: Where do the consumers either listening to or engaging with the conversation live?
- Sentiment analysis: How do consumers feel about the conversation?
The caveat: Boatwright notes that while sentiment analysis can provide a good temperature check of where consumers stand on any given topic, it’s not always reliable due to the nuance and complexity of language.
People can be sarcastic, for example. What a word means in one context might differ in another. Slang presents another set of challenges.
“No platform can 100% determine whether a conversation is positive or negative, or anything else,” said Boatwright. “Language is continuously evolving.”
He advises PR pros to do their own analysis and build their own dictionary based on keywords related to the brands they oversee.
While social media tools are getting better, Boatwright added, “they can never fully replace the need for human interpretation.”
Watch the full session, titled “Social Intelligence for Public Relations Pros,” on Ragan Training.
The post The social listening metrics every PR pro should track appeared first on PR Daily.
