![How to build a social listening strategy [4 real examples]](https://blog.hootsuite.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/07/social-listening-strategy-1.png "How to build a social listening strategy [4 real examples]")
A social listening strategy lets you keep tabs on millions of social media conversations. It’s like having an unlimited number of focus groups operating all at once, all around the world.
In this guide, we’ll explain why you need a social listening strategy and walk through the steps to build one.
Key takeaways
- Without a strategy, social listening is just noise. A clear plan helps you turn conversations into action.
- A social listening strategy needs goals. Your goals shape what you track, how often you check in, and how you respond.
- Insights are more valuable when they’re shared. Getting the right information to the right teams can drive smarter decisions across your org.
- Even the best strategy needs the right setup. A platform like Hootsuite helps you collect, analyze, and share insights all in one place.
A social listening strategy is a plan for using social listening to gather information that can help your business succeed.
Like any good strategy, a social media listening strategy starts with clear goals. From there, it’s all about planning how to gather the right data to support those goals.
You’ll also need to include a plan for analyzing your data and sharing your results and strategic recommendations.
A social listening strategy helps you listen with purpose. It keeps your efforts focused, actionable, and tied to real business impact.
Here’s how a strategy makes all the difference:
Focus your listening on what matters most
Instead of tracking every possible conversation, a strategy helps you decide what’s actually worth tracking. With clear goals in mind, you can zero in on insights that support smarter decisions.
Turn data into direction
A social listening strategy creates a clear path from insight to action. Rather than collecting data and letting it sit in a dashboard, you can translate what you hear into recommendations and next steps.
Move from reactive to proactive
Without a strategy, social listening can feel like putting out fires. You only respond when something goes wrong.
But with one, you can spot trends, changes in brand sentiment, and early warning signs of potential issues before they snowball. You know which conversations require quick action, and which point to bigger shifts.
Tie social listening to real business impact
A strategy makes sure your social listening efforts connect to real business goals. You’re not collecting data for the sake of it. You’re using what you learn to improve customer experience, protect your brand name, keep a positive online presence, and more.
TL;DR: A social listening strategy brings focus, purpose, and direction. It turns social data into valuable insights that actually move the business forward.
You can build a strong social listening strategy by following these steps:
- Map out your purpose
- Identify priority keywords and topics
- Pick a social media listening tool
- Check in regularly
- React when necessary
- Share insights with stakeholders
1. Map out your purpose
To use social listening strategically, you need clear goals for your social listening plan.
For instance, you could use social listening for:
- Reputation monitoring
- Crisis prevention and management
- Audience or market research (pain points, expectations, customer feedback)
- Lead generation
- Competitive intelligence
- Customer engagement
- Brand awareness
- Understanding brand perception
- Sourcing user-generated content (UGC)
- Identifying potential partners and influencers
You don’t have to limit all of your social listening activities to one goal. But you do need to pay attention to what’s most important.
Start by reviewing your organization’s existing strategic goals and KPIs — not just the social team’s goals. After all, social listening can help teams across your org, from customer support to product and digital marketing.
Then, map social listening directly to those organizational goals. Identify the priority areas where social listening can have the greatest impact.
In the process, you’ll develop your own social listening KPIs. These are the backbone of your social listening strategy.
2. Identify priority keywords and topics
Next, plan out the keywords and topics to monitor.
For instance, say you’re focused on reputation monitoring. You’ll want to track mentions of your brand, product names, and executive names.
Or, maybe you’re focused on competitive intelligence.
In this case, you’ll want to watch all the same types of relevant keywords, but related to your top competitors.
It’s also a good idea to follow broader conversations around your industry and specific niche. This approach supports ongoing competitor analysis.
Lastly, clarify which channels to prioritize for your social listening plan. With the right social listening tools, you can monitor multiple social channels from one dashboard. But it’s still worth discussing where you’ll dig up the most useful information.
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3. Pick a social listening tool
Social listening creates a lot of data, so you need the right social listening platform to collect, filter, and analyze what people are saying. Otherwise, you’re left with an overwhelming bowl of data soup.
