JC Serrano
Dec 16, 20213 min
Updated: Oct 17, 2022
Social listening is an excellent customer research strategy that could be done through social media. Instead of giving out surveys to get an idea of what people think of your firm, you can simply look for how they talk about you online.
However, as easy as it sounds, a lot goes into how the data is collected, how it's processed, and how it's applied to your Law Firm Marketing strategy.
So, let's list the three crucial stages of processing this data and how you can best do each one.
Data from social listening is sometimes messy and unorganized. You're always going to pick up things you don't need.
For example, you could be looking for mentions of "Example Law Firm" but get irrelevant results that mention the words "Example", "Law", and "Firm". As a result, your search results might get clogged up by these irrelevant results and cause you to miss the data that you need.
The first step is to manually review what you've gathered. Of course, you don't have to look at every single data point, but you'll be able to see if something is wrong.
So, if you're getting too many irrelevant results from general keywords, try adding more to make it more specific. For example, instead of using the previously mentioned "Example Law Firm", you can try keywords like "Example Law Firm Los Angeles", "Example Law Firm California", "Example (Latest Case)", "Example Attorney", and so on.
Your data will be much more targeted after that. The most important thing to remember is to not take your initial set of results for granted. Before you assume your data is useful, double-check it.
Once you've removed all of the unnecessary data points, you now have to interpret the data you gathered.
It's difficult to know where to begin, especially when working with a large dataset. However, the goal of your project will help steer this process.
For example, if your goal is to gauge your brand reputation, you can sort the data into "positive" and "negative" feedback. If you're using social listening to figure out the next blog topic idea, try looking for mentions of what users want to read about.
Remember: If you're a smaller or newer firm, you might have too few mentions to create graphs out of. However, if you apply your Lawyer SEO and marketing tactics right, you might be able to reach enough people who could start talking about you.
People's opinions, needs, and wants can change through time. For example, the people who want to read about a certain blog topic today might not read it next month. Likewise, the people who have a negative impression of your law firm now might change their minds. With that in mind, social listening is most effective when done regularly.
It's important that you figure out your goals and data collection strategies before you start doing this regularly. If you find out after months that you've been gathering incorrect data or that you overlooked something important, you've wasted a lot of time and effort.
Discussions on the internet move at a breakneck pace. New terms, goods, and even memes may unintentionally influence your data. Always double-check your work.
For the same reason, you should update the keywords and topics you're tracking. For example, if a new competing firm enters the market or a new product is introduced, you must ensure that data is collected to capture these events.
Social listening isn't any easier than collecting data from surveys. However, it is a different tactic that doesn't require asking hesitant respondents to hastily answer your survey.
That said, you need to pour in some time and effort to effectively conduct social listening for your law firm.
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