Are you social listening in the Dark?

First off, let’s explain what “social listening” actually is.

If you’re using social media, chances are you have your notifications switched on, and are only checking and answering private messages if you get an alert. Then you’re social monitoring.

To get to social listening, you need to go much further, and deeper.

The aim of the game with social listening is analysing conversations, reflection and understanding, tracking conversations and sentiments around words/themes/brands.

This is so we can discover opportunities and develop content and conversations for your audiences, that they really want to engage with.

With only “30% of tweets talking about your brand, don’t include your “@”” we can stand out from the crowd by doing good social listening. At the moment only 24% of brands say they actively social listen.

In a recent talk Liz delivered to the CIPR NW group at UCLAN in Preston, we shared a list of our top useful and mostly free tools for social listening…

Boardreader.com

Backtweets.com

Mentionmapp.com

Socialbakers.com/free-social-tools

Socialmention.com

Mention.com

Social-searcher.com

And something that’s really exciting to us is understanding and recognising sentiment in comments and engagement.

Our favourite free sentiment tool – www.csc2.ncsu.edu/faculty/healey/tweet_viz/tweet_app/

We are sure, you’re already aware of how to easily and quickly  find out the most relevant trends, which includes trends.google.com and the native statistics on Twitter etc.

But here’s where it gets even more exciting – Dark Social!

You’ve heard of the Dark Web right? Well, dark social is similar. For example, dark social could be a Facebook messenger chat, or a Whatsapp private message. If people are sharing your content, but not publically, this is classed as “dark social” as you can’t see clearly the analytics like you can with a public post on a Facebook page.

84% of on-site shares by channel, globally are from dark social, and percentages have remained steady since 2016.

So how do we go someway to tracking these?

Our favourite dark web tracking tool, is keyword hero, which uses lots of data sets to match the information in the big data, to those analytics you have that are usually “(not provided)” for your keywords in Google Anayltics for example.

This is why we love keyword-hero.com

You can read the geeky stuff about how they do it here – https://keyword-hero.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/08/How-he-does-it-extended.pdf

Then, our favourite tool for tracking dark social is AddThis.com (or another sharing coding button you can install onto your website). This we you’ll be able to track more details on how many people are sharing your content on which platforms, based on the buttons they interact with.

We’ve also loved learning about the AI drive tech here at DigiEnable, and we’d suggest you check out the AI generated user profiles from SocialBakers, as well as @datamonsters’ machine learning algorithm for sentiment and sentence tracking.

With everything, there’s usually a question over ROI (Return on investment) and the answer isn’t usually sales!

Here are the reasons we value as ROI with social media…

  • Relationships not sales
  • Brand recognition
  • Increase brand reputation
  • Increased web traffic
  • Building advocacy
  • Growing your community
  • Promoting products/services
  • Savings on outbound marketing

We hope you found this useful, if you want any help with your social media, just let us know!

You also might want to sign up to our monthly e-update which you can do via the sign-up box on this page, which shares lots more!

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