Every Hootsuite plan includes tools to help you get started with social listening (and then bring it to the next level). And, it tracks conversations across all major social media channels, including Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, Twitter (X), TikTok, Bluesky, and more.
Use Quick Search to discover trending hashtags, brands, and events worldwide, or dive deeper for personalized insights on your brand. You can track what people are saying about you, your top competitors, your products or services — up to two keywords tracking anything at all over the last 7 days.
Plus, you can use Quick Search to analyze things like:
- Key metrics. Are more people talking about you this week? What’s the vibe of their posts? Hootsuite Listening doesn’t just track what people are saying — it uses enhanced sentiment analysis to tell you how they really feel.
- Top themes. How are people talking about you? What are the most popular positive and negative posts about? Which relevant conversations are you showing up in?
- Results. Ready to get into specifics? The results tab will show you a selection of popular posts related to your search terms. You can filter by sentiment, channel, and much more.
And if you want to go even deeper, our upgraded listening can show you sentiment over time, top influencers in your space, audience demographics, and much more. Interested in a free demo? Book one now.
We’re pretty excited about these industry-leading social listening capabilities. But we realize Hootsuite’s not the only social listening tool out there. We’ve got a whole post of the 13 best social listening tools to help you choose the one that’s best for you.
4. Check in regularly
Determine how often you’ll review your social listening data. The right cadence will depend on your goals.
Some social listening data requires (at least) a daily check-in. For example, say you’re using social listening to find customer questions or high-priority conversations. Obviously, you’ll want to check in often.
If you’re using social listening to gather data for longer-term strategy decisions, you can check in less often. That said, you still want to establish a cadence to benchmark changes over time.
You can also use alerts in your social listening tool to notify you of spikes in conversation or unexpected changes in social sentiment. That way, you can step in early and stay ahead of issues.
5. React when necessary
Once you start listening, you need a plan for how to act on what you find. Not every insight calls for the same response, so it helps to decide this ahead of time.
The first type of reaction is day-to-day engagement. These include customer questions, brand mentions, and other conversations that your social team can handle directly.
Next is the crisis-response reaction. This happens when your social listening strategy flags a potential PR or brand crisis brewing on social media. In this case, the social team should put a crisis management response plan into action.
Finally, decide how you’ll respond to bigger-picture insights. Social listening will surface trends, patterns, new competitors, and bigger shifts over time. You may not need to react right away, but they should feed into your long-term planning and strategy.
6. Share strategic insights with stakeholders
Social listening can help the whole business, but only if the right people see the insights.
More than half (56%) of social marketers say their organizations don’t fully understand the value of social media. That’s why it’s important to share what you’re learning and why it matters.
A good social listening tool (like Hootsuite) makes this easier by turning data into clear reports. You can share audience insights, rising topics, or industry trends.
Not sure how to turn data into clear takeaways? This is an area where AI can really help.
It combs through mountains of data to highlight areas of greatest potential impact. The AI-powered tools built into Talkwalker build custom data models using natural language processing to highlight tangible, actionable results.
Let’s take a look at four social listening strategy examples. These case studies highlight how real brands use social listening to guide business decisions.
1. A leading spirits brand: Contest inspiration and strategic shift
It’s tricky to market alcohol products on social media. A leading spirits brand wanted to better understand their target audience. They were looking to build lasting relationships and ongoing brand loyalty. At the same time, they faced cuts to the marketing budget.
They implemented a social listening strategy to identify new ways to forge customer connections. The data they gathered helped identify a group of relevant influencers to amplify their social content.
They also discovered that their audience liked contests and social media challenges, so they responded by creating their own challenge-based contest. It brought in more than 18,000 registrations and a significant amount of user-generated content.
What about longer-term strategic insights? The brand realized the importance of a community manager to identify customer needs going forward. This was an important strategic shift.
2. Yves Rocher: Social listening to guide product development
Yves Rocher is a French beauty brand focused on natural cosmetics and personal care products. The brand must strike a balance between quality and price. At the same time, they want to be at the forefront of developments in the natural beauty industry.
They implemented a social listening strategy with three key goals:
- Understand consumer behaviors related to beauty products and routines
- Gain insights from the scientific community to guide decisions about ingredients and packaging
- Track media coverage to understand public opinion on beauty and cosmetic topics
For instance, Yves Rocher uses social listening to monitor perception of specific ingredients. This allows the brand to identify changing expectations early. They then have time to adjust formulas or develop new products.
They also use social listening to learn about new materials that might make packaging more eco-friendly.
The brand identified some key insights to guide its social media marketing strategy. For example, consumers are no longer focused on using cosmetics to hide flaws.
Instead, they now view beauty products as a component of self-care. They want an inclusive brand that embraces individuality. This insight was crucial in revamping their social media strategy.
3. Zoo Zurich: Sourcing visitor feedback and UGC
Here’s the thing about being a major tourist attraction: people will post a lot of social content about their experiences with your brand. But since they’re not specifically seeking an interaction with you, they won’t always tag you in their posts.
That was the case for Zoo Zurich, the most visited leisure attraction in Switzerland.
Brand reputation is especially important to Zoo Zurich. It is a nonprofit organization that relies on donor support.
When the social team got serious about tracking mentions of the brand on social media, they soon realized that much of the online conversation about the institution was happening out of view. Visitors were not using tags or brand hashtags.
Identifying this visitor feedback became a driving purpose of Zoo Zurich’s social listening strategy. As did uncovering missed opportunities to engage with social media users.
They now use a social listening tool to get daily reports of all new mentions (tagged or not). They also developed a UGC campaign using the hashtag #FollowerFotoDerWoche (follower photo of the week). Many of the photos shared by visitors later became inspiration for a social media post or UGC feature.
4. Dubai TV Channels Network: Data-driven content production
It seems obvious that social listening data could guide social content creation. But what about brands whose main offering is content? For them, this data can steer production decisions, too.
Dubai TV Channels Network created a social listening strategy with two main goals in mind:
- Gauge customer sentiment. Understand overall satisfaction with the network and steer marketing campaigns.
- Get real-time feedback on individual shows as they air. Then, use this information to guide future production decisions.
Social listening gives Dubai TV Channels Network rich data about audience reactions to a show. They know how viewers feel about everything from plot lines to specific characters. They gather this data across multiple social media platforms in several languages.
Dubai TV Channels Network’s social listening reports display positive and negative sentiment changes after each episode airs. Then, the social team sets up reports to send automatically on a weekly basis to relevant stakeholders. (They also send monthly reports to departments that don’t need real-time data.)
Based on the ability to gather such rich, actionable insights, the organization shifted its strategy to prioritize audience feedback to optimize future seasons.
FAQ: Social listening strategy
What is a social listening strategy, and how do enterprises build one?
A social listening strategy is a plan for using social data to support real business goals. It goes beyond social media monitoring by analyzing patterns and sentiment at scale.
Enterprises can build a social listening strategy by setting clear goals, choosing the right keywords and channels, using an enterprise-ready social listening tool (like Hootsuite), and sharing insights with the right teams.
How does social listening help improve brand reputation and customer insights?
Social listening helps improve brand reputation and customer insights by showing how people really talk about your brand online. One of the most important benefits of social listening is the ability to spot and address issues early. Over time, it also reveals patterns in feedback that can improve customer experiences.
What are best practices for creating a social listening strategy for global brands?
The best practices for global brands include setting clear goals, tracking keywords in multiple languages, and focusing on the regions that matter most. Global brands should also align listening efforts across teams and use consistent reporting. This helps ensure insights are easy to understand and act on across markets.
What metrics matter most in a social listening strategy?
The metrics that matter most depend on your goals. Common social listening metrics include volume of mentions, sentiment, share of voice, and trending topics. These metrics help you understand how often people talk about your brand, how they feel, and how you compare to competitors.
How can social listening tools be used for competitive analysis?
Social listening tools can be used for competitive analysis by tracking competitor mentions, sentiment, and key topics. This helps you see what customers like or dislike about competitors. It also helps you spot gaps, opportunities, and emerging trends in your industry.
Hootsuite brings social listening and social media management together in one intuitive dashboard. You can gather business insights AND schedule all your social content, engage with your audience, and report on your wins. See Hootsuite in action — start a free 30-day trial today. No strings attached.
