Answering the Questions Nobody Asks (But Should): Using Social Listening to Create Content for the Web and Social Media

Background: To be able to provide the best answers, you have to know the questions people are asking, even if they aren’t asking you directly. Studying the social media and website use of their audience can help communicators decide what content they should be creating for social media and their website.

Program background: As a relatively small local public health agency, we frequently use social listening as a tool to better serve our audience. In the fall of 2015, we introduced an ordinance that would allow our animal control officers to declare dogs as nuisance or restricted dogs, which would require additional licensing and increased responsibility from the owners. Because we anticipated some controversy surrounding the ordinance, we carefully monitored social media, particularly the Facebook comments on any news coverage. After the ordinance had passed, we noticed that most of the negative comments were from people who were under the false impression that "nuisance" referred to noisy dogs, and that we would be handing out fines and restrictions to owners if their dog barked too much. Since this was not part of the ordinance, we created a short video to explain exactly what the ordinance meant.

As Zika virus became a more prominent issue, we noticed people were using search engines and the search function directly on our website to look for information. We responded by creating a page on our website to directly answer the most common concerns, and featuring the page prominently on our homepage for easy access.

Using social listening and analytics, we are also able to prepare ourselves for potential controversy. When we notice multiple people are searching for a particular restaurant on our website, we are able to talk to our inspection team and prepare for any potential questions we may receive from media or citizens.

Evaluation Methods and Results: 

We typically have higher engagement and reach on social media content that we create based on something we noticed via social listening. For example, the video about the nuisance and restricted dog ordinance reached over 2,200 people, making it one of our most popular posts at the time, and we saw a significant decrease in the amount of people complaining about our "noisy dog ordinance."

Conclusions: 

Listening to your audience via social media and website analytics can increase your online engagement rates and better inform your audience.

Implications for research and/or practice: 

Social listening requires minimal time commitment and knowledge. With some free tools, a little analysis, and whole lot of common sense, you can easily keep an ear on the pulse of your audience and give them the answers to the questions they didn’t ask you directly.