To ensure you are efficiently analysing your brand sentiment, it’s important to implement a set of best practices. Some we use and recommend are:
Review your competitors’ marketing efforts
When you learn from people who are already doing well, you’re in essence skipping the mistakes they made on the way to getting where they are today. Side-stepping the mistakes of your competitors will save a lot of resources! Review their campaigns; what worked? What didn’t?
Determine when to engage
Gospel within our agency: “Don’t feed the troll”. Having the ability to see exactly what your customers are saying can make you feel like you want to respond to absolutely everything. While it’s generally a good idea to engage with your customers online, some conversations are not beneficial to anyone. Create a set of parameters – what doesn’t warrant a response? When is it necessary to block a user?
Be ready to act
When your social listening exercises highlight a concern from your customers you must be prepared to act. This means setting up open channels of communication amongst different internal/external teams and ensuring that clear processes are in place for action.
Choose your tools carefully
“We shape our tools and after they shape us” – put perfectly by Marshall McLuhan.
Choosing the correct tool in any situation can make or break your efforts. Taking the time and effort to carefully research the social listening tool that will work best for you will repay you a hundredfold over time.
Know and track your metrics
Which metrics matter to your organisation? Build a model for sentiment analysis around what matters most to your business – otherwise you’ll never know how you’ve been benefited by engaging a sentiment analysis tool! There are lots of things you can track. Here are examples of metrics we feed back to our clients:
- Sentiment: How many mentions about your brand are favourable or otherwise? What is your brand perception?
- Popularity: How many mentions are you getting per day, week or month?
- Influencers: Who are the influencers within your industry? How significant are they within your industry? Who should you be working with?
- Engaging topics: Which topics get the most likes, replies and reposts? Knowing this will help you understand where to focus your social listening efforts.