Basics of Oracle SRM: Listen & Analyze Part 1

Welcome back social media gurus! In my last blog, I walked you through Oracle SRM’s Publish feature. Arguably the most important part of the platform, I covered everything from layout and organization to drafting the best posts. Now it’s time to move onto the big leagues; it’s time to take on Listen & Analyze.

In Listen & Analyze you get to see how much attention your stellar posts are getting! Through metrics such as the number of fans/followers, likes/favorites, URL clicks, and more, you get the ability to see which posts are your most successful ones. We strive for validation, comments, and reach with our posts; now it’s time to check in on that engagement. Let’s dive in! Once you are on the Listen & Analyze homepage, you may be feeling a little overwhelmed. That’s okay. For simplicity sake, we are going to focus the on Topics and Resources areas with this blog. We’ll talk about the other parts in an upcoming post. Topics are a crucial part of being successful with SRM and not just in the Listen & Analyze section of the platform. The topics you set up here are actually going to be useful in Engage (which we will be taking a detailed look at in a future blog).

Topics hold keywords that your SRM instance will use to search social media channels and the web for content that is important for you to know about. When a keyword is found, it will appear in the Engage section of SRM and you will have the opportunity to reply, like, or reshare it directly through the platform. We use SRM at Relationship One. We’ve created topics for our partners, competitors, and relevant practices. Here is an example of a few topics you would see on our Topic grid:

Let’s focus on “Oracle Marketing Cloud” as an example Topic. The numbers on the right of the grid indicate the estimated number of relevant posts and the available number. Estimated is the amount that would show up if we didn’t define keywords and the available are the posts that comply with our keywords and restrictions. If you click the gear menu, you can define and refine the topic.

Above is a screenshot of what our “Oracle Marketing Cloud” Topic looks like in underlying interface. In the Search Term section, you can select keywords that apply to this topic specifically. Keywords can be hashtags, user handles, related terms, etc. This helps narrow down your results. Best practice is to be as specific as possible with keywords so you don’t end up with an overwhelming load of white noise. This may take some trial and error to get the Topic where you want it to be, but be patient with the process as it is incredibly valuable.

You can adjust the Targeting Options to keep out clutter. Targeting allows you to include and exclude certain locations, content types, source URLS, and authors. Advanced options lets you create boolean conditions, searching for phrases that use one or more keywords. This is helpful if you want “Content” and “Marketing” results instead of specifically “Content Marketing.”

The Preview tool in the top right allows you to see what types of messages would show up in Engage with the parameters you have set so far. This is helpful to decide exactly what you do and do not want to see in your inbox. You can “try before you buy” in a sense!

Now let’s focus on the golden child of Listen & Analyze; Resources. This area of the platform has everything you need to find out how much and what kind of attention your posts are getting. Use this data to find out which posts are the most successful, so you can recreate that success more often.

There are a lot of important reports in this section. You can select a particular bundle or social channel by clicking the drop-down on the left side of the screen. Here is an example of a dashboard for a Facebook profile, with the aforementioned drop-down active.

For Facebook, there are analytics showing the growth in fans, the number of likes, comments and shares, and impressions. You can select a set of dates to see the engagement during that time period. You can also export the data from these graphs onto a PDF, excel spreadsheet, or an image file.

On the left side of the screen, you can choose to focus in on certain results like fans, demographics, visibility and specific posts. This allows you to zone in on the demographics of your engagers and discover the posts with the most interaction. All of the data on these pages can be useful, but it is up to you and your company to decide what you find most important to focus on. As a best practice, our marketing team meets up on a biweekly basis to review the results of our social media efforts and determine a strategy for future posts.

We’ve only scratched the surface with Listen & Analyze, but I hope I gave you a good start! Check back with us in a few weeks for our next SRM series blog! We will be exploring the other tabs in Listen & Analyze: indicators, SEM reports, resources, and social campaigns. Now go and #BeAGoodListener 😉