Social Listening: A Human-Centered Approach to Your Online Strategy

As social media’s technological implications continue to evolve, we must remind ourselves of one unchanging fact: social media is at its core about the human. Companies and brands today are increasingly aware of this fact and have more and more turned to social listening, a qualitative approach to market research, as a method for a rounding out their marketing strategies.

Social listening is based in anthropological methodologies and can be thought of as eavesdropping on online public conversations. Much like how an anthropologist records everyday conversations in ordinary environments, listening to social media is the collection and perceptive understanding of people’s thoughts in their natural online networks. Social listening gives marketers a glimpse into the thoughts and conversations that customers express in an impartial manner and setting familiar to them.

The transit industry is arguably one of the best at staying attentive to their customers. Your service already necessitates an understanding and facilitation of basic human needs, such as mobility and safety. As stewards of taxpayer money, you strive to take into consideration the transportation needs of your constituent communities when making planning decisions. But yours eyes and ears can’t be everywhere at once. Holding a town hall every night is logistically infeasible, and running telephone or ridership surveys are yearly endeavors that cost.

How then do we practice social listening in the transit industry and take advantage of this burgeoning methodology? How do you create strategic intelligence out the vast amounts of social data available on networking platforms?

Start by looking for the signals. One or small groups of comments may not be a representative sample of your entire population but are valuable because they could point you to a nascent phenomenon or a developing trend. Take for example an important issue your agency is tracking, such as sentiments towards your next ballot initiative or opinions on a service change. A signal to look out for is to observe whether new people are talking about that issue? Often the same people are conversing with one another about their identical positions on a topic. However, if someone or group of people newly enter the conversation, you want to know that soon and reach those people with your own messaging.

Data mining of social media is an effective way of keeping track of these changes, but with this technique there is not a way to gain a 100% representative sample of your population; the technology can’t do this in real-time quite yet. This fact shouldn’t stop you. There are thousands of conversations going on in your online network right this moment. A social listening approach may open you up to new ideas and perspectives you have not considered before.

So before you simply look at the engagement numbers as a measure of online outreach success, realize it takes a human mind to recognize, appreciate and make meaning out of an online sphere buzzing with social activity. Marketing managers for commercial brands and companies say that social listening grants them a superior understanding of their clientele. It’s time for the transit industry to seize this opportunity and to make use of the social conversations taking place in front of them now.

 Zach Hernandez is a content analyst for AlphaVu.