Around data analytics, this is the equivalent of getting the most prestigious blue check mark Twitter provides.

All of the spectacular analysis ListenFirst provides to our clients wouldn’t be possible without deep, behind the scenes relationships we have with the leading social media platforms, and Twitter is one of the most important of those relationships. That’s why I couldn’t be more excited that today we’re announcing that ListenFirst has been invited into the Twitter Official Partner Program (TOPP).

TOPP is an extremely exclusive program. Of the thousands of companies in the Twitter ecosystem, only a select few with a proven track record of customer success in using Twitter’s Developer Platform to provide brands with outstanding products are invited to join. When a company earns the corresponding Twitter Official Partner badge that is Twitter’s stamp of approval to show clients that you’re a trusted company and that your products are best-in-breed. 

For brands already part of the ListenFirst community, the TOPP announcement reaffirms our long term commitment to Twitter, and means ListenFirst will have an even bigger seat at the table with Twitter.  As part of the partnership, ListenFirst gets unparalleled access to information from across Twitter.com; gains early access to information and betas; and receives introductions to leaders and other opportunities across Twitter. 

ListenFirst and Twitter will also partner to continuously identify opportunities for improved product health and growth, driven by the adoption of new Twitter APIs. 

When it comes to analytics based ROI analysis, ListenFirst already has unparalleled social business intelligence for Twitter, including owned, paid, and earned analysis, cross-platform tracking, real-time conversation analysis, audience insights, affinity analysis, and sentiment analysis. This partnership will lead to further innovation, with conversations about how to create solutions that help brands get more value out Twitter happening more frequently and at a more senior level. 

We’ve already been working with Twitter for nearly 10 years, and to understand the world’s largest focus group, you want the absolute best in social analytics. Joining the TOPP program confirms ListenFirst rises to that standard of excellence.  

When a brand wants the biggest, broadest TV audience, the solution is often advertising during live sports. For the same reason, the social media accounts of sports leagues and individual teams is some of the most valuable real estate for sponsored content on social media.

Sports fanbases are loyal and extremely engaged, and paid partnerships with the most popular leagues and teams often means brand messaging is seen by a far wider audience than through owned organic posts.

For the following report, ListenFirst analyzed the sponsored content posts of the MLB, NHL, MLS, NBA, and NFL at both the league and team level between July 2020 – June 2021 to determine the tactics and best practices that are most effective for brands around these paid partnership posts.

Social media listening is a great way to measure the conversations happening and to analyze the sentiment around your brand. However, with listening alone, you’re only hearing from the vocal minority.

The majority of your consumers are not the ones making noise. They’re busy living their lives and showing you how they feel by click-based engagement with your post.

In this report, we’ll share why social listening isn’t enough and why analytics is critical so you can focus on the data that really matters to help grow your business.

According to the 2020 CMO Survey, only 30% of CMOs believed they could prove the impact of social media efforts quantitatively.

So if you find it challenging to prove the value of your social media campaigns, you’re not alone. The key to successfully measuring the impact of your social media efforts hinges on leveraging social media analytics.

At ListenFirst we’ve helped leading brands across the world determine their most relevant KPIs. We’ve learned a thing or two over the years and have a few tips to get you on the right track.

There are three critical steps to ensuring you have the right elements in place to measure your social media marketing program effectively. You’ll find the steps below, along with tips to get you started. 

Identify the metrics that align with your business goals.

When it comes to setting KPIs that will have an impact, less is more. 

Start with your business goals. How do those translate into social metrics or outcomes? For example:

• Do you want to grow awareness? Consider metrics related to audience growth. 
• Are you set on increasing brand affinity and loyalty? Review engagement rates. 
• Is brand love your focus? Look at social sentiment.

Follow a thoughtful process when determining the metrics that are important to your business. 

Use social media analytics to set realistic benchmarks.

It’s critical to outline your goals and do industry research prior to determining the most logical KPIs for your brand. 

Of course, you want to look at historical trends for your brand as well as for your competitors. But there’s also a lot to gain from reviewing other aspirational brands who’ve accomplished what you are after. Even if the brand is not a player in your industry, validate that what they’re doing is something that may have translated to their success. 

Then ask yourself what’s a reasonable expectation for your brand based on the historical data and performance across other brands?

Download our report How to Maximize Social Media Analytics for more details on how to identify the metrics that matter. 

Track your KPIs frequently

Reporting is key. Once you have your KPIs set, you have to constantly track them. 

Reporting that allows you to see all of your cross-channel data in one view is essential. You’ll also want to set up reporting that will allow you to see the most important metrics, including your benchmarks and historical trends, at a glance.

Dashboards are a great way to communicate the story the data is telling to your key stakeholders. ListenFirst recently added configurable dashboards to the platform, giving users the opportunity to build a series of dashboards to best match their team’s goals.

Read more about configurable dashboards.  

If you’re like most brands and increasing your investments in social media, be sure you have a plan in place to know if you’re moving the dial. Follow these three important steps and let us know how we can help along the way.

The Addition Makes Social Insights More Customizable And Shareable

NEW YORK, September 14, 2021 /PRNewswire/ – ListenFirst, the premier social media analytics solution used by the world’s leading brands, today launched the advanced user experience for the solution’s user interface, including Configurable Dashboards which provide users with the ability to save analysis tiles to a shareable, configurable view. Additionally, ListenFirst launched LinkedIn analytics, which offers owned analytics around a brand’s LinkedIn account for key metrics, including New Followers and Responses. 

In creating the advanced user experience, ListenFirst worked hand-in-hand with their customers to ensure they were able to access the data most relevant to their needs in the most streamline fashion, while also introducing modern aesthetics. Configurable Dashboards quickly surfaces the most valuable insights, allowing customers to create specific combinations of ListenFirst data to match their team’s unique use cases and workflows.  Additionally, the new ListenFirst aesthetics introduces a complete re-imagining and redesign of navigation, data visualization, and analysis in the platform.   

ListenFirst used UX measurement standards like the System Usability Scale to accurately capture the lift in user efficiency, satisfaction, and delight; assuring that all the Dashboard changes were directly in service of improving user experience. 

“The social media data ListenFirst provides is already a differentiator for our clients,” explained Daniel Cho, Design Director at ListenFirst. “What the Enhanced UI does is elevate the experience of accessing those insights. Executives and marketing professionals now have more flexibility in creating easy-to-update dashboards tailored to their KPIs, and options in terms of sharing those dashboards. Brands are provided with frictionless access to the social data that’s most impactful.”

The recent report, The Forrester Tech Tide™: Enterprise Business Insights And Analytics, Q1 2021, spoke to the importance of “single click” capabilities in leading enterprise BI platforms, and making analytics accessible to a wider audience. “Not only do these [augmented BI] platforms turn business users into citizen data scientists; many also democratize valuable insights to the broader enterprise via a conversational UI — asking questions using NLQ and getting an explanation to answers not just via graphs and charts but also via an NLG narrative of how to interpret the visuals.”

ListenFirst’s new user experience is building on this trend to make social media analytics more accessible to a wider audience by simplifying the workflow and surfacing the key takeaways alongside the data visuals.

ListenFirst’s new user experience is building on this trend to make social media analytics more accessible to a wider audience by simplifying the workflow and surfacing the key takeaways alongside the data visuals.

Also as part of the release, the addition of LinkedIn analytics tracks Owned LinkedIn metrics such as impressions, video views, new followers, post responses, and content engagement rate. LinkedIn Analytics can also be viewed cross channel, allowing for a high level understanding of brand engagement on social media and campaign performance.