How To Make Social Listening Work For Your Video Strategy

Have you ever wanted to know everything people say about you behind your back? For example, if someone were spreading misinformation, you could correct them. Or, if they had a question, you could answer it rather than let the speculation continue to spiral. Social listening lets you know what your audience is saying on social media, allowing you to respond appropriately.

Defining Social Listening

Social listening starts with picking keywords and other things to track, such as your brand name and slogans, relevant full names and campaign hashtags, close misspellings of them all, plus the same for your top competitors. This would monitor brand mentions, industry keywords and product conversations, pulling in data over time to show trends and changing sentiments.

There are many social listening tools which allow users to refine a search by location, hashtags, or track changing brand awareness. Free versions of social listening tools often highlight more of the unimportant information, but they are a good way to try this tool as a smaller business.

TechTarget calls social listening “the process of identifying and assessing what is being said about a company, individual, product or brand on the internet.” This includes everything that is publicly posted, such as blog posts, comments, forums, social media and more. Customers are often more clear with their true feelings when not speaking to you directly, and learning both the good and the bad is useful.

But social listening is more than just recording people’s words. You must also consider how you can learn from them, why they said those things and what isn’t being said. Social listening allows a brand to form better plans and strategies by revealing social awareness about the brand’s products and services.

The Benefits of Social Listening

There’s a lot of talk on the internet, only some of which is valuable, so businesses need a social listening strategy, a goal to follow plus the right tools to capture and learn as much as possible. Social listening allows a business to notice brand problems that have the potential to become disasters and work against them earlier, such as apologizing for mistakes or taking down a misunderstood post.

Through this powerful tool, a business can learn what their customers like best and change anything that isn’t working. Take note of the problems people have with an older product or service. When you announce the newest version, consider showing how previous issues were solved, or promote your next product or service based on what people liked.

Others benefit from watching top competitors, learning from their mistakes and successes. See what customers want from a business in your industry by finding the questions they ask or features they talk about most. Social listening gives you the raw data to find brand-relevant lessons and opportunities whenever your industry is mentioned in social media.

Some businesses try responding to every customer, but people don’t like when their social media conversations are intruded on. Never use social listening to find places where you will offer your product or service. Learn from their conversations and make connections where natural, spreading awareness of your brand rather than trying to sell something. Or simply record statistics on each kind of complaint so you can deal with the most common elsewhere.

How Social Listening Helps Video Production

Hootsuite suggests using social listening to discover business problems and opportunities as they enter the public consciousness of social media. Positive or negative reviews make great future videos. Use customer feedback to come up with ideas, such as answering common questions about your product or service so the next customer will have the answer available. If people are frustrated with your competitor and have problems you can solve, your next marketing video should be on that topic.

SproutVideo promotes using similar language in your video scripts to your customers who like your products and services, so they’ll feel a connection with your marketing. Social listening helps you to learn about your customers and make content which appeals to them.

Video distribution should go to where you have the biggest audience already, whether that be YouTube, your own site, or other streaming platforms. Study trending social topics and video formats for each destination to create videos which people will find and care about.

Watch how well each piece of content marketing does, from where a video was shared to what sections got replayed. Social listening tools can show you places people often skipped in videos, allowing you to make future content that does more of what they like.

Social Listening For Your Video Strategy

Marketing strategy can and should change based on topics of current interest. Different social media platforms will bring in different types of responses, and social listening helps businesses form unique strategies for each. Your marketing strategy should take into account which social media platforms get the best responses for a type of content.

Social listening can help your video marketing strategy by revealing seasonal shifts in what people care about and want to know within your industry. The ways in which an organization reacts to what they learn could be anything from directly answering a simple question to adjusting their whole branding strategy. Some strategies are done specifically to prepare for and learn from an industry event or marketing campaign, causing mid-event changes or improving future campaigns.

Awario encourages the use of social listening to learn how to shape and direct your video strategy to reach the intended audience. Research what worked and didn’t work for competitor video marketing so you can learn from them. Marketing campaigns with different versions need social listening to discover which is best and why.

Finally, look for people who spread awareness of your brand simply because they like you, then find ways to support and connect with them. Any time you can support content creators and collaborate with thought leaders, you are making connections that spread your influence.Video production companies like AJI Media provide strategy, production and distribution services. Reach out to learn more!