Social listening is used to discover data for many different reasons. In my previous posts, we focused on proactive crisis management and removing noise when collecting brand mentions. Now, let's explore a use case that goes beyond brand tracking - content ideation and community management opportunities.
At Solvay, a trends and insights report that aims to surface, explore and track emerging trends in our key markets is how we uncover new communications opportunities. Each quarter, we develop a series of strategic recommendations to fuel content creation and brand messaging based on what our audiences discuss online.
The insights report is used to inspire our editorial calendar over the months to come. However, we also need more tactical approaches which capture real-time opportunities and enable Solvay to drive the industry chatter. What we see as a successful approach to social listening for communications opportunities is to combine both strategic in-depth reporting with tactical moves. It’s the latter that I want to focus on today!
Step 1: Boolean!
First, you need to build a boolean for each of your key markets or categories of interest. This is the boolean we have built for Hydrogen Economy:
When building your search, think about how your audiences use words to describe a topic in a tweet - their language is likely to differ from the corporate messaging you’re used to. Use the Explore widgets to check if your results are yielding accurate mentions.
Step 2: Alerts
In order to be notified if your keywords are triggering a spike in conversation, you’ll want to use Spike Detection alerts. For Solvay, alerts are sent when the search volume is much higher than the search's baseline. Social alert baselines compare levels of conversations for specific time frames to calculate an average - the baseline.
The alerts display example posts that moved the needle above the threshold (your baseline). Here’s one of ours:
Step 3: Engaging in relevant conversation
When reviewing the hydrogen alert, I discovered the Bloomberg Green article and wanted to engage with it because the content focused on electrolyzers. Although our brand wasn’t mentioned, the topic is very relevant to our business. Solvay’s LinkedIn update promoting the piece was the second most engaging post about hydrogen so far this year!
I shared the above example to demonstrate how a relatively simple tactic, the alerts, and ongoing monitoring of a category conversation, can have a positive impact on your audience engagement. Small actions taken often are particularly important to teams who are time-poor or simply have no resources to work on in-depth reporting.
I’d love to hear how you approach this challenge in the comments…
