Admittedly listening and monitoring is not the glamorous part and I know time is of essence on a lot of this (as the pace is so fast) but how can you be authentically participate in conversations if you haven’t planned out your responses or got the business processes supporting the campaign?
There’s lots of hype and talk about setting up and running social media campaigns. Then there’s the books and seminars on how to use Twitter or Linked in or blogs…..but they only attribute a small part to the initial listening and monitoring aspect of the campaign.
It’s like learning to ride a bike, but not knowing where the best places are for a bike ride or even understanding how to get there.
Understanding and knowing what conversations are going on and fundamental to planning your campaign.
Top 10 tips on why you need to listen & monitor before you start participating:
- Understand which sites / communities / groups have the most active and the most influentially conversations (it’s not just about volume of the chatter)
- Identify the main influencers in the group & then devise strategies to gain their trust
- Work out your strategy for initially participating in the conversations – which site to start on
- Learn from your competitors mistakes – are they already engaged, have they made any mistakes which you can learn from
- Develop your content plan – as you can develop content which you know people are asking for
- Test your business processes for answering the questions had the response times (as the responses need to be timely not days after someone has asked the question!)
- Let you review if you have resourced the campaign sufficiently – is the volume of conversations too much to handle vs resource level?
- Help you understand the tone of voice you should be taking
- Put the tracking in place so you can test that it works
- Measure the metrics prior to the start of the campaign so you have a baseline to work from
Don’t fall down the usual one of diving straight in and then feeling that you aren’t getting the ROI or meeting your metrics…….as you won’t have planned the strategy effectively.
Great post. I couldn't agree more, it's definitely the boring part of the campaign but the time you put in doing the spadework at the start will save you the time tenfold later down the line.
In my experience you also have to allow plenty of room to tear it all up and start again sometimes. Be prepared to follow the engagement rather than insist on the validity of your hunches/assumptions. I like the analogy of sailing a boat, you can steer it but the wind is essentially your boss.
Thanks for the prompt comments and glad to hear you agree.
Following your hunches rather than actual proven conversations will lead to a poorly planned and inefficient campaign.
Loving the analogy of the sailing boat…..works a treat.