Social Listening Guide - Attentive.ly [PDF]

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Your People Are Talking.

Are You Listening? A collaborative project with

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Your People Are Talking. Are You Listening?

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703.988.3549 [email protected]

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Forward Engagement is tough. Declining organic reach, ad blockers, decreasing email metrics, pay to play on Facebook and stiff competition with cute cats. While the problems are dynamic, the ultimate solution is always the same. Sending the right message, at the right time…you know the rest. But how?

Roz Lemieux Attentive.ly CEO and Co-Founder of Fission Strategy

Most engagement strategies are based on the idea of posting or emailing strategic content from a pre-determined timeline, which is just one way to engage on social or any other channel. Our guide flips the funnel and shows a powerful new tactic that will dramatically increase engagement with this one idea — responding to people as they talk about your work or cause on social media. We’ll walk you through the basics of of social listening and offer game-changing strategies for multi-channel engagement, which probably isn’t like anything you’re doing. The power of social listening isn’t about tracking endless chatter. It’s about smart segmentation so when your supporters talk about your work online, you’re able to reply in real-time, with the right call to action, on the right channel. We’ll show you how.

Cheryl Contee Attentive.ly Co-Founder and CEO of Fission Strategy

Enjoy,

Roz Lemieux & Cheryl Contee Attentive.ly Co-Founders

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What This Guide Will Teach You 1. What is Social Listening and the Benefits 2. Social Listening for Big Moments 3. Why Rapid Response Matters 4. How to Engage Your Influencers 5. How to Use Attentive.ly, Twitter, and

Facebook for Social Listening

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What is Social Listening? Social listening is a relatively new marketing tactic, especially for nonprofits. Looking at the big picture, it was only 2012 when Dell launched their first social media control room, which took 70 staff to monitor conversations! At the time, the ability to respond to the latest news and trends on social that were relevant to their audience was totally remarkable. Today, it’s not only expected, but essential for modern engagement. For nonprofits, what is exciting about advances in social listening is how affordable it has become to process data. Organizations can now use a proven strategy once reserved for the largest commercial brands at a price that leaves plenty of budget for the great work they do. Social listening is accessible — you don’t need a mission control center to listen to your people.

Social Media Listening Defined Social listening is the process of monitoring digital media channels to understand the conversations around relevant topics, or social mentions, so you can better engage those people driving the discussion and participating in it. In other words, it allows you to track relevant search terms on your people, so when they say, “I love your campaign!” you say, “We love your support, and here’s how you can help today.” It’s critical that organizations understand how, and if, their supporters are talking about their key issues. It’s not only interesting to see the nature of the conversation, it also helps inform the content strategy while offering powerful opportunities to reply with real time, personalized multi-channel engagement. By listening to what a key stakeholder is saying on social media, your organization can understand which issues resonate and why. You can literally see how people are talking about your work.

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5 Benefits of Social Listening 

Get the Pulse of Your People

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Often you may suspect a hashtag is trending with your base, but can’t back it up with real data. Social listening is like running a daily poll on your supporters so you have a real-time pulse of your people. Which #conversations can you join that connect supporters to your mission? 

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Send the Right Message When we talk about personalization in the context of engagement, it’s about knowing your audience better so they can be sent the most relevant content where the conversation is happening. This means having the ability to strategically monitor conversations in your CRM and with you social media followers, not the world. The right message could range from a reply to a volunteer who is talking about your work, to an automated email with a CTA, when a search term is mentioned.

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Timing is everything. One of the main benefits of social listening is to increase campaign conversions by sending the right message at the right time. If there is a swell in relevant conversations, seize the moment and send an email or social post when the issue is most likely to gain traction. Modern personalization combines social media insights, social listening, and information you already have in your CRM so you no longer have to guess when to send your awesome content.

