Social Listening, Missing the Point? | Podcast S02E03

In the world of content marketing, there’s a rule of thumb content creators should follow: listen to what your audience needs before creating content for them. Now, this may seem like common sense to some but believe it or not, there are businesses out there that are still creating content marketing strategies based on what they feel people want vs. actually listening to what people need. When the truth is, there are already tools out there that can tell you what exactly you should be talking about in your content strategy – case in point, social listening.

With the birth of social media in the past decade, marketers are now more than ever able to mine the sentiments of a selected audience on a specific product. Every time a person mentions they dislike a product, social listening tools can pick up this insight and create a strategy around what might appeal to them instead. And in this episode, we speak with Stephanie Schwab from Crackerjack Marketing who has over 20 years of experience in how social listening has benefited brands and their content marketing strategy.

“Not just a way to monitor your brand mention”

According to Stephanie, there are two types of social listening – ‘real-time listening’ which essentially monitors brand mentions as and when a customer is talking about the brand and ‘reporting listening’ which keeps track of the general conversations that the target audience is also talking about outside the realm of the brand. While real-time listening monitors the brand mentions, reporting listening can really help a brand understand how to stay relevant to the audience.

“Pick a social listening tool that supports your needs”

With so many tools out there, one could easily get lost in knowing which tool works best for them. In fact, not all social channels are created equal for social listening and not all social listening tools are optimized for all social channels either. So in the case of experimenting on paid tools, it would be best to test as many out as possible and to work with a professional social listening analyst who can dissect the data and give a more accurate understanding of what the audience sentiment is.

“Social listening still needs human touch”

Ultimately, social listening tools on its own are still only 60% – 70% accurate. When it comes to identifying the human slang, nuances and mixed languages, the machine still needs a human to interpret the data compiled. But the value of the data is ultimately gold as it can easily dissect the most important topics that your target audience is seeking. Stephanie highlights that if you’ve got the right social listening analyst, the investment is worth every penny. So businesses who have not jumped in on this yet are missing out on a key part to strengthen their content marketing strategy.

S02E03 Guest #3: Founder of CrackerJack Marketing. Stephanie Schwab.

Meet Stephanie Schwab. As the founder of Crackerjack Marketing in USA, her two decades of PR and marketing experience have earned her multiple awards including Ragan’s PR Daily Awards, PR News’ Digital PR Awards, a WOMMIE award, a PRNews Platinum award, and an OMMA award. Stephanie also holds a faculty position at Loyola University at the Quinlan School of Business, a professor at an international university at Harbour Space and a part-time faculty member at The New School in New York City.

A SCOOP OF INSPIRATION

Don’t skip this bit.

Social listening tools still require human touch to get a more accurate representation for audience sentiment
Free tools for social listening you can start on now

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