How to get started with social listening on TikTok

Deck from a webinar I gave for TikTok listening tool Exolyt, covering all the things you need to know to get started with social listening on TikTok, including:

• What is social listening?
• TikTok social listening 101
• Trending topics
• Cultural listening
• Video vs. Text-based social listening

and more.

Transcript

1. KIM TOWNEND STUDIO 2024 Intro to Social Listening for TikTok
2. KIM TOWNEND STUDIO EXOLYT · 2024 • What is social listening? • TikTok social listening 101 • Trending topics • Cultural listening • Video vs. Text-based social listening What we’re talking about today
3. KIM TOWNEND STUDIO 2024 What is social listening?
4. KIM TOWNEND STUDIO EXOLYT · 2024 What is social listening? Social listening is no longer a niche idea or nice-to-have. It is fast becoming a vital function for your social media team and multiple business departments. If you want to avoid ge tt ing le ft behind, and missing out on opportunities, then social media listening is imperative. • Content Strategy • Paid Media Insights • Brand Strategy • Campaign Analytics • Cultural Strategy • Audience Analysis • Creative Strategy • Social Strategy • Trends • Community Management
5. KIM TOWNEND STUDIO EXOLYT · 2024 Types of social listening Brand monitoring Competitor audits Influencer identi fi cation Topic deep dives Horizon scanning Micro/Macro trends Cultural shi ft s Audience insights Di ff erent People Understand All Of These Things To Be ‘Social Listening’ USUALLY DONE BY A SOCIAL MEDIA MANAGER/ANALYST USUALLY DONE BY A SOCIAL LISTENING PRO/RESEARCHER
6. KIM TOWNEND STUDIO 2024 TikTok listening 101
7. KIM TOWNEND STUDIO EXOLYT · 2024 Getting started with TikTok listening on Exolyt Set your objective. (This will guide the type of listening you’ll do) 1. 3. Search for relevant keywords/accounts/trends Start ‘tracking’ hashtags and accounts you’re interested in 4. 5. 6. Set up ‘social listening’ projects around ongoing topics of interest Analyse regularly! Group your tracked items into folders 2.
8. KIM TOWNEND STUDIO EXOLYT · 2024 Brand research Deep dive into what your brand or competitor brands are doing on TikTok. Analyse their followers, how their videos are performing, who they are partnering with, how fast they’re growing and loads more. This is a really useful piece of initial research when you’re pu tt ing together pitches or strategies. Its helpful for: understanding white spaces and ge tt ing clear on your brand positioning.
9. KIM TOWNEND STUDIO EXOLYT · 2024 Competitor comparison The quickest way to get a feel for what’s happening with your competitors on TikTok is to use the ‘compare accounts’ option. You can add up to 5 accounts to compare, and see data on their followers, views, engagement, the demographics of the followers, most popular videos, and anything else you’d need to know. Really useful to understand the TikTok competitor landscape at a glance.
10. KIM TOWNEND STUDIO 2024 What’s trending?
11. KIM TOWNEND STUDIO EXOLYT · 2024 The what and the why There are multiple things that can trend on TikTok, including: • Single videos • Challenges • Hashtags • Accounts • Sounds TikTok is known for trends. It’s what most people think the platform is for. Understanding what’s trending overall and then applying di ff erent fi lters to this data can be extremely useful. Being able to identify the di ff erent types of trends, and make a call on whether they are relevant to your brand/business is all important. In this section we’re going to look at how you can do that. FYI
12. KIM TOWNEND STUDIO EXOLYT · 2024 A note on why you need tools for this! Why do you need a social listening tool to do this? Surely if you’re spending time on TikTok you’ll understand what’s trending. Nope! Beware the FYP. The TikTok algorithm is so good and niche that it’s the ultimate social media echo chamber. What is trending for you, is quite likely not trending for another user. Social listening is the only way to check the validity of whether a topic is gaining traction.
13. KIM TOWNEND STUDIO EXOLYT · 2024 Identifying trending topics Exolyt makes this VERY easy for you. Regardless of if you’re going broad or you have a clearer idea of what you’re looking for, it’s really simple to fi nd what you’re looking for. If you want to go broad click ‘Trends’ in the ‘analyse’ section of the right hand toolbar. In this section you can see trending tags, accounts, videos, sounds and more. Useful for: when you’re not sure what you’re looking for!
14. KIM TOWNEND STUDIO EXOLYT · 2024 Identifying viral posts for community management Brands commenting on social posts is nothing new, but it’s experiencing a new lease of life on TikTok with brands fi nding new levels of engagement and click through by leaving funny/ interesting comments on relevant trending videos. There are two ways to identify these videos with Exolyt. 1. Go through the main trends page and click the ‘videos’ option. 2. Go through a trending hashtag page and look at the most viewed videos
15. KIM TOWNEND STUDIO EXOLYT · 2024 Industry specific trends As you’ve seen there are hundreds of things trending on TikTok at any given moment. There’s no time to analyse them all, but you don’t need to. Use ‘industry insights’ to identify the top trends in your industry, fi lter by country and begin analysis. Pay particular a tt ention to the ‘today’s hotness’ score, the total views, and shape of the growth graph. Useful for: when you want to create content and get involved in trends that haven’t peaked yet.
16. KIM TOWNEND STUDIO EXOLYT · 2024 Use the content matrix for context Good social listening is all about context. Connecting the dots and knowing where you should play. The content matrix is built into the industry trends module, and allows you to understand at a glance where all the current trends sit in terms of engagement, saturation, and hotness. Useful for: context and decision making!
17. KIM TOWNEND STUDIO EXOLYT · 2024 How to use your insights • Creating trending topic reports • Identifying conversational opportunities • Identifying content opportunities Now you’re armed with data and potentially some useful insights too. How do you use them?
18. KIM TOWNEND STUDIO 2024 Deeper cultural listening
19. KIM TOWNEND STUDIO EXOLYT · 2024 What is cultural listening? Cultural listening is a relatively new term that is being used to describe the process of identifying emerging trends and sometimes the broader behaviour shi ft s that are happening across culture. Culture on social is driven by communities, so another way to think of this is as community listening. Cultural listening is not interchangeable with social listening, but in my opinion social listening is the best place to start with cultural listening. Cultural listening can be extremely useful to brands and businesses, but is not exclusive to them, and doesn’t deal in absolutes the way that brand monitoring does.
20. KIM TOWNEND STUDIO EXOLYT · 2024 Getting started The best way to begin to understand the cultural context of TikTok, is to start SIMPLE. I usually start with a keyword, or speci fi c hashtag if I’m already aware of it. Once I’ve clicked through to the relevant hashtag page, there are a few things that I want to look at to start to get a be tt er sense of understanding.
21. KIM TOWNEND STUDIO EXOLYT · 2024 Things to look for • How many hashtag views? • How many videos? • Is it trending up? • Is there a speci fi c geo focus? • What are the related tags? • Vibes research (top videos)
22. KIM TOWNEND STUDIO EXOLYT · 2024 Metrics for analysis The top three things you want to look at, can be found in the hashtag growth chart. Here we want to look at if views are going up or down, how videos look in relation to views, and how ‘spiky’ the trend is. I usually look at data from YTD to understand if a trend is consistent or spiky. As a general rule the trends with more consistent growth tend to last longer.
23. KIM TOWNEND STUDIO EXOLYT · 2024 My favourite part of Exolyt This is the network graph of hashtags overlap to #booktok in the UK over the last 14 days. When it’s a massive hashtag like Booktok I try and narrow down my parameters to get the most useful data. I look at this data both as a list and as the network graph (which can also be made dynamic) to understand not just the associated communities, but how they interconnect with each other. This, to me, is the most useful part of the tool when it comes to strategy.
24. KIM TOWNEND STUDIO EXOLYT · 2024 Circular networks Looking at how the overlap is occurring as a circular graph helps us to understand which communities are related to one another. We can see that there’s a big #bikerso ft iktok community with many related hashtags. This is part of an ongoing crossover between the two communities that started late last year. But looking at the network graphs it’s apparent that biketok/booktok is a sub set of booktok that’s actually extremely insular. It’s not connected to the broader booktok trends, or the romantasy communities at all.
25. KIM TOWNEND STUDIO EXOLYT · 2024 Looking at the overlap When I look at the overlap I’m looking initially at the percentages or any clear anomalies. Then I move onto grouping the overlapping tags into themes, to understand the importance. For example here, I would include #romancebooks, #darkromance, #romantasy #darkromancebooks, #romancebooktok, #romantasybooks, #ACOTAR, #enemiestolovers, #darkromancebooktok, #sarahjmass and #throneofglass in a broader ‘Romance’ category. Suddenly romance emerges as the dominant genre theme for #booktok in the UK over the last two weeks.
26. KIM TOWNEND STUDIO EXOLYT · 2024 Deeper Dives Once I’ve identi fi ed some key themes, I start clicking through to their hashtags for a deeper level of analysis. What is the overlap from the new hashtag to the original hashtag I was tracking. #Booktok has a 13% overlap with #bookrecommendations, but #bookrecommendations has an 81% overlap with #booktok. #romancebooks has an 76% overlap with #booktok and a 24% overlap with bookrecs. So we can surmise that the romance community is not just huge, but extremely active when it comes to book recommendations FYI Analysing the data this way allows us to see the smaller groups within a massive community and understand their behaviours.
27. KIM TOWNEND STUDIO EXOLYT · 2024 Use cases for insights Cultural analysis is a huge topic and we’ve only scratched the surface of the type of insights that you can glean from this type of analysis here. However, just this simple look at using Exolyt to be tt er understand community and culture can be applied to various other workstreams. • Audience and community analysis • Community crossover • Longer term trend analysis • Trend grouping • Longer term strategies
28. KIM TOWNEND STUDIO 2024 Video vs. Text
29. KIM TOWNEND STUDIO EXOLYT · 2024 We know how to do traditional social listening Social listening platforms were originally set up to listen to Twi tt er, using boolean searches to collect and analyse primarily text-based posts. It was relatively simple to put together a boolean query by doing some desk research around your topic of interest and then parsing through your data set to clean irrelevant mentions and start analysing the text posts. Some of this approach still stands, but with video social listening we need to think about things di ff erently.
30. KIM TOWNEND STUDIO EXOLYT · 2024 Video listening requires a different approach 1. The on screen caption 2. The video caption 3. The voiceover 4.The comments 5.Hashtags 6.Video contents There are six places that our key words can show up (this goes for social SEO for video too!) This makes writing traditional booleans more complex as each of these spaces requires a slightly di ff erent approach. Right now with booleans there’s no way to separate the speci fi c placements out, and this means you’re usually ge tt ing a lot of irrelevant data returned. For this reason I like to go in really broad, with a simple keyword, hashtag, community, account or sound, and work out from there.
31. KIM TOWNEND STUDIO EXOLYT · 2024 Image analysis adds an extra dimension Social listening tools have been able to do static image analysis for a while, but now we’re moving into AI video image analysis. This can be used to fi nd out what’s happening in the videos associated with your search terms. (Who is in the videos? Are they inside or outside? What are the colours? Are there props? What is the emotional state? etc) In some cases you can set up the entire search around what’s in the videos. Are you looking for a speci fi c brand logo or videos that contain a certain colour for example? And Exolyt’s own AI video search uses machine learning to pick up relevant videos that match your textual description. This is a rapidly expanding area and I’m excited to see how it develops in 2025. Exolyt’s AI video search is currently in Alpha! FYI
32. KIM TOWNEND STUDIO EXOLYT · 2024 Comments are a goldmine Reading isolated comments won’t help us in our quest for understanding and context. The best way to analyse comments is as a group. If you add hashtags or accounts to a social listening project in Exolyt, you can analyse the comments for each tag separately, and understand key themes, most used words, the emotions that are most prevalent and even the amount of sarcasm used in the comments. This helps give a pre tt y clear idea of the general vibe of the community.
33. KIM TOWNEND STUDIO 2024 Takeaways
34. KIM TOWNEND STUDIO EXOLYT · 2024 • Social listening means di ff erent things to di ff erent people: always ensure clarity about objectives and deliverables to avoid confusion. • Spending a lot of time on TikTok doesn’t necessarily mean you’re going to be be tt er at social listening. Remember to beware the FYP! • TikTok is more than trending topics, but they’re a good way to learn about TikTok listening. • Cultural insights come from context, connection, and comparison. • To add extra power to your insights, investigate how many people are searching for your trends/keywords on TikTok and beyond. Searching is a more active form of engagement, so a high search volume is big news.
35. KIM TOWNEND STUDIO 2024 Thanks! Questions?