Understand What Your Supporters Want to Hear People want to engage with organizations that understand their interests and values. Social listening informs communications and digital teams about what your people want to hear. As a person’s online identity becomes better defined by the things they click on, interact with, and talk about on social media, the more important it becomes to tailor your communications to get their attention.


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… At the Right Time

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Drive Conversions Achieve the best results possible with a powerful combination of social listening and marketing automation. Attentive.ly’s client American Rivers had a staggering 24% petition completion rate for a campaign (an average response rate is around 3%). Each time a supporter mentioned “Grand Canyon” on Twitter or Facebook, that person was placed into a segmented email group and received an automated email asking them to sign their petition within 24 hours of the mention.


By sending automated emails when our supporters mentioned “Grand Canyon,” American Rivers gained 2,500 new petition signers with an impressive 24% petition signature conversion rate, 40% open rate and 0 unsubscribes.

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Who is Talking About You? Since social listening is a fairly new communication tactic for nonprofits, you may be drawing a blank on how you could implement this for your group. It’s likely that the current tools you’re using (CRM, Hootsuite, Tweetdeck, etc), can do part of the job, but pooling all these resources may be somewhat time intensive.

Whom should you listen to? We always recommend listening to people in your CRM or database since those are generally the most engaged and where you’ve invested the most resources. Attentive.ly integrates with the leading CRM’s and is the only nonprofit tool that listens to what people in your contact list are saying.

What should you listen for? 1. Mentions and hashtags. People who are talking about issues that relate to your programs or campaigns. 2. Trending terms and hashtags. In working with over 200 organizations, we have seen a steady pattern of terms and hashtags that change each week — these are trends. Your people are talking about all sorts of campaigns, with a few steady topics that rise to the top. Find your core conversations and trending hashtags that you can engage with week to week. 3. Ride Other People’s Waves. In many cases, top trending hashtags in your CRM won’t “officially” be part of your campaign. But, you can still look for ways to join their conversation organically. 4. Opportunity to engage. Opportunities can range from retweeting your VIP influencers to showing your everyday influencers social love.

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Case Study

In preparing for their #Write4Rights campaign, Amnesty International Canada used Attentive.ly to identify a large number of supporters talking about issues related to their human rights campaigns on social media. Amnesty successfully identified influencers that had already used the hashtag and asked them via DM to tweet during their global day of action.

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How to Engage People Who Talk About You 1. Retweet, Like, or Follow. Okay folks, we’ve seen a steady trend of nonprofits not giving out much social love. When supporters post about your issues, reward them with a RT or at least a Like. If they are a VIP influencer posting about your issue, make sure you’re following them and RT their posts. The goal is to cultivate the relationship, so they will reciprocate with a RT and become more involved with your organization. 2. Email or Direct Message a Call To Action. If people are talking about a term that relates to a clear action they can take, send them an automated email with your Call to Action. This could be a donation request, petition, event invitation, Google hangout, Twitter storm, new report, etc. 3. Create a Facebook Ad. Any time a supporter mentions #YourCampaign, put them into a group that receives a Facebook Ad the next day about #YourCampaign. 4. Join Twitter Team. Borrow a move from the Hillary campaign and ask your supporters to help you spread the word by providing them with content for key events. It’s a great way to turn supporters into ambassadors within their own social circles, and demonstrates how much their voice matters to the campaign.

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The American Friends Service Committee reviews trending hashtags and content amongst their community at their weekly editorial meetings. This helps inform decisions about what action alerts and web content to create for the week.

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Case Study

Rapid Response by American Friends Service Committee A few days after the fatal shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, MO, the American Friends Service Committee (AFSC), a Quaker nonprofit organization which promotes an end to discrimination, noticed a significant shift in focus on social media to the hashtag #Ferguson. They could quickly see that terms such as “police” started trending, not just nationally, but in their own database. Using Attentive.ly to see which AFSC supporters were talking about Ferguson, AFSC created a saved search to see exactly who was talking about Ferguson on Facebook and Twitter. They then invited those supporters to a Google Hangout to hear AFSC’s response to the events as they unfolded. The result was a record high Google Hangout turnout and 74 donations. More importantly, AFSC seized the opportunity to talk about solutions around discrimination as the Movement for Black Lives gained momentum.

