How Social Media Listening Can Improve Your Content Marketing

How Social Media Listening Can Improve Your Content Marketing When producing content, your number one goal should be to add value for your community. That value might be sharing tactics to accomplish their goals, or lessons on how to make the best use of your product. Or it could be introducing them to tools that will make their lives easier, or even to the best restaurants in their city. No matter what your topic (aka value) is, your content is driven by your community. Listening to your community is an obvious first step to unlocking the power of your content marketing, but it’s one that goes tremendously overlooked. Here’s how you can lay the foundation of a strong and sustainable content strategy by  using social media listening  to hear what your community is saying. When producing content, your number one goal should be to add value to your community.Identify Relevant Topics  to Write About Gather invaluable insights by paying attention to what your community is saying to you, to your competitors, and to each other - problems they’re trying to solve, tools they’re using, and what it is about your brand/offering they like or dislike. Monitor specific key terms relevant to your brand with a media monitoring tool (like Mention) to pinpoint your community’s interests as they relate to the problem you’re solving or value you’re adding. Beyond monitoring your brand name, deciding on other keywords to track is as simple as choosing terms related to the problem you solve and mission of your product. For example, we know that our content can be valuable  to anyone looking to learn more about social media listening, social media strategy, community management, Twitter strategy, and content marketing, so we track all of those terms, among others. We recently noticed a trend in conversations around brand advocates  in our community management feed, so we wrote a post on how to convert five types of customers into brand ambassadors  using media monitoring, which performed significantly well. We chose brand ambassadors rather than advocates because from monitoring these conversations, we learned that both are important to a community ecosystem and often (but not always) theyre one in the same. Brand ambassadors also seemed to appeal to a larger marketing-focused audience. If you need more help deciding which terms to track, check out this  guide to keyword research. Identify Headlines with Viral Potential Swayy.co and Scoop.it are effective tools for discovering what stories your network or community is sharing on social media. You can monitor the content that’s most popular among your community as a whole, or based on a specific topic you track. Forums with upvoting capability such as GrowthHackers.com, Inbound.org, and Hacker News are also great places for discovering headlines that resonate with audiences, by tracking which trend. Additionally, Buzzsumo will show you the most popular posts (measured by social shares) on any specific topic. Use the headlines and topics you identify as inspiration for yours, but put your own spin on it by using your own unique case studies,  for example. Or, take a look at the comments and social shares from these articles and see which section resonates with the audience the most, then produce content that elaborates on that particular segment. You can also monitor the key terms used in these headlines to identify what other related topics your audience may be interested in. For example, weve recently seen a lot of content around the role of emotions and psychology in marketing. This happens to be a topic were interested in, so we will create an alert around it, research the topic further, and brainstorm topics that are unique to our offering. By taking this approach, weve seen our content perform well on these forums. Growthhackers is now the fourth  biggest driver  of traffic to our blog. Discover Where Your Audience Hangs Out Media monitoring and social media listening tools provide you with a vehicle for distributing your content directly to where your community is already sharing information. After all, in order to be heard over the noise that is the Internet, sometimes you have to hand deliver your content to where your community is finding information.