If you have read my other two posts, you should be up to date on how to be a good listener, why social listening is important, what to listen to and how to create a social listening strategy.
Today I am going to talk about what comes after you’ve listened in and gathered some intelligence.
This step is all about the message. General things to think about include the following. How are you going to address what’s been said? What is the goal you want to accomplish? And most importantly, what is the call to action.
1. Create a Messaging Strategy
The first step to consider is what you want to say to people who have talked about your brand, industry or keywords you have been monitoring. Since you will find people talking about many different topics you should consider addressing each one differently. How will you deal with the rants? How will you deal with the rave? How will you deal with the questions? What is your tone? How do you want to represent your brand? These are all things that you should be looking into when creating your messaging strategy.
You will also want to create a message strategy for each different network that you are monitoring. As each social network is different, they all need to be addressed differently. For example, Twitter allows you to use 140 characters.So when creating your messages on this network you need to make sure they are precise and to the point.
When you are monitoring keywords for leads, you have to think about how you are going to open up the conversation. Questions work best. People are generally interested in talking and will respond. If you see someone saying they are hungry for pizza, and you are a pizza company, you might want to respond with what kind of pizza is your favorite? They will respond. And boom, now is your chance to send out your call to action. Remember emails are key. I will go into detail in a different post.
Keep in mind that something might come up in your listening that you might not have prepared for. That’s ok. Be open to adjusting as you go along You also might find that some messages work better. That’s an indication to you that you should follow suit.
2. Create a Response Strategy
Once you have a general idea of the types of things you will say for each potential mention, you will have to think about the response strategy. Consider the following. Will you respond to each one? Who will respond? How long will you take to respond?
In my experience as a community manager, I was the one responding.That’s just want community managers do. You might not have a community manager, and that’s ok. You might want whoever manager your twitter account to respond. Or you might be the one responding.Depending on the size of your company this role will be different.But no matter how big of a company you are, never forget the importance of it.
When it comes to responding to each one, that might depend on the amount of mentions you get.Or how active you want to be. In my opinion rants should be addressed always. It is your opportunity to turn a negative person into a neutral person, or best case, a fan! We like that, 🙂 If you are monitoring keywords you might want to test a few and see which work best for your goals. If you find one keyword always generating a lead or converting to a fan, this might be something to think about ramping up.
In general I think it is a good idea to respond within 24 hours at the very longest. Social Media is all about real-time conversations. The quicker you can respond the better chance you have to get that persons attention. On Blogs you can wait a little longer, but with Twitter this rule stands.
Real estate broker says, Location, Location, Location. Social Media People say now, now, now. I made that up. 🙂
NOTE: Use humor if you can.
Now that you have leads, what’s next? It’s all about nurturing and marketing automation. Jason Clegg, our founder will be sure to explain it in a future post.
In my next post, I’ll share with you an example of a successful social listening for lead generation campaign.
If you haven’t read my other blog posts in this series you can do so here:
Social Media Relationship Skills – Listening
Social Media Relationship Skills – How To Create A Social Listening Strategy
Stay tuned. 🙂
