Join the Conversation: Active Listening on Social Media By Lauren Cleland New Media Specialist, Explore Georgia #TeamGaSocial

Why Should We Listen? Because: 3 out of 4 Americans use social technology 1 27% of time spent on the internet is spent on social media sites 2 Social media listening helps us understand real conversations, real people, and what they want. Social media can increase or decrease a brand's impact on their campaign success. #TeamGaSocial

How to Listen Identify relevant keywords Ask questions and probe Identifying your audience’s collective voice can be translated into your marketing or communications strategy. Open the floor for co-creation Create an open forum for opinions & discussion. When brands act like their consumer’s ideas are valuable, brands demonstrate that they’re actively listening. Close the loop Let your audience know that their voice resulted in change #TeamGaSocial

Active Listening in Action A result of a keyword search #TeamGaSocial

Finding a Balance Content Creation: 80% engaging & original 20% new fan outreach (via keyword searches) Don’t alienate old fans on the quest for new ones #TeamGaSocial

Tools for Active Listening Hootsuite: Hootsuite is a social media management system for businesses and organizations to collaboratively execute outreach across multiple social networks from one interface. It allows organizations to streamline workflow with scheduling and assignment tools to reach audiences with geo-targeting functionality. Wildfire Interactive: Wildfire is one of the world’s largest social media marketing software providers. Its marketing suite combines social promotion and advertising software, mobile and desktop page management and messaging and real-time analytics. As a division of Google, Wildfire provides a holistic way for brands to manage and optimize their marketing efforts and spend across all digital channels, including search, display, video, mobile and social. Engage121: Engage121 helps measure and track social success. It offers tools to boost traffic and engagement as well as target specific groups of users or demographics. The platform allows for the management of multiple brands while keeping communication and workflow separate for each account. Involver: Involver helps the world’s most ambitious brands create meaningful connections across the social web. They work to develop coding language for social applications – which allow front-end developers to take full control of their brand pages and multiple channels to be managed from a single interface. This then allows for the elimination of branding inconsistencies across channels, geotargets, languages and devices. Additionally, the platform makes it easy to collaborate across teams. Expion: Expion is a social software company. It provides scalable enterprise-grade software to listen, content plan, publish, moderate, analyze, govern and share across multiple social channels. The system produces real-time community intelligence, giving brands and retailers the power to optimize consumer engagement, service and ad performance. Its Marketing Insights Technology allows companies to integrate multiple social streams in real-time, creating highly visual analytics to discover patterns, breakouts and trends. #TeamGaSocial

Sources 1.Forrester, The Growth of Social Technology Adoption, MarketingLand, April 2013 #TeamGaSocial