Social Listening

What is Social Listening?

In today’s rapidly changing society, it is crucial to be aware and responsive to your audience’s needs. Social media platforms are increasingly becoming a space for people to express their needs and opinions. Monitoring and analyzing social media discourse, or social listening, provides a real-time approach to detect social developments that are discussed online. Social listening can help you gain information that can help to inform your strategies and online content, as well as to monitor and evaluate the success of your online strategies. 

Social Listening can be used to: 

• Research the broader online landscape, to map out which stakeholders, such as politicians or media outlets, are discussing specific topics online on the different social media channels. Being aware of trending topics and knowing which actors mingle in discussions around certain issues enables you to tailor your campaign for current needs of young people and to improve our strategies on how to approach stakeholders to provoke social change. 
• Monitor and analyse what topics are discussed on your own social media platforms, providing valuable insights for any organisation serving an audience. What is on the minds of your target group? 
• Evaluate the success of your own online activities (such as digital campaigns). 

How Do You Practice Social Listening?

• Collect data from online platforms that are owned by your organisation and other platforms that are publicly accessible (i.e., social media channels and news articles that are not behind a paywall or log-in)
• Search the online (social) media sphere based on keywords, author names or hashtags. 
• After collecting the relevant content, you can analyse these posts and articles with Natural Language Processing methods to reveal insights in what is being discussed. Natural language processing (NLP) is a branch of artificial intelligence that helps computers understand, interpret and manipulate human language. NLP draws from many disciplines, including computer science and computational linguistics, in its pursuit to fill the gap between human communication and computer understanding. 
• Analyse who is addressing these topics (significant people, organisations or media outlets), and how these discussions change over time. 

How Can Social Listening Help Improve Your Work? 

Your campaign strategies can be shaped by the insights on the topics discussed by people on social platforms and by the topics addressed by stakeholders online. These insights can help you improve your  content and engagement strategies, and help identify strategic partners. 

By tracking content and campaigns online, you are also able to track your performance. You can monitor how often content is shared and it if amplified by media and/or other stakeholders. Dashboards can help you monitor data in real time and you can optimise strategies based on developments in the online debate. 

Limitations of Social Listening 

Due to privacy restrictions, it may be the case that you are only able to collect data from your own platforms (e.g., your own Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and YouTube channels), and platforms that have an open data sharing policy (e.g., Twitter, blogs, forums, and news articles). Content shared on apps like WhatsApp or Snapchat are private, and therefore restricted from data collection. To collect data from open platforms, clear indicators are needed to retrieve relevant data. These indicators can be hashtags, Twitter-usernames, URLs of websites, blogs, or forums, or keywords. If keywords are used to identify relevant messages, the keywords need to be clear and specific (also synonyms, and the single and plural versions of words should be provided). It is not possible to search for topics that cannot be indicated by specific keywords. 

What Social Listening Tools to Use? 

There are a number of different tools available for social listening, some paid and some are free:

CASE STUDY: Huna Libya – 16 Days of Activism 2019 Twitter Campaign The 16 Days of Activism Against Gender Based Violence is an yearly international campaign coordinated by the Centre for Women’s Global Leadership and is used by activists around the world as an organizing strategy to call for the elimination of all forms of gender-based violence. In 2019, the campaign started November 25 and ended December 10. Many RNW Media country teams contributed to this international campaign and provided social media data to the PMEL team to evaluate the performance of their campaign afterwards. Huna Libya expanded their usual analysis and provided real-time insights before, during and after the campaign.    They conducted an online context analysis before the campaign to understand the online context in which the campaign would be launched. These insights could be used to strengthen the content and engagement strategy of the campaign.   They tracked their campaign hashtag and the online debate about GBV during the campaign. Campaign monitoring was applied to track the performance of the campaign, to adjust the campaign real-time if necessary, and to be able to use encountered content immediately for their campaign.    They evaluated their campaign afterwards. This evaluation showed how the campaign evolved and performed, and which stakeholders amplified the campaign.    Social Listening Applied – A Step-by-Step Process    How did the Huna Libya team use Brandwatch as a social listening tool to monitor and evaluate their campaign?  The section below details the step- by- step process of how the RNW Media team employed social listening in the 16 Days of Activism 2019 campaign.   STEP 1: QUERY CREATION Before starting your context analysis, you need to create a query. This means making sure that you identify the content you want with the social listening tool. In this specific case these queries are mentions related to GBV. With the query, you can search for mentions including certain hashtags or keywords, mentions written by specific authors, on specific sites, URLs, and links. The query ‘tells’ Brandwatch to collect matching content that appears from that day onwards on different platforms. For this project, data was collected by tracking keywords and hashtags concerning GBV, the twitter channel of Huna Libya, their campaign hashtag and their partner’s campaign hashtag. The keywords were searched for in combination to maximise the chance of collecting relevant mentions. See an example of the query used by Huna Libya below:     STEP 2: CONTEXT ANALYSIS   For your context analysis, you need to create a dashboard to summarize and visualise the incoming data. This shows which people or organisations are discussing GBV on Twitter, what they discussed and if any other information on GBV appeared online. Brandwatch always generates a summary of the data (see figure below). Besides the summary, you can also make use of word clouds to show what people discuss, in this case regarding GBV, and it is even possible to filter this word cloud on what women and men have shared.     STEP 3: CAMPAIGN MONITORING  During the campaign it is important to keep track of the progress. The dashboard was monitored 3-4 times a week so the Huna Libya team could anticipate and follow up on unexpected changes, new authors and new content. In the case of the GBV campaign, no new people or content appeared online initiating discussions about GBV. Most authors were sharing mentions from Huna Libya. The general discussion on GBV increased a lot during the 16 Days of Activism. The start and end of the campaign show main peaks.    STEP 4: EVALUATION  The evaluation can be done on multiple levels. You can research how much the campaign hashtags were used and when, the volume of a query, and if important stakeholders amplified the campaign (sharing the campaign content with their audiences). In Figure 4, you can see how the volume of the GBV query in Libya changed over time. It was discussed most actively during the 16 days (25th of November – 10th December). After the campaign ended, the mention volume dropped.