This is a standard advice by any social media consultant worth his salt. Yes, before you jump into social media with a alot of enthusiasm and no strategy, understand this: Social media marketing is no different from traditional marketing. You need data to back you up when developing a strategy. You need a strategy to help you develop a community. The only way you can get data when it comes to social media is by listening and analyzing conversations about your industry or your brand.

Here are 5 areas you should be aware of when listening to the conversations on the social web.

The 5 Ws of social media monitoring

Who - This is by far the most critical part of the equation in this concept. One of the things that you want to find out is who are talking about you? Is this person influential in his community? When he say something positive or negative about your brand, does he attract many comments? These are people that are important to your success in social media because you want to make them a brand advocates, especially if they are influential in their community.

What – The ‘What’ answers will give you very good ideas of how to create your content for your audience. You want to find out what are they talking about your industry? Are they reacting to an experience they had with your company? What are the keywords use? What are the sentiment when they use it? Are they positive or negative? Do not restrict the conversations to just you, your industry or your brand. Conversations about your competitors can also be monitored. What are your target audience saying about them? With these data, you can then create content that is relevant to your target audience.

When – When are they talking about you? Is it only before, during or after an event? For the retail and F&B industry, it could be when you have promotion or a magnificent sales going on. For bigger companies like Microsoft, Starbucks or Apple, it could be when they launch a new product or announce their quarterly earnings. Ultimately, you want to know if there is a timing when conversations about you take place so that you know what interest your target audience and why. The challenge for most companies (especially for those whose conversations happen during ‘on-seasons’) are how to get conversations going during the off-seasons.

Where – Identify the different channels where people are talking about you or your products. Are there conversations in Facebook, blogs or even forums? Which of them have a community specifically talking about you? Knowing the channels where they talk about you help you to identify key influencers and participate in the conversations as well. Remember, it is much easier to join a conversation than to create and nurture one, so start looking around to see where your target audience hang out.

Why – This is one area you need to constantly update yourself with. The ‘Why’ give you answers on what motivates your audience to talk about you. However, you can’t solve this entirely on listening alone. You have to ask your target audience directly. Therefore, it’s best to listen and participate in conversations so that you can establish a rapport with the people in the community before you do the asking.

Listening is a vital part for any company who are interested in jumping on to the bandwagon of social media marketing. Have you started your own listening program yet? Tell us what you heard?

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