How do I build a Brand Health Listening strategy?

Sprout’s Listening tools help you understand the perception of your brand and products. You can use Listening to build a Brand Health strategy to help design marketing approaches, analyze your social efforts and create new content.

Before you create a Brand Health Listening strategy, it’s useful to understand how to build a Listening query.

Brand Health Listening Template

Sprout’s Brand Health Listening Template can help you design your queries. To set up the Template, navigate to Listening > Brand Health.

A Brand Health topic can help you answer questions about how your audiences feel about your company or products. It’s useful to think about common phrases or keywords—including misspellings or nicknames—associated with your brand, as well as what you might need to exclude to avoid excessive noise in your topic.

Grouping keywords

Once you identify which words or phrases you want to track, you can group keywords. Grouping is especially useful if your brand name includes a common word. In this example, the Listening topic will only pull in conversations about Sprout Social AND social media management, social media or software. Grouping gives you more granular results: you could use this topic to learn how people specifically feel about Sprout’s software instead of other aspects of the company.

Once you group your keywords, you can preview your topic. You can use this feature to see if any of your terms will create unwanted noise.

If you’re satisfied with the preview, you can click Start Listening to begin pulling in data.

Exclusions

If you discover that your topic is pulling in unrelated content, you can exclude keywords or accounts. Excluding posts from your own brand will help reduce noise by filtering out any of your own content. In addition, you can exclude keywords for topics that aren’t relevant to your query. For example, Sprout Social is often abbreviated as “Sprout” in conversation. But the word “sprout” is common in different industries and contexts, and it’s often not related to Sprout Social. Since we know other common usages, we can proactively remove irrelevant messages.