With the growth in companies making social media a priority in all facets of their business, the growing amount of questions of how, what, where, when and why throughout the social realm are stronger than before. As you likely know, social media starts with listening: find out what is being said by your community. If you are looking to make an impact in 2012, enhancing the way you are listening to social conversations could be the ticket.

How Should you Listen?

Look into a paid monitoring system or at least add more free tools to your arsenal so that all the angles are covered.

Where Should you Listen?

Figure out where your community is active whether that’s Twitter, Blogs, Facebook or other media types. Then take this knowledge and allocate your resources appropriately to make sure you’re making the most out of your time.

When Should you Listen?

Don’t just decide on your monitoring hours, take it one step further and decide how you will deal with all the mentions that happen outside of your monitoring hours. Make sure you have the right amount of staff to deal with the volume of social posts.

What Should you Listen for?

You may already be listening for your brand mentions, but if you’d like to go further with it in 2012, listen to your competitor and industry mentions as well. Think outside your brand to find more conversations and information from your community.

Why Should you Listen?

While there are tons of arguments for why brands should listen, decide your own reasons in 2012. It’s not about doing what everyone else is doing, but rather tying it back to realistic business use cases that are important to your organization.

No matter what listening methods you put in place this year, make sure that you take the time to thoroughly think them through. Those methods are important to your organization as a whole.

To find out more about making an impact with listening in 2012, see chapter two of this month’s ebook.

Tags: business objectives, Community, engagement