How to get started with Web listening (and why a Twitter search isn’t enough for you)

Do you know that a Twitter search is not enough for you to do web listening? Find out why here.

When I talk about market research based on web listening, many people ask me why it is not enough to simply use social networks, or Google itself, to listen to the web.

“Whyon earth do you need special tools?” I heard myself asked several times.

Or even worse, when I ask a company if they already have tools to listen to the network, I repeatedly hear, “Yes,of course, we listen to the network: we do Twitter searches when needed.“ Or, “Sure, we set up a Google Alert.”

Better than nothing, I would say, but doing social media searches or using Google’s alert service is not listening to the network. It can be useful, certainly, but only to get the pulse of the situation and see the latest posts and articles published on a certain topic. End.

Why don’t you just research on Twitter and listen to the network?

The reason is very simple. The search function of social networks was not created to offer you useful data and information for your business and marketing activities.

Instead, it is designed to push the user to discover new things, follow other accounts, and ultimately spend even more time on their platform.

It is in no way dedicated to those who have to do market analysis and draw conclusions!

Likewise, alert services are there to make you aware of new articles about you or your company, not to help you derive all the information that is so important to your reputation and strategies.

Here, then, are mainly four reasons why you need a truly dedicated tool.

1. The completeness of the data collected
2. The overview of what is happening online
3. The ability to pull advanced information out of the data, such as user demographics and buzz seasonality
4. The simplicity with which you can do this, without having to waste hours and hours putting all the data together

Understanding these differences is a crucial point, because otherwise you will always be left with the worm in the back of your brain that “you could have done everything for free, too,” or that “but after all, I don’t need software.”

Therefore, I decided to go into these points one at a time.

Read also: Social Listening Best Practices: how to get started and not make mistakes

The completeness of the data collected by social listening tools.

When you do a social media search or get a Google Alert email you are getting a series of posts and articles, usually the latest ones.

If your goal was just to stay updated on what’s going on now, then all right, you’d have your answer, right?

Ni, because the searches you can do with these basic tools are very simple, through just one keyword at a time… And very rarely do people use just one word to indicate a company, a person, a product, an industry!

Think of the world’s most famous brand, Coca Cola: to refer to it you can write “coca cola,” or “cocacola,” or just “coke,” or “coke.”

Through simple tools such as social networks and alerts, you will have to do a word-by-word search if you want to get the results a little more complete. And even then, you’re probably missing something!

In contrast, if you want to track mentions of the Ferrari car brand, searching through social alone will find millions of results. But many of them will be about Ferrari sparkling wines and all the people with the last name Ferrari!

With a suitable tool, however, you can build even very complex searches to collect all the conversations about a topic and to exclude all the mentions that don’t fit, cleaning up the noise and getting only what you need.

All this by searching not just one channel at a time, but all channels together!

The overview that network listening tools grant you.

A social media search or email alert does not give you any insight, only a series of posts and articles published on a single platform at a time.

You don’t just want to see the posts and articles, though, right?

You want to know in total how many have been in a period of time, and you probably also want to know how the number has changed day to day–maybe even putting together multiple sources and comparing multiple searches, competing companies.

Yeah, and then there was the groundhog who made chocolate.

Jokes aside, you may have already realized that doing all this through social media alone is virtually impossible, because you would have to manually count posts and articles, day by day, source by source!

And here we come to the next point….

Simplicity and time saving given by the use of web listening tools.

Imagine that you (or your analysts) have to go into all the social networks daily, do dozens of searches, count the results and transcribe them into an Excel spreadsheet, categorizing them post by post.

I think you would agree that after a week doing this job you would drop everything and retire to live in a Zulu community where they don’t even know what a computer is yet!

Yet, I have known analysts who do just that for a living: they turn into little robots, modern neo-amanuenses, and endlessly copy article and post titles onto endless excel sheets, compiling sentiment, author data, and so on.

I confess that I too once had to do a similar job, because I was working with a marketing agency and one of our clients-a multinational corporation! – wanted us to do this work, but refused to use suitable software.

Rather, he wanted us to use software chosen by his Group, but it simply collected posts from the various social networks WITHOUT any supporting data. Nightmare!

After four hours doing this work I was talking in binary and thinking in morse code.

What I want you to understand is that it is not materially possible: collecting and cataloging data is a job that has to be done not by people-who can add much more value in other ways-but by machines, computers in short!

A dedicated network listening tool takes care of this directly, collecting posts and categorizing them automatically.

Just the hours of work saved by your poor automaton – pardon, employee – are worth choosing software that does this job!

Read also: Social media listening and monitoring: 7 practical applications in the enterprise

Plus, if the network listening software does the job…

…You have the ability to analyze data and have the reports nice and ready at your service!

With web listening tools, charts, tables, and views for peering inside the data are already in place.

Your poor employee doesn’t have to waste as many hours racking his brains over pivot tables and extrapolating data on Excel to produce a shred of a report for you, but can concentrate on reading the charts and turning the results into useful information.

And the data collected is much more in-depth: a simple Twitter search will never extract information from you such as the demographics of users and the area in which they are located, the most frequent words and hashtags, the most shared links, the total coverage of tweets and retweets–unless you count them all, which is humanly impossible.

In conclusion

As you may have guessed, those who delude themselves that it is enough to use social media such as Twitter as it is to listen to the network are like those who try to look at the stars with theater binoculars instead of using a telescope!

Want to learn more about web listening and understand what we at CMI can do for your business?

Please feel free to contact us: we are here to help you!