Listening Metrics That Matter

As social media becomes more prevalent, the data it creates becomes a critical research and insight-generation activity. Businesses turn to listening platforms to harvest the rich trove of consumer conversations generated across all social media channels, including blogs, message boards, and social networks. These platforms deliver a variety of listening metrics — such as "likes," retweets, conversation volume, and sentiment — to support firms across a range of different business initiatives, including campaign analysis, crisis management, competitive analysis, and market research. But businesses run the risk of wasting their efforts by over-collecting and underutilizing the social data. To derive actionable customer intelligence, marketers must first choose their listening goals and then combine those listening metrics with the output data from other business programs. This is an updated version of the 2009 "Listening Metrics That Matter" report, with new examples and terminology.