1 Select a brand, product name or firm that you want to “listen” for. You can use the same brand as for the practice exercise, or you can choose a different one.
2 Explain what the primary purpose of your social listening is for this exercise. Make this very specific so that you can get some meaningful results. You should focus primarily on Twitter for this exercise although it would be useful to experiment with other channels to see the difference in results.
3 Take some time to brainstorm and test all the keywords and terms that you can think of that might relate to your brand. Plan how you will combine these terms into searches that will get you the most relevant results for your stated purpose. Use the search tips on Boolean searches that we looked at in class. Run your searches and refine them before you select the best ones to use for this assignment. Then:
a. List all of the keywords and terms that you will use for this social listening exercise
b. Using those keywords and keyword combinations, list all of your searches. You should have at least 10 well thought out searches. You must demonstrate your understanding of using simple Boolean search techniques to retrieve the most relevant search results for your social listening streams.
4 Run all 10 of your best searches in Hootsuite, creating a separate stream for each search. Take screenshots of each stream to show a typical result set for each search.
5 Summarize what your social listening exercise has shown you about conversations and mentions of your brand by referring back to your primary purpose (from section 2 of this report) and evaluating how successful it has been in providing you with some relevant data. Provide evidence of your findings with screenshots of individual posts to show what people are talking about and the tone of those conversations.
• Were conversations directed specifically at your own brand’s Twitter account (ie. by using @username) or did the mentions simply surface in conversations? If the latter, what terms were people using to talk about the brand?
• What was the perceived volume of direct and indirect mentions?
• Were they primarily positive or negative in sentiment, or mainly neutral?
Conclude the exercise by reflecting on whether this exercise in social listening was useful to you as a marketer? Why or why not? How might you change your search strategy next time to improve your results?