Timing is of the essence since many terms are only hot for a few days or weeks. If the term is trending in your CRM, which a tool like Attentive.ly will show you, it means it’s time to engage eveyone who used the term — especially your influencers.

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“ferguson dc protest 112514 2” by Neil Cooler via Flickr CC BY 2.0

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Social Listening for Big Moments You know your big action and event days, but do you have a plan to respond in real-time? Make a list of your moments and create a game plan with these tips to respond in real time, using social listening. 1. Buy-In. This is a great exercise in building trust for rapid response engagement. The idea is to get buy-in for pre-approved content AND criteria for on-the-fly posts you will share or retweet during the event. 2. Prepare content. While you’ll want to create content on the fly as the moment unfolds, aim to have at least half of your posts preapproved and scheduled before the event, leaving time to share creative posts and engage with others during the event. Make sure to also send sample content to your staff. Our partner Fission Strategy encourages blog post preparation with a direct call to action at the end of the blog. “Draft a blog post in advance including what your organization does to address issues surrounding the event, so that you can publish quickly while buzz is at its highest and enjoy inbound traffic to your website. Include a call to action at the end of your blog post to give folks another step to take on your behalf.” - Fission Strategy

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3. Line Up Your Influencers Before Event. Before and during the moment, listen for “the name of event” or #related_terms. You can segment these social mentions into a group called “event mentions” in Attentive.ly. You may even want to segment these mentions further by influencer type such as “VIP Mentions”. 4. Engage People During the Moment. Participate directly in the conversation, especially on Twitter, around key terms by responding to, liking, and sharing the best posts. Keep your eye out for VIPs and get their attention by giving them the same social love. This is a good way to nudge VIPs to share your content. Thank supporters for any shares. 5. Follow Up. Create a group of all of the folks that discussed your issues or mentioned your organization during the event. Send them an email with next steps (and thank them!).

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“That’s the power of Attentive.ly: When there’s a newsworthy event on a topic we cover, we’re ready to go with relevant conversation our audience is primed to engage with.” - MomsRising

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Why Rapid Response Matters When we talk about rapid response on social, it’s more than replying to direct comments on Twitter or Facebook, which are are fairly limited and easy to follow up with. The idea is to respond to your people who are talking about related terms or hashtags. Timing is everything with social listening — if conversations about your work start to trend, seize the moment by showing some social love, or think about emailing an action alert or donation appeal while the issue is top of mind. With social media, you have a few hours to respond before you look lame or the person has shifted gears. Keep in mind that rapid response on social media generally can’t go through the normal approval channels. Colin Delany of Epolitics points out, “A Facebook post that languishes for a week waiting for sign-off isn’t rapid … or by that point, response.”

Too often digital teams aren’t equipped to respond quickly on social media or send an email within 24 hours for reasons including: •

They have no idea what terms are trending with CRM members or with followers.

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Retweeting followers isn’t something they do.

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Retweeting influencers is a multi-person decision, which means it never happens.

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Not empowered to make decisions. Every post must be approved.

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Tweets are determined a week prior.

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The email schedule is determined months prior.

Many of these objections are organizational, not technical. The tech is available and affordable, so it’s really a matter of re-evaluating priorities, re-thinking policies, and trying new tactics.

#DEMDEBATE #MARCHMADNESS #EARTHDAY

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“ 703.988.3549 [email protected]

“Rapid response should really be planned response, so do as much work as you can in advance to ensure that you’re making the most of it and able to enjoy it yourself!” - Blue State Digital

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How To Engage Your Influencers There’s nothing more relatable to your supporters than seeing your mission in action by real people, like themselves. Nonprofits have an enormous opportunity to recruit passionate followers who will extend the reach of content and help secure future supporters. The idea here is to tap into other people’s networks who will share your content to their own followers. It’s one of the smartest ways to grow your base and move the needle on social engagement. You might be surprised to learn that nearly every nonprofit we’ve run data on has influencers. In fact, we found the top 5% of supporters in our client’s CRM comprise 85% of their network reach. We’re confident that every nonprofit has influencers hiding out in their CRM, which is the best place to start. The best opportunity to engage your influencers is when they talk about your mission on social media. Make sure you’re set up to know who your influencers are and have the ability to engage them within a few hours of the mention.

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“Engaging influencers around trending events is a great way to unleash social-fueled results.” - Social Driver

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Types of Influencers VIPs Whether you’re looking at someone like a Baratunde or Carole King, VIP/Celebrity Influencers tend to be about 1% of your email list with a Klout score over 70. Nearly every customer at Attentive.ly has found VIPs hiding out in the CRM they didn’t know about. Once you’ve created a list of the VIPs and Professionals you plan to approach, get on their radar by following them, providing smart comments and understanding their content. Once warmed up, send them a personalized email (ideally) with a clear pitch.

Professionals The Professional influencer is known for their area of expertise and generally have a Klout score of over 55. Their job as a journalist, executive, speaker, etc. is to educate and motivate others around their message. They already have real skin in the game so are motivated to deliver targeted content. When contacting Professional influencers, let them know you’re reaching out to them for their professional reputation. Since they’re in the spotlight, they likely receive multiple requests to share content — so make sure you’ve done your homework and have a solid, personal ask.

Everyday Perhaps one of the most practical uses of social listening is to engage your “everyday” influencers or ambassadors talking about your search terms on social media. Motivated by passion and interest around a product or cause, your everyday influencers are the largest and most accessible of the three groups you should cultivate. They have moderate Klout scores (40-60) and up to a few thousand social connections. While they won’t have the reach of a VIP influencer, when combined in a group, they can extend your network reach by thousands. These are folks that would be the most thrilled if you asked them to share your content to their networks on a regular basis as ambassadors, so don’t be afraid to reach out.

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Showing Social Love While your organization has the best handle on messaging, cultivating your social media ambassadors to share your good word is smart. Here’s why: •

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 Follow  Like

Social Proof. Show that you have real, grassroots backing by retweeting on-message posts from a variety of your supporters.

 Comment  Share

Engagement. What better way to demonstrate that the voices of your people matter than to retweet or like their (relevant) posts. They’ll love it!

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WOM. Dozens of studies show that recommendations from friends and family carry the most weight when making decisions. This is why word of mouth is considered to be the most effective type of marketing.

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Organizing Power. Nonprofits have what everyone else wants — dedicated supporters motivated by their values and passion to help you achieve your mission. Cultivate your power by showing social love.

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New Content. Take advantage of your people power and think of your supporters as a source of new content that validates your mission, grows your base, and mobilizes your people.

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Social Love Checklist


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If their voice matters, show it.

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“Given that social media is really better when it is people sharing ideas with people, the more an organization can incorporate the voices of its “real people” members into its feed the more compelling it will be.” - turner4D

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Using Twitter or Facebook

“If you’re trying to listen to your own audience, sort through your followers and assign them to lists. How you sort them is up to you, but you COULD throw them all in one list. More likely, though, it’ll to be useful to segment them in some way (geographically, based on interest, social media reach, etc.)." Digital Strategist Beth Becker

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Facebook lists live on your own profile, not on your page, so you would create the lists and then share them with your fellow page admins if you want. If you are trying to see what other people who aren’t in your audience are saying about you, you can also put them on lists, again sorted however you want. Personally I try to sort by geographic location, issues (if I know what the person/organization is known for) and particular campaigns engaged with. The last is especially useful if you are a multi-issue organization, since someone who is active on social media talking about the environment may not be useful if you are trying to see what people are saying about the Fight for 15 campaign. You can then use Twitter, Facebook, Hootsuite or TweetDeck to set up columns to monitor those lists. Take a look at those lists on a regular basis in order to get a sense of what is being said. You can also set up saved searches/columns around keywords and hashtags in order to monitor what is being said.”

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Use Attentive.ly for Social Listening Using Attentive.ly, you can see what people in your CRM are saying on social media. Your organization can understand which issues resonate with them and why — you can literally see how your people are talking about your work on social media.

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Trending conversations. See what topics, hashtags, images, and videos are trending among your contacts. Filter by location, list segment, or social network.

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Segment by social mentions. It takes just one-click to cut a list segment based on social mentions, influence, and social networks, which you can send to your CRM.

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Identify “influencers” hiding out in your CRM. Find your existing influencers based on network reach, topic relevancy, and prior interactions.

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Marketing automation. When a supporter mentions your cause on Facebook or Twitter, send them an automatic email from Attentive.ly or your CRM, asking them to sign your campaign petition .

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CRM integrations. We integrate ActionKit, ActiveCampaign, BSD, Campaign Monitor, CiviCRM, Luminate, Mailchimp, NGP and Salsa. We also have an available API and connect with Zapier which allows you to import/export to other CRMs.


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“Social listening with Attentive.ly is unique in that it takes a medium where we have weak relationships with supporters (social networks) and creates for us a medium where we can talk to supporters directly (direct message, email, social advertising). Making this connection is priceless." MomsRising

Image Credit MomsRising on Flickr

Visit www.attentive.ly for pricing, free resources and to request a demo.

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About Attentive.ly Attentive.ly drives engagement with your campaigns by turning your existing supporters into advocates. We identify the influencers you need to engage today and provide multi-channel tools for an automated, personalized response.

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Track Keywords

Influencer Engagement

Track interest in key topics, including your brand, over time, and add “watched words” to track and filter.

Does your email “house list” have top bloggers, VIPs, even Members of Congress? Find the influentials hidden in your list.

Social Listening

Export to CRM

Find out who is already talking about a campaign topic or your organization and engage the most influential people.

Increase your Facebook Page following, and promote a campaign on Twitter.

Beautiful Stats

Spot Trends

We turn your list into an infographic showing the reach of users’ networks, influential people, popular cities, popular tmes to post, and more.

Stop guessing, and use your audience’s hashtags to join the conversation.


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Make Social Listening Actionable Work with a digital agency and consulting team to get your digital strategy moving, today.

Fission’s offerings include: •

Live Event Social Media Coverage. Fission will map and monitor engagement opportunities with influencers and hashtags, to amplify your organization’s reach.

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Facebook Engagement. Fission provides insights into your organization’s Facebook outreach strategy, and works with you to create powerful campaigns with compelling copy and design, catered to the audiences you wish to serve, within your budget.

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Discovery & Audits. Fission conducts in-depth discoveries to find out how your current technology is working, what your new technical and staffing requirements are, which CMS or CRM would best suit your specific needs, and what your resources, assets, allies and opponents are.

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Strategic Planning

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Campaign Implementation

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Web Design & Development

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CRM & Advocacy Tool Integrations

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Brand Identity Design

Meet our sister company, Fission Strategy.

Fission has a proven track record helping leading nonprofits, foundations and social enterprises harness innovation more effectively to create social change around the world. If you’re nonprofit, a political group, social enterprise or cause seeking to solve a seemingly intractable problem, buck the status quo, tell the truth about an important issue, or create a vibrant web presence for your community, you’ve come to the right place.

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Want to try Attentive.ly?

Visit www.attentive.ly for pricing, free resources and to request a demo.

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 [email protected] 703.988.3549 © 2016 Attentively. All rights reserved. 20


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