13 Tips for B2B Social Listening Research

Post or Source - When building out your search, you need to think about your listening in three parts: 1) Finding an audience to uncover insights 2) Finding conversation by what is posted in social content, or 3) A combination of sources and posts.

Audience/Source Examples	Post Examples

Brand name - Use your brand name or competitors’ brand names in your query. If a company has an easily misspelled name, don’t forget to include common misspellings too.

@company names - Include social handles for your brand or competing brands. This helps capture conversation where brands are @ mentioned. If a brand has a support social account, be sure to analyze it to understand if that channel can be useful for insights. Example: @AdobeCare or @Illustrator.

Product names - For larger companies like Adobe, product names are key to differentiate in social posts. Examples include: Adobe InDesign or Adobe Illustrator.

Industry buzzwords - Buzzwords can help you understand b2b conversations, what companies rise to the top and the sentiment around those companies. Industry buzzword examples: marketing automation, lead generation, content marketing.

Slogans - While slogans are more popular in b2c marketing, b2b marketers have made strides in branding their companies. You don’t want to forget this when conducting your analysis. Example: InMoment’s "Every Experience Matters" or Lonnie Mayne’s "Red Shoes Living".

Names of key people (in your company or competing company) - Company leadership with a large social presence can help uncover key differentiators about companies on social media as well. Examples: Brian Halligan and Dharmesh Shah from Hubspot.

Campaign names or keywords - Particular words or phrases used on social media, often related to a campaign, can provide a great base to search. Examples: “Be Bold at Work” from Forrester that also includes a hashtag #boldatwork.

Branded hashtags - One of the best ways to see social growth from a campaign or branding campaign is with branded hashtags. Example: #salesforcetrailblazer.

Unbranded hashtags related to your industry - Industry hashtags have really taken off and can help pinpoint conversations online. These are great ways to find key audiences or posts to find insight. Example: #contentmarketing, #marketingtips, or #leadgen.

Biography descriptions - Biographies on Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest etc. are great sources of data to define your audience. Example: CEO, COO, Entrepreneur, or SaaS.

Source interests - A source (business or person) can post about certain topics over time, showing they have a preferred interest in a certain topic like computer technology. By building a base query on a source interest, you can query to build an audience or search by that interest. Example: healthcare, internet, or sales.

Post interests - Using AI technology, posts are automatically categorized into posts interests by IAB taxonomies. If you are interested in posts about cloud computing, filtering by posts interests can target specific conversations to start uncovering insights. Examples: agriculture, business administration, or computing.

Conclusion

By implementing these important tactics during researching with social media data, brands in the B2B space can glean more impactful and precise insight about the businesses they are trying to reach. But don’t forget to keep those key questions listed at the top in mind before trying to find insight.

Applying the above b2b social listening best practices will help you build and use social listening queries to find insight.

Ready to see how social listening can help your b2b team? Contact us today to learn more.