Every minute of every day, people are sharing their thoughts, experiences and opinions on social media. While social media is prevalent in a large portion of society, in most cases it is only for personal use – whether its liking, reading and/or commenting on other people’s content, posting life updates/announcements or sharing others’ content and news stories.

Somewhere in between those tweets, posts and images, people often share their thoughts to the public at large. For organisation keen to understand what people think of them, here is a great opportunity to access a huge amount of relevant data.

If you are such an organisation, have a go at answering the three simple questions below to find out how well you know your audience.

• Whose opinions might be relevant to you?
• How do they feel about your organisation and the topics related to what you do?
• What topics and trends are they passionate enough about to discuss online?

If your answer is “I don’t know” to the above questions, you need to focus your efforts on understanding which stakeholders and groups have an online presence, starting with knowing who your online audience is.

This is where social listening comes in.

Social Listening is the process of monitoring digital conversations to understand what customers are saying about a brand or industry online. It is highly effective for PR strategies, including crisis response and management and social media outreach, and useful for organisations to measure their social media efforts.

Organisations are regularly looking for ways to regulate their online presence, engage with their users and managing the flow of data to manage public relations. The role of social media to provide key insights into your audience is not understood well, despite a large percentage of their audience being available on them.

How does Social Listening fit in with engagement and consultation?

Social listening is particularly effective in the pre-consultation stage. There is an opportunity to use social media to tools to carry out ‘social listening’ to gather information on what is already being said, discover influencers who could be important stakeholders, and other key information that could shape your consultation.

It is a brilliant tool for observing what is already being said about the issue you are consulting on or going to consult on. Let’s have a look at sudden service changes. If a facility has been threatened with closure, be it a walk-in centre, day-care centre or even a road, it is most likely going to appear on local news channels. One thing leads to another and individuals begin to share these news stories on their private feed to make their friends and community aware. Often, people like to comment and share their views about the issue. Social listening will enable you to draw out all the negative/positive comments, this will give you a general idea about what people think about a specific issue prior to the consultation. This also enables you to clarify or challenge misinformation that may be getting shared in relation to your consultation.

A few years back, tCI was involved in a European project, funded by the European Commission, to find out what people in Europe are saying about the Erasmus Programme (European student exchange programme). We did this by using a software that has the ability to search across the internet using the filters we applied, such as country, gender, age, sentiment, language etc. We used it to find out people’s thoughts on studying abroad, working abroad and all other Erasmus related queries.

All these digital conversations can be harnessed for a number of purposes such as:

• Informing policy, decision-making processes or consultations
• Identifying digital audiences, spaces and influencers
• Improving the quality of information, redressing the balance of misinformation
• Tracking trends and anticipating issues
• Being more responsive to citizen needs
• Improving take-up of formal participation opportunities
• Addressing the deficit of active listening on the digital channel
• Extending a network of contacts for later consultation

Social Listening has a huge potential for the public sector and it’s surprising to see that it hasn’t generated more interest in recent years but as people are spending more time online, it can give you, as consultor, a more informed view on your consultation.

If you’re interested in learning more about social listening get in touch here. The Institute offers advice and guidance as support.