Kim Townend

Social Media Listening & Strategy

social media marketing

Ten Principles for Regenerative Social Marketing

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During the time I’ve spent working specifically in social, I’ve often come across a type of person (both agency and client-side) who is looking for a quick-fix, maybe doesn’t really see the worth in organic, figure ads could do the job, and doesn’t put much stock in brand or strategy beyond look and feel.


This approach might get you where you need to be during the first 12 months, but it’s not sustainable, doesn’t allow space to grow, and you burn through your potential audience quickly.


The type of social marketing that I encourage my clients to practise is much more sustainable and generative. It allows time and space to investigate and understand your brand, your audience and the right social space for you. It helps you grow, but not at the expense of longevity and turning your audience into a community. It’s respectful of people’s time and attention and never just publishes identical copy and content across every channel.


To clarify what I mean when I talk about generative marketing on social, I’ve created a list of 10 simple principles I adhere to.

  1. Authenticity above all else.
  2. Identify your specific audience (s)
  3. Cultivate community
  4. Work with the algorithms, but don’t be at their mercy
  5. Great content lives in the space between your audience interests and your brand values
  6. Don’t be too concerned with what your competitors are doing
  7. Great social is more than great creative
  8. Sales doesn’t have to be gross if you don’t make it feel gross
  9. ‘Always on’ doesn’t have to equal burnout.
  10. Behave like a good human

I use social intelligence to get to grips with your audience and interests and the spaces they play in, and I take the time to work with my clients to nail who their brand is and what that means for how they behave on social.

If you take the time to get your social strategy right, it will serve you for years to come. The execution/tactics will undoubtedly need updating as the platforms change their algorithms and favourite content types on a whim. But the core strategy should remain sound.

In a world of content overload and social same-ification, fostering and building connections is the best way to succeed. Please get in touch if you like the idea of working together to make that happen!

Why you should be using social media listening

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When brands first started using social media, few even had defined strategies. We were all figuring this new strange beast out. Not everyone was here yet, there were no algorithms, we were actually interested in the content that was being shared.

Fast forward to 2020 and it’s a very, very different space. By next year it is predicted there will be 3.1 billion social media users globally. Everyone is here, and they are all talking.

When brands create content for social media, they’re not just competing with other brands, they’re competing with memes, and pictures of dogs and whatever is trending on TikTok today.

A social media strategy helps with getting your content in front of eyeballs, (it’s imperative if you actually want to social media to perform for your brand). But how can you be sure that your social media strategy is actually going to deliver?

The answer is social media listening

Social media listening is simply the practice of using some kind of software (I favour Pulsar and consider it best in class) to listen around keywords/brand names across a variety of social channels.

Why is it so useful? I’ve broken it down into 3 sections below.

Understanding who your social audience actually are

Almost all brands have an idea of who they want to reach on social media. This is oftentimes either anecdotal or based on real life/traditional research methods. But the internet isn’t like real life. It’s like the internet. I’ve worked on so many projects where the client has had a very clear idea of who their social audience is, and social listening has revealed something very different indeed.

Take Sherlock for example. When I was approached to write the digital strategy for the Sherlock immersive escape game, the offline data said Sherlock fans were mostly male and predominently boomers.

Anecdotally this didn’t make sense to me, everything I knew about the online fandom suggested different. So I did a big chunk of social listening before the project even began. I looked for Sherlock fans and their interests and differences based on location and platform and it became incredibly clear that the Sherlock social fandom was incredibly female, and mostly under the age of 35. (Offline data was skewing more toward the literary fandom/Sherlockians)

Using data from the social listening I was able to create a strategy that played to the global audience, spoke their language, actually engaged them on platforms they were already using and drove an incredible amount of organic traffic.

Competitor research

Most people will do a social media audit of their own brand, and look at what competitor brands are doing themselves on social media. In my experience it’s uncommon for people to dedicate the time to doing social listening around key competitors, oftentimes the brand in question won’t even be doing this themselves.

This is important as it’s far easier to get a realistic idea of the general feeling about a brand by listening to what people are saying when they aren’t addressing the brand directly. (Pulsar leverages IBM Watson to actually understand the key mood of the conversation alongside the sentiment)

This can help your brand by identifying current issues with competitor products, pain points, and even understand what consumers are actually looking for (that’s right, social media listening isn’t just for marketing, R&D teams hit me up!).

You can use this data for creating a robust content strategy for any part of the funnel, or even for product development.

Identifying influencers, micro-influencers and detractors

So many brands have got influencer work so wrong, just going for the biggest name with the broadest appeal. Although this can be brilliant for reach, I tend to favour a more micro-influencer based approach. Social listening is brilliant for finding the people in your communities of interest who talk about your keywords all of the time.

The other side of this, is it’s also very easy to identify trolls in the space too. I look at the people who are talking the most around the keywords, switch the sentiment to filter to negative and then I have all the biggest detractors in any community listed out for me- ready for my community managers to keep an eye on. (This was helpful when crafting the social strategy for the Climate Assembly.)

