Mike Delgado

As a social media community builder, listening is a key aspect to my work.

Listening helps me find my target audience online

Listening helps me understand the topics and trends that matter

Listening helps me find out the pain points of my community

Listening helps me discover what channels drive traffic & revenue

Listening helps me develop better content

Listening helps me engage better

The trouble with listening is that it takes time – and there isn’t always a clear financial ROI. You can spend all day analyzing social media data, but not achieved one of your social business goals (e.g. customer care, improve brand awareness, web traffic, leads, etc.).

After all, there is a ton of data to analyze.

Social media listening tools provide you with demographic data, social mentions by regions, data on competitors, data on influencers, data on best times to post, data on what type of content performs well (and where), sentiment data, etc. And then there is time-consuming unstructured data (e.g. video, audio) that is difficult to analyze – or live streaming data that can be a beast to tackle.

The trouble isn’t collecting the social media data, it’s analyzing the right data and making actionable decisions from it. 

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I know your business might be tempted to use Anchor like a broadcasting tool. However, that would be missing the whole point of Anchor.

Anchor is your telephone, not a megaphone. The Anchor community prefers personal and authentic conversation, not polished lectures.

Before diving in, you need to consider the business challenges:

1. Your target audience might not be on Anchor (yet)
2. Your target audience might not want to engage with you on Anchor
3. There are no analytic platforms to help you measure success
4. You might not have time in your day to engage in audio conversations
5. You’ll need to know how to handle complaints and/or customer care through audio
6. Anchor might not fit with your overall social business strategy
7. You might not know who should be “the voice” for your brand

There are many other reasons why your brand might avoid Anchor right now.

And that’s okay.

You shouldn’t join a social media channel unless it aligns with your business goals. That said, if your business goals include improving engagement with your target audience and increasing trust, Anchor is a great social network to do this.

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In the latest update to Anchor, members can now add voice commentaries to any content on the web.

The process is pretty simple when using any mobile browser:

First, click on the share button on your mobile browser.

Scroll through your list of share options and select “More” if you don’t see Anchor listed.  Once you select more, you can enable Anchor to appear as a sharing app.

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There will be some brands who join Anchor to simply use the platform as a broadcasting platform. However, that would be missing the whole point of Anchor.

Anchor is not your megaphone, it’s your telephone. It’s a beautiful platform to build conversations with your community. It’s about dialogue – not dictation.

Here are ways to initiate Anchor conversations around work you’re already doing:

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Do you want to see more engagement on Anchor?

Are you trying to build a business case for spending time on this emerging platform?

One of the benefits of creating content in Anchor is that the content doesn’t expire like on Periscope and Snapchat. The content lives on and becomes part of larger conversations (especially when using hashtags). Just because you’re not getting immediate engagement doesn’t mean you won’t.

A wave you created last week can start getting replies and plays a month from now. And you can help inspire discussion on your older waves by repackaging these waves on other channels.

Here are just a few ways to repackage Anchor waves:

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Brands, please use Anchor like a telephone –  not a megaphone. This means listening and adding value to Anchor conversations — not using waves as your audio ad channel.

If you’re thinking about using Anchor for business, here are some suggestions before diving in:

1. Spend most of your time listening – not talking.

Don’t start creating audio content without first listening to how others are using it. Spend several hours navigating Anchor to listen to discussions that matter to your community.

Listen to some of the trending conversations going on to get a feel of the Anchor culture. If you don’t enjoy listening to other people’s points of view, this platform is not for you. Most of your time on this platform should be listening, not talking.

One of the biggest benefits to listening is that you’ll discover topics and challenges your target audience has. As you listen to waves based around topics important to your business, have your notepad open so that you can jot down the interesting comments made. These waves can inspire a boatload of content. You just need to listen – and take notes of what is being said (and by who).

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Do you want to help your waves get seen by the right community on Anchor?

Do you want to increase the plays, likes, and replies on specific waves?

First, we need to all work on creating helpful and engaging audio content that will resonate with our community. That will always be something we need to focus on. This doesn’t mean you need to have a professional and polished audio clip, but it does mean your clip should provide help — as well as inspire discussion.

That said, once you’ve created a helpful wave that you think can create a meaningful dialog, here are some strategies to help you earn more ears (and more importantly) more conversation.

1. Spend time researching what hashtags are used by your target audience in Anchor.

One simple way to get more visibility for your waves is to use hashtags that your target audience is using.  Spend time researching hashtags that relate to your business to discover what types of audio conversations are happening.

Just because you’re using certain hashtags on Twitter doesn’t mean the same hashtag conversations are happening on Anchor. Right now, you might need to select slightly more generic hashtags since Anchor is a newer social network. The only way to find out hashatag usage is to keep checking as this network evolves.

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Social media monitoring is one of the most important jobs for those of us working in social media management. It’s how we uncover important conversations that matter to the businesses we support.

It’s also a time-consuming aspect of our jobs – and reason why we set-up streams and dashboards to help us focus on the most important online conversations.

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Live streaming video content lives on — so make sure it’s valuable enough to re-share and re-package.

This means, you need to be selective about what you decide to stream. And you need to be thinking about how the video can provide value for those who didn’t view it live.

It’s not just about getting more replays, it’s about re-packaging the live stream to serve those who missed it. And you should always think about ways to upcycle that live stream video into channels and mediums that new audiences will find useful.

Here are five simple ways you can upcycle your high-value live streaming content:

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Social media monitoring can be expensive (and time-consuming) so it’s important to be strategic with what keywords you choose to listen to.

Here are some various ways to approach keyword monitoring for your business:

Monitor your brand names (typos, misspellings, hashtags)

If you’re a well-known company (and mentioned often online), you should track the common misspellings and typos of your name.

Other branded keywords important to your business may also include:

1. Branded product names
2. URLs
3. Company abbreviations
4. Stock symbol
5. Trademarks
6. Unique campaign names
7. Spokespeople representing your brand

To learn about variations on these keywords (as well as common typos or misspellings), talk with your search engine marketing (SEM). Ask them if they have recommendations on what branded keywords should get tracked online.

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