K atie c ouric

Social Listening
Social listening is the process of monitoring digital conversations to help
you understand what customers are saying about a particular brand, person,
or industry online. It’s used to surface feedback that can help differentiate
your brand, product, or service. Arneson’s team at Paramount used social
listening to understand which aspects of films people most connected with.
His team would observe the films that did really well and pay attention to
what people were talking about. Was it the story that captured their
attention or the characters? This is valuable information that helped them
understand how to market current and future films. It helped them learn
what people were excited about.
It’s important to know that this process takes time and a lot of data
analysis. Arneson urges that you can’t just look at the top queue of subjects
that people are mentioning. You have to dig deeper and find out why
they’re talking about what they’re talking about. You have to interpret the
messages and use your best judgment to create new content or adjust the
content you have and see how people respond. Then you listen and adjust
accordingly again. It’s an ongoing observation-and-testing process because
it’s never clear-cut. People won’t come out and say, “I love this video
because it makes me feel really good about myself.” It will never be that
obvious.
Arneson advises that it’s important to watch trends change over time.
Observe how people respond to your content or product at the onset, and
then notice how their reactions change as time goes on. Doing so gives you
a backstory to understanding what type of content and messages are
important to push. Over time, you’ll develop the ability to use what people
are saying to inform your ongoing efforts and change the conversation to
meet their needs.
Having the backstory will also give you a grounded point of analysis to
help determine if there are comments you can ignore. Perhaps a person
complains about a piece of content. But then you go back and see that in the
past others enjoyed similar posts. If you have the data, you’ll have a point
of comparison to keep things in perspective and determine which problems,
if any, are worth reacting to. If you’ve kept records over time you’ll have a

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broader picture and clearer understanding of how and why people are
engaging with you.
If you’re a large brand and the amount of information is overwhelming,
you can always hire a company to help you perform social listening.
However, most of you are probably at a stage that’s manageable enough to
do it yourself. Just read and record the comments on your posts and use the
search tools that social platforms provide to look up keywords around your
content. Additionally, you can go to your competitors’ pages and record the
comments and information about the type of content that’s performing well
and not performing well on their social pages. Make sure you record what
you learn so you can go back each week or month and do a comparative
analysis.