I’m going to stop here, although I could add many more reasons that listening should be a part of your social media strategy going forward. As always, if you have any questions or would like to work together – get in touch!

The Same-ification of Social Media

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It’s been happening for years…

Little by little, the social networks all started to steal from one another and adopt similar functionality until all the platforms allowed you to share the same types of content. This just encouraged brands to share the same content across all the platforms (with slightly different pixel dimensions if they were really making an effort).

But it wasn’t just the platforms. The things users were posting became suspiciously similar too. I’m sure you all remember this article from a couple of years back about how similar Instagram posts were becoming.

And it’s not just influencers. Over the last year I’ve worked with a variety of alcohol brands and run social listening projects for all of them. I became really discouraged by the sheer amount of bottle shots on Instagram.

I understand that brands are proud of their bottle designs and labels and rightly so, they are an incredibly important part of the brand experience.

BUT! What if not all the content on the internet looked the same?

What if you took a chance and crafted a strong brand tone of voice and social identity that wasn’t just ‘honest and friendly’ and the same as what everyone else was doing.

As social media becomes ever more overpopulated with the same style of copy and posts from so many brands – it offers up a perfect opportunity for your brand to stand out.

Sure, all the beautifully curated shots are getting reasonable engagement, but are they delivering on actual objectives?

Consider MoonPie

MoonPie were included in almost every agency case study in 2017 for having such a strong brand personality and really generating the kinds of organic engagement people just weren’t seeing anymore. Fast forward 3 years to 2020 and they are still at it. Going from strength to strength:

The MoonPie example wasn’t just about generating engagement though, this was reflected in sales. Within the first year, they had increased sales by 17% just by using Twitter. They currently have over 320k Twitter followers and only post about once a fortnight. That is some good ROI!

Good social media strategy always starts with a strong brand strategy – but it’s only really great when brands are brave enough to do something a little bit different.

(This is where a good social listening project comes in! Being able to identify who your online audience is, where they live, their different interest clusters, how they behave on different platforms, etc. This ‘real people’ insight allows you to craft a social media strategy with real personality and content that will actually resonate with your target audience on the right platforms for you – get in touch if you want to talk about how I can help you achieve this)

Social Media and Social TV are not the Same Thing!

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Okay, maybe that title was a little misleading, in that social media is definitely an intrinsic part of social tv as it provides the tools that make it possible.

What I’m really trying to do in this post is point out that the two things, although sounding the same, require very different approaches. 

Which is why I’ve come up with 4 principles for you to consider, when approaching a social TV project.

Social media for both brands and broadcasters, is an often awkward, slightly perplexing idea.

Yes, you need to be visible on it, yes you need to be creating some form of content as part of this deal, and yes you need to be listening and responding to your consumers. But this is where the similarities end, for one simple reason*

People are already fans of TV shows!

Nerd Rage gif from 30 Rock

They’re interested in the stories you have to tell, they’re interested in the secrets you can share, they’re interested in the exclusives you can dangle in front of them as your will decides.

With brands, people are largely interested in getting stuff for free and customer service, unless you’re lucky enough/smart enough to have built a really strong content offering, solidly over time then getting them to stay interested in your content in 2015, is pretty hard work.

So, it makes sense that you would go about developing your social media strategy for a broadcaster, quite differently than you would for a brand.

When it comes social TV, it really is all about the fandom.

Fandom is something that brands rarely have unless they’re very, very good with Tumblr (I’m looking at you Dennys)

The key to creating a good social TV strategy is understanding the fandom. Only then can you create the kind of content that fans will go crazy for.

This sounds obvious, but time and experience have taught me that it’s really not.

Just to be clear, I’m not saying you need to love the shows, but you need to understand the fandom.

In every social TV project that I’ve worked on, I’ve started with the fandom and worked my way outwards to the mainstream.

Starting with the mainstream is never going to work, because those guys aren’t going to be bothered about your show unless it’s popular right now.

Fandom is what makes the show popular, it’s what buys the shirts and the boxsets and creates the art and goes to Comicon and gets the people on Facebook interested in watching in the first place.

Not all platforms are created equal

Yes, this goes for regular social too, but (kings of social TV, The CW will tell you) it’s more pronounced with TV.  (Or as I like to put it, don’t try Superwholock on Facebook.)

Different types of people naturally gravitate towards certain platforms. Always, always look at your analytics and then use them to hone your hunches.

Different platforms require different content types and different timings. Are you looking to build buzz, drive to TX or drive to catch up? Each of these things will benefit from understanding the whens are wheres and whos.

Also, people are beginning to make noise about Snapchat being the future of social TV, so you might want to keep an eye on that.

Oh, and always check fandometrics.

Everyone loves a reaction gif.

Seriously.

If you want to know more about any of this/are looking for some help with social TV, then please drop me a line.

*Yes, I know there are exceptions to this rule, but they are just that, exceptions.