As the country begins to reopen slowly, the effects of COVID-19 are not only apparent in most aspects of our lives, but also in our social media habits. According to Facebook, total messaging increased by over 50% in countries hit hardest by the virus, and in Italy specifically, Instagram and Facebook Live views doubled in just one week. Twitter reports that there is a COVID-19 related tweet published every 45 milliseconds and #coronavirus is the second most used hashtag of 2020.
With the rush of activity level on social media, it’s clear that keeping a pulse on what people are saying about your brand can not only inform your communication strategy, but also measure the success of your messaging and the tactics you employ.
What is social listening?
Social listening goes beyond monitoring the comments and reviews on your own social pages. It captures what is said about your brand or company across the entire social media landscape. What are people posting about you on their own channels? How are you being referred to in comments and conversations amongst friends? It is in these moments that you can capture a candid pulse on the sentiment of your audience, reactions to a recent campaign, or an interpretation of your brand messaging.
How can social listening inform your communication strategy?
If you’ve studied communications, you’re likely familiar with Dr. Stephen Covey, who says, “If I were to summarize in one sentence the single most important principle I have learned in the field of interpersonal relations, it would be this: Seek first to understand, then to be understood.”
By capturing and measuring the conversations about your brand on social media, you’ll begin to see trends around what your audience finds important and engaging. Social listening will help you to understand what types of stories will garner the best response from your audience. Not only that, it’s a tool to help pinpoint potential influencer partnerships and brand ambassadors.
How can social listening help you pivot your messaging during a crisis?
During times of crisis, such as the pandemic we are currently in the throes of, adjusting your communication strategy and corresponding messaging is crucial. Social listening is an intuitive way to monitor and analyze the conversations happening around your brand to help pivot your messaging.
Social listening is also a measurement tool after you’ve begun to carry out your messaging strategy. Use this tool to measure the reaction to your brand’s messaging during crisis and adjust accordingly. Watch overall sentiment and dive deeper into what parts of your messaging are garnering the reaction you want in your audience.
Social listening involves more than what’s being said to your face – it monitors the depths of social media, including those conversations between friends. There are many different social listening tools available. At Element, we use multiple tools and programs that help us to capture the full picture of what’s being said about your brand.
Contact us to learn more about Element’s social listening and monitoring capabilities